O'Neill: U.S. had Iraq plan early in '01
Ex-official calls moves 'a leap'
January 11, 2004

CRAWFORD, Texas -- Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill contends that the United States began laying the groundwork for an invasion of Iraq days after President Bush took office in January 2001--more than two years before the start of the U.S.-led war that ousted Saddam Hussein.

"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' "60 Minutes" in an interview to be aired Sunday night.

O'Neill, who was fired by Bush in December 2002, said he had qualms about what he described as the pre-emptive nature of the war planning.

"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," according to an excerpt of the interview that CBS released Saturday.The administration has not found evidence that the Iraqi leader was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, but officials have said they had to consider the possibility that Hussein could have undertaken an even larger strike against the United States.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan would not confirm or deny that the White House began Iraq war planning early in Bush's term. But, he said, Hussein "was a threat to peace and stability before Sept. 11 and even more of a threat after Sept. 11."

O'Neill's interview was part of his effort to promote a new book about the first half of Bush's term, "The Price of Loyalty," for which O'Neill was a primary source.

The administration began sending signals about a possible confrontation with Iraq before Sept. 11, 2001.

In July 2001, after an Iraqi surface-to-air missile was fired at an American surveillance plane, Bush's national security adviser said the United States intended to have a more resolute military policy toward Iraq.

"Saddam Hussein is on the radar screen for the administration," Condoleezza Rice said at the time.

Yet Secretary of State Colin Powell said in December 2001, after the terrorist attacks in Washington and New York, that "with respect to what is sometimes characterized as taking out Saddam, I never saw a plan that was going to take him out."

According to the book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, the Bush administration began examining options for an invasion in the first months after Bush was inaugurated.

The former treasury secretary and other White House insiders gave Suskind documents that in the first three months of 2001 revealed the Bush administration was examining military options for removing Hussein, CBS said.

"There are memos," Suskind told CBS. "One of them marked `secret' says `Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq."'

O'Neill was also quoted in the book as saying the president was determined to find a reason to go to war and he was surprised nobody on the National Security Council questioned why Iraq should be invaded.

"It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it," O'Neill said.