[Peace-discuss] O'Neill's remarks and their weight (fwd)

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Here's CBS News' own account of the interview on 60 Minutes.  Note the
question mark in the headline.  --CGE]


	Bush Sought 'Way' To Invade Iraq?
	Jan. 11, 2004
	CBS News

A year ago, Paul O'Neill was fired from his job as George Bush's Treasury
Secretary for disagreeing too many times with the president's policy on
tax cuts.

Now, O'Neill - who is known for speaking his mind - talks for the first
time about his two years inside the Bush administration. His story is the
centerpiece of a new book being published this week about the way the Bush
White House is run.

Entitled "The Price of Loyalty," the book by a former Wall Street Journal
reporter draws on interviews with high-level officials who gave the author
their personal accounts of meetings with the president, their notes and
documents.

But the main source of the book was Paul O'Neill. Correspondent Lesley
Stahl reports.

Paul O'Neill says he is going public because he thinks the Bush
Administration has been too secretive about how decisions have been made.

Will this be seen as a "kiss-and-tell" book?

"I've come to believe that people will say damn near anything, so I'm sure
somebody will say all of that and more," says O'Neill, who was George
Bush's top economic policy official.

In the book, O'Neill says that the president did not make decisions in a
methodical way: there was no free-flow of ideas or open debate.

At cabinet meetings, he says the president was "like a blind man in a
roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection," forcing top
officials to act "on little more than hunches about what the president
might think."

This is what O'Neill says happened at his first hour-long, one-on-one
meeting with Mr. Bush: "I went in with a long list of things to talk
about, and I thought to engage on and as the book says, I was surprised
that it turned out me talking, and the president just listening ... As I
recall, it was mostly a monologue."

He also says that President Bush was disengaged, at least on domestic
issues, and that disturbed him. And he says that wasn't his experience
when he worked as a top official under Presidents Nixon and Ford, or the
way he ran things when he was chairman of Alcoa.

O'Neill readily agreed to tell his story to the book's author Ron Suskind
- and he adds that he's taking no money for his part in the book.

Suskind says he interviewed hundreds of people for the book - including
several cabinet members.

O'Neill is the only one who spoke on the record, but Suskind says that
someone high up in the administration - Donald Rumsfeld - warned O'Neill
not to do this book.

Was it a warning, or a threat?

"I don't think so. I think it was the White House concerned," says
Suskind. "Understandably, because O'Neill has spent extraordinary amounts
of time with the president. They said, 'This could really be the one
moment where things are revealed.'"

Not only did O'Neill give Suskind his time, he gave him 19,000 internal
documents.

"Everything's there: Memoranda to the President, handwritten "thank you"
notes, 100-page documents. Stuff that's sensitive," says Suskind, adding
that in some cases, it included transcripts of private, high-level
National Security Council meetings. "You don't get higher than that."

And what happened at President Bush's very first National Security Council
meeting is one of O'Neill's most startling revelations.

"From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was
a bad person and that he needed to go," says O'Neill, who adds that going
after Saddam was topic "A" 10 days after the inauguration - eight months
before Sept. 11.

"From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can
do to change this regime," says Suskind. "Day one, these things were laid
and sealed."

As treasury secretary, O'Neill was a permanent member of the National
Security Council. He says in the book he was surprised at the meeting that
questions such as "Why Saddam?" and "Why now?" were never asked.

"It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The
president saying 'Go find me a way to do this,'" says O'Neill. "For me,
the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do
whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap."

And that came up at this first meeting, says O'Neill, who adds that the
discussion of Iraq continued at the next National Security Council meeting
two days later.

He got briefing materials under this cover sheet. "There are memos. One of
them marked, secret, says, 'Plan for post-Saddam Iraq,'" adds Suskind, who
says that they discussed an occupation of Iraq in January and February of
2001.

Based on his interviews with O'Neill and several other officials at the
meetings, Suskind writes that the planning envisioned peacekeeping troops,
war crimes tribunals, and even divvying up Iraq's oil wealth.

He obtained one Pentagon document, dated March 5, 2001, and entitled
"Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield contracts," which includes a map of
potential areas for exploration.

"It talks about contractors around the world from, you know, 30-40
countries. And which ones have what intentions," says Suskind. "On oil in
Iraq."

During the campaign, candidate Bush had criticized the Clinton-Gore
Administration for being too interventionist: "If we don't stop extending
our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we're
going to have a serious problem coming down the road. And I'm going to
prevent that."

"The thing that's most surprising, I think, is how emphatically, from the
very first, the administration had said 'X' during the campaign, but from
the first day was often doing 'Y,'" says Suskind. "Not just saying 'Y,'
but actively moving toward the opposite of what they had said during the
election."

The president had promised to cut taxes, and he did. Within six months of
taking office, he pushed a trillion dollars worth of tax cuts through
Congress. But O'Neill thought it should have been the end. After 9/11 and
the war in Afghanistan, the budget deficit was growing. So at a meeting
with the vice president after the mid-term elections in 2002, Suskind
writes that O'Neill argued against a second round of tax cuts.

"Cheney, at this moment, shows his hand," says Suskind. "He says, 'You
know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don't matter. We won the mid-term
elections, this is our due.' ... O'Neill is speechless."

"It was not just about not wanting the tax cut. It was about how to use
the nation's resources to improve the condition of our society," says
O'Neill. "And I thought the weight of working on Social Security and
fundamental tax reform was a lot more important than a tax reduction."

Did he think it was irresponsible? "Well, it's for sure not what I would
have done," says O'Neill.

The former treasury secretary accuses Vice President Dick Cheney of not
being an honest broker, but, with a handful of others, part of "a
praetorian guard that encircled the president" to block out contrary
views. "This is the way Dick likes it," says O'Neill.

Meanwhile, the White House was losing patience with O'Neill. He was
becoming known for a series of off-the-cuff remarks his critics called
gaffes. One of them sent the dollar into a nosedive and required major
damage control.

Twice during stock market meltdowns, O'Neill was not available to the
president: He was out of the country - one time on a trip to Africa with
the Irish rock star Bono.

"Africa made an enormous splash. It was like a road show," says Suskind.
"He comes back and the president says to him at a meeting, 'You know,
you're getting quite a cult following.' And it clearly was not a joke. And
it was not said in jest."

Suskind writes that the relationship grew tenser and that the president
even took a jab at O'Neill in public, at an economic forum in Texas.

The two men were never close. And O'Neill was not amused when Mr. Bush
began calling him "The Big O." He thought the president's habit of giving
people nicknames was a form of bullying. Everything came to a head for
O'Neill at a November 2002 meeting at the White House of the economic
team.

"It's a huge meeting. You got Dick Cheney from the, you know, secure
location on the video. The President is there," says Suskind, who was
given a nearly verbatim transcript by someone who attended the meeting.

He says everyone expected Mr. Bush to rubber stamp the plan under
discussion: a big new tax cut. But, according to Suskind, the president
was perhaps having second thoughts about cutting taxes again, and was
uncharacteristically engaged.

"He asks, 'Haven't we already given money to rich people? This second tax
cut's gonna do it again,'" says Suskind.

"He says, 'Didn't we already, why are we doing it again?' Now, his
advisers, they say, 'Well Mr. President, the upper class, they're the
entrepreneurs. That's the standard response.' And the president kind of
goes, 'OK.' That's their response. And then, he comes back to it again.
'Well, shouldn't we be giving money to the middle, won't people be able to
say, 'You did it once, and then you did it twice, and what was it good
for?'"

But according to the transcript, White House political advisor Karl Rove
jumped in.

"Karl Rove is saying to the president, a kind of mantra. 'Stick to
principle. Stick to principle.' He says it over and over again," says
Suskind. "Don't waver."

In the end, the president didn't. And nine days after that meeting in
which O'Neill made it clear he could not publicly support another tax cut,
the vice president called and asked him to resign.

With the deficit now climbing towards $400 billion, O'Neill maintains he
was in the right.

But look at the economy today.

"Yes, well, in the last quarter the growth rate was 8.2 percent. It was
terrific," says O'Neill. "I think the tax cut made a difference. But
without the tax cut, we would have had 6 percent real growth, and the
prospect of dealing with transformation of Social Security and
fundamentally fixing the tax system. And to me, those were compelling
competitors for, against more tax cuts."

While in the book O'Neill comes off as constantly appalled at Mr. Bush, he
was surprised when Stahl told him she found his portrait of the president
unflattering.

"Hmmm, you really think so," asks O'Neill, who says he isn't joking.
"Well, I'll be darned."

"You're giving me the impression that you're just going to be stunned if
they attack you for this book," says Stahl to O'Neill. "And they're going
to say, I predict, you know, it's sour grapes. He's getting back because
he was fired." "I will be really disappointed if they react that way
because I think they'll be hard put to," says O'Neill.

Is he prepared for it?

"Well, I don't think I need to be because I can't imagine that I'm going
to be attacked for telling the truth," says O'Neill. "Why would I be
attacked for telling the truth?"

White House spokesman Scott McClellan was asked about the book on Friday
and said "The president is someone that leads and acts decisively on our
biggest priorities and that is exactly what he'll continue to do."

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