"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said to me: 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, 'If I have a chance to invade�.if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency." Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father's shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. "Suddenly, he's at 91 percent in the polls, and he'd barely crawled out of the bunker." Now obviously Bush was not smart enough to pull this off himself nor was he even the original instigater. The real brains behind the scenes appealed to his vanity...how it would make him a "great president." The next step was to get the American people on board, and to do that they resorted to the same tricks applied by totalitarian and other governments over time. You manufacture rage, or in this case, redirect the 9/11 rage to make people believe that Saddam Hussen was responsible for 9/11. Despite all real evidence to the contrary, the war mongers were able to convince 70 percent of the American population that Saddam Hussen was responsible for 9/11. See opinion poll in USA Today of September 6th, 2003. And four years later in June 2007, a Newsweek poll showed that 41 percent of Americans still held onto that belief. This is what you call "cognitive dissonance." It's why the Republicans, with the help of Fox News, are able to hold onto their base so strongly. Never admit you are wrong. The three tools to control the thinking of a populace are hate, anger and fear. When people hate or are mad or are afarid they do not think clearly. They are incapable of understanding. These are the tools that Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh use every day in their broadcasts. It's mind control and it's very effective. Just look at how many birthers believe Obama is not a REAL American. They have been taught to hate Obama, and hate, along with rage and fear, blocks out all rational thought. Three tools of the conservatives for holding onto power... My wonky two bits worth of opionion.
On the other hand, Salon.com in a September 6, 2007 article entitled, Bush Knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction provides additional details of how Bush did in fact know that Saddam Hussein did not possess WMDs, but he acted in bad faith in rejecting evidence from his own CIA. His mind was made up to invade Iraq, and facts that proved otherwise were rejected.
On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam's inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.
Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD. So I get back to my original four points on why Bush went ahead with an invasion that was doomed to failure. If indeed Bush knew, then it would have been grounds for impeachment....taking America into war on a lie. But maybe that happens more often than not. I mention all of this because Americans have short memories, and for many right wing conservatives, their delusional memory of the events has not changed. Some absolutely still believe that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs and they are out there hidden in the desert if we would just look harder. That's another example of the cognitive dissonance that right wingers suffer from. They are incapable of absorbing facts that don't conform to their biases. As a final note, I read this book review of Blood on our Hands this morning in Truthout. It takes a different persepective from that of the conventional wisdom of the mainstream media. I plan to read the whole book at some point when I have more time.