ajc.com | Opinion | Long before Sept. 11, Iraq was targeted

While disarmament is important, and war may indeed prove necessary to achieve it, our real goal all along has been regime change.

The rest of the world knows that, which is why it has proved so reluctant to endorse our foray toward empire. It also explains why France, Russia and other countries have insisted that the United Nations retain the final right to decide whether arms inspections have failed. Knowing how eager we are to go to war, they do not trust us to make that decision.

The president and vice president, along with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, have tried to justify their insistence on regime change by describing it as a policy forced on them by Sept. 11. In fact, President Bush's strategists were advocating the overthrow of Saddam long before those attacks happened.

Four years ago, on Jan. 26, 1998, a group of conservatives sent a strongly worded letter to President Clinton, insisting even back then that U.S. foreign policy "should aim above all at the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power." It also states that "American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the U.N. Security Council."

What makes the letter so interesting is the identity of those who signed it, and the jobs they now hold. Among them were:

Paul Wolfowitz, today the deputy secretary of defense; Richard Armitage, now deputy secretary of state; Paula Dobriansky, now undersecretary of state for global affairs; Peter Rodman, today the assistant secretary of defense; Richard Perle, current chairman of the Defense Policy Board; Elliott Abrams, now on the president's National Security Council; Zalmay Khalilzad, now the president's special envoy to Afghanistan; and John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.

Oh, and Rumsfeld, too.

If Iraq was so important it had to be addressed immediately why did Bush immediately drop it and spend weeks full-time campaigning for Republicans?

Don't tell me it was to give the UN time to debate the issue. We could have had the inspectors in 6 weeks ago but instead this administration has been trying to get a green light to invade and the UN refuses to do that.