LET HISTORY JUDGE:

Bush set sights on Saddam after 9/11, never looked back (Mar 21, 2003, USA TODAY)

Within weeks of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the president and his most influential advisers set a goal of toppling Saddam -- if possible by coup or exile, more likely by force. Bush began to make the case to the world with his speech to the United Nations a year and a day after the attacks.

With Wednesday's decision, Bush finally pulled the trigger. But the gun was cocked for a long time, since the Sept. 12, 2002, speech. The six months since then have been a time of diplomatic maneuvers, military deployments, rhetorical shifts and single-minded determination.

Bush refused to let anything deter him:

* He minimized a nuclear showdown with North Korea that even some administration officials believed posed a more immediate threat. The divisions within the president's inner circle over North Korea were severe. When New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson told Secretary of State Colin Powell that he had gotten a call from North Korean diplomats, Powell said Richardson should go ahead and meet with them -- but told him to avoid talking about it to Powell's rivals in the administration.

* He dismissed the complaints of then-Senate Intelligence Chairman Bob Graham, D-Fla., and others that in targeting Iraq as the second front in the war on terrorism, the administration was shortchanging the first battleground, in Afghanistan and against al-Qaeda. A senior Defense Department official worried that combat operations in Afghanistan last spring were poorly planned because the Central Command was preoccupied with the next war.

* He was defiant when the U.N. Security Council refused to endorse the resolution he and British Prime Minister Tony Blair had sought to pave the way for the attack. The president had fought hard behind the scenes for the U.N. imprimatur. After a private White House dinner with Secretary-General Kofi Annan, he included an initiative to fight AIDS in Africa in the State of the Union address. Annan had mentioned the issue as a personal priority.

Administration officials even found themselves addressing other worldly matters as they lobbied the president of Guinea, one of the Security Council's 15 members. He was desperately ill with kidney disease. His concern: Which vote was more likely to get him into heaven?

In the end, it was Bush's unyielding determination that undermined the diplomatic campaign. Skeptical foreign leaders complained that the administration's earlier willingness to go to the United Nations and agree to renewed weapons inspections in Iraq was only for show. The president had his mind made up, they said, no matter what.

Some top administration officials agree.

''He was not going to be easily deterred or distracted,'' a senior adviser says. ''It would have taken nothing less than an Iraqi capitulation. Either Saddam and his inner circle would have had to leave or they would have had to really, truly, completely, verifiably disarm. Bottom line: Bush was not looking for a way out.''

Aides and outsiders interviewed for this article cite a mix of motives behind the president's focus -- some call it an obsession -- on Iraq: His view of Saddam as a brutal despot who threatened Israel and unsettled the Middle East. An almost Shakespearean impulse to finish the job his father had started. The prospect of more-stable oil supplies.

Bush himself says he is thinking about the verdict of history.

More than anything, what this story points out is the deep inanity of the neocon and libertarian Right's absurd "wobbly watch". It's easy enough for conservatives to point out how badly Democrats and the Europeans have misunderstood George W. Bush, but the blogosphere and publications like the Weekly Standard have shown no greater comprehension. This war was never a question of whether, only of when. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 21, 2003 2:29 PM