Bush planned Iraq ‘regime change’ before becoming President – [Sunday Herald]
I’m not sure this is news — PNAC stuff has been publically available for some time — perhaps it’s the explicit plan to use Saddam Hussein as a pretext for the invasion of Iraq when the actual reason is to establish a permanent American military presence?
The stuff about “decisively winning” wars on multiple enemies simultaneously sure seems to have turned out a lot harder than it was supposed to be.
The stuff about trying to bring democracy to China is chilling. Imagine that instead of picking a fight with Iraq and discovering it was nigh impossible for us to end that fight in a way we were happy with, we’d done the same thing with China. Holy crap would we be hosed. Remember way back before 9/11, when the first kind of scary incident in the W. Presidency was us sending out a spy plane to China and the Chinese shooting it down? I wonder if military rivalry with China would have been a much bigger part of the first W. term if 9/11 hadn’t forced everyone’s attention to the Middle East….
If so, I’m grateful. Iraq is bad enough, but we can pull out whenever we choose to. I don’t think we could “choose to” end a war with China if we’d started one.
Via digg.com.