Three years after the invasion, the true rationale for war was still unclear. We knew what it was not, but we did not know what it was. So, at a March 21, 2006 press conference at the White House, Hearst reporter Helen Thomas put the question to Bush point-blank:
"Every reason you've given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true," Ms. Thomas began. "My question is, why did you really want to go to war? From the moment you stepped into the White House, from your Cabinet officers, the intelligence people, and so forth what was your real reason? You have said it wasn't oil, a quest for oil, it hasn't been Israel or anything else " what was it?"
Bush bristled that anyone might suggest Iraq was a war of choice. In a muddled and rambling reply, Bush said he did not want to go to war but his attitude toward national defense and foreign policy changed after 9/11. He talked about our not being protected by the oceans as we once thought we were. He mentioned Iraq and Afghanistan and al Qaeda and the Taliban but got them bollixed up and moved away from that point. Besides, he said, it was Saddam Hussein who decided to flout UN Resolution 1441 and not disclose the location of his weapons. And Helen's "performance at the Gridiron was just brilliant."
That was Bush's response to the question, "Why did you really want to go to war?" Significantly, Bush referred to weapons of mass destruction only obliquely and as an afterthought although, according to Rove, they were the real reason for war. Somebody's not telling the whole truth.
Today, seven years after the invasion, U.S. forces remain in Iraq. And there remains the unanswered question, "Why did Bush really want to go to war in Iraq?" We still don't know. After all this time, we may never know the real reason for the Iraq War.
One More Theory
"What people don't know, they surmise," Garrison Keillor once observed. That is what I do here, in advancing a theory of why Bush and Cheney really wanted to go to war in Iraq. As far as I can tell, this theory fits the facts as we know them. That alone makes this scheme worthy of some consideration.
Please note that this is all speculation, not established fact. Yet it is completely plausible, in my view. So I ask anyone who was inside the Bush Administration who knows the real reason for the war to come forth and make that reason public. If this theory is wrong, what's right?
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