From start, Bush team focused on war with Iraq: documents, Agence France-Presse on The Raw Story, September 22, 2010, by AFP, used with permission, quoted verbatim:

Former president George W. Bush’s advisers focused on toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime as soon as he took office and discussed how to justify a war in Iraq shortly after invading Afghanistan in 2001, official documents showed Wednesday.

A few hours after the September 11 attacks in 2001, then defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld spoke of attacking Iraq as well as Osama bin Laden, according to notes of a meeting on that day, newly declassified papers show.

Rumsfeld told a Pentagon lawyer to go to his deputy to get “support” showing a supposed link between the Iraqi regime and Al-Qaeda’s founder, according to the papers posted by the Washington-based National Security Archive, an independent research institute.

The US government has since acknowledged that Saddam’s regime had no role in the 9/11 attacks.

In June and July of 2001, senior administration officials seized on intercepted aluminum tubes as proof that Iraq was pursuing nuclear weapons, even before a preliminary assessment of the tubes, according to two State Department memos to then secretary of state Colin Powell.

One memo states the US government’s interest in “publicizing the interdiction to our advantage” and “getting the right story out” about the tubes, which were soon found to have no nuclear connection.

Confronting Iraq was also the focus of a July 2001 memo to the national security adviser at the time, Condoleezza Rice, with Rumsfeld urging a high-level meeting on policy towards Baghdad.

Voicing concern that sanctions were proving a failure and that Iraq’s air defenses were improving, Rumsfeld warned: “Within a few years the US will undoubtedly have to confront a Saddam armed with nuclear weapons.”

Forecasting an optimistic outcome far from the result the Iraq war produced, Rumsfeld said that Washington’s image in the region and the world would benefit from toppling Saddam.

“If Saddam’s regime were ousted, we would have a much-improved position in the region and elsewhere,” he wrote. “A major success in Iraq would enhance US credibility and influence throughout the region.”

Another document shows Rumsfeld discussing war plans for Iraq just two months after the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan.

In a meeting with the then head of US Central Command, General Tommy Franks, the defense chief tells him to ready forces for the “decapitation” of the Iraqi regime.

In talking points dated November 27, Rumsfeld lists possible triggers the Bush administration could use to start a war, including Iraqi military action against the US-protected enclave in northern Iraq, discovery of ties between Saddam and 9/11 or recent anthrax attacks and disputes with UN weapons inspections.

In a December 18, 2001 memo, the State Department’s analytical unit warns that France and Germany will likely oppose an invasion of Iraq without concrete proof that Baghdad was behind the 9/11 attacks.

The same memo warns that British support for a US war would come at a political cost for the prime minister, Tony Blair, and could trigger a backlash from the country’s Muslim population.

Backing the US war “could bring a radicalization of British Muslims, the great majority of whom opposed the September 11 attacks but are increasingly restive about what they see as an anti-Islamic campaign,” the memo states.

The documents posted Wednesday were released under a Freedom of Information request.

The Downing Street Memos:
Proof of the Illegality of the Iraq War

Note by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: The Downing Street Memos are the leaked text of a cabinet meeting held in Britain with then British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his cabinet officers and seven other similar meetings at the cabinet level. These are terribly damning documents, not just damning for Britain and Tony Blair, but the documents offer proof that George Bush was using every means at his disposal to falsely sell the war on Iraq to the U.N. and the American people. Here is the text of the main Downing Street memo (PDF), dated July 23, 2002. The text of all eight Downing Street memos (PDF) has also been posted by WarIsACrime.org, formerly called After Downing Street. The most damning text in the main Downing Street memo of July 23, 2002 is as follows:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

That little statement, “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,” is a tacit admission that “the facts” of the case — that Saddam Hussein was a secular Muslim who in fact hated Islamic fundamentalists such as Osama Bin Laden, that the evidence for any improvement for Iraq of it’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities was non-existent, and the whole nuclear program as sold by the Bush administration was entirely trumped up and lacking any credibiltiy, and that there was no Al Queda presence in Iraq before we invaded it — were being entirely ignored. No, the Bush administration was determined on regime change in Iraq, and “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” — in other words, manufactured out of whole cloth.

See Bush Administration Claims vs. The Facts, Leading to War, no date.

See Road to War: How the Bush administration sold the Iraq War to American people, MSNBC, November 8, 2005, by MSNBC.com.

Recommended: Surprise! Cheney-Bush-Rumsfeld lied us into Iraq, Daily Kos, September 23, 2010, by Meteor Blades: with evidence of newly declassified NSA and other documents.

Watch Rachel Maddow on Bush Lies Leading Up to the Iraq War, “Rachel Maddow Gives Bush The Credit He Deserves!,” August 31, 2010, MSNBC video on YouTube — 10:13.

Current News on Iraq: See U.S. troops fight on despite end to combat in Iraq, Reuters, September 24, 2010, by Jim Loney: “(Reuters) – Since President Barack Obama declared an end to combat operations in Iraq, U.S. troops have waged a gun battle with a suicide squad in Baghdad, dropped bombs on armed militants in Baquba and assisted Iraqi soldiers in a raid in Falluja.”

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