From "Bush Disputes Ex-Official's Claim That War With Iraq Was Early Goal" in the New York Times:
President Bush on Monday disputed a suggestion by Paul H. O'Neill, the former Treasury secretary, that the White House was looking for a reason to go to war with Iraq from the very beginning of his administration.Responding to an account provided by Mr. O'Neill in a book to be published on Tuesday, "The Price of Loyalty," by Ron Suskind, Mr. Bush said he was working from his first days in office on how to carry out an existing national policy of promoting a change of government in Iraq. But the president said his focus at the time was on re-evaluating the ways in which the United States and Britain were enforcing the "no flight" zones in northern and southern Iraq.
"And no, the stated policy of my administration toward Saddam Hussein was very clear," Mr. Bush said at a news conference in Monterrey, Mexico, when asked whether he had begun planning within days of his inauguration for an invasion of Iraq. "Like the previous administration, we were for regime change."
"And in the initial stages of the administration, as you might remember, we were dealing with desert badger or fly-overs and fly-betweens and looks, and so we were fashioning policy along those lines," Mr. Bush continued, apparently referring to confrontations with Iraq over the no-flight zones. "And then all of a sudden September the 11th hit."
From his first days in office, the President did what Dick Cheney told him to. Starting with the nomination of one Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense - the same Rumsfeld who had been plotting throughout the 90s, along with his friends Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, among others, to create a scenario to invade Iraq and oust Saddam Hussein.
And notice how Bush doesn't even refute O'Neill's other claim - that he sleepwalks through cabinet meetings, like a "blind man in a roomful of deaf people."
What's next on the agenda, Dick?
Dick?
