Much has been made of former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s comments that President Bush and his administration were laying down plans to remove Saddam Hussein from power even before 9/11. On an upcoming showing of CBS’s “60 minutes” he has this to say:
“From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” O’Neill told CBS’s “60 Minutes” in an interview to be aired Sunday night.
But why this is news actually shocks me. The Bush administration never reasoned that 9/11 explained a war in Iraq, so to have an Iraq plan prior to 9/11 makes perfect sense. If anything, the revelations from O’Neill further support the idea that 9/11 and Iraq are two distinctly separate things.