BusinessWeek's Hard Turn From Bush

The truly damning part about Against All Enemies, however, is what Clarke reveals about the Administration's mindset on Iraq, What George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz really have to answer for is the insidious way in which they used the Twin Tower horror to coax the country into supporting an attack on Iraq.

Put Clarke's book together with The Price of Loyalty by former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and The Path to War, a brilliant piece of reporting in the current issue of Vanity Fair by Brian Burrough, Evgenia Peretz, David Rose, and David Wise, and the picture that emerges is numbingly clear: Bush's neoconservative advisers had Iraq in their sights well before his inauguration.

Clarke cites five rationales for the invasion: Finishing the job Bush I started, pulling U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia (where they were a counterweight to Iraq but unwelcome), creating a model Arab democracy, opening a new and friendly oil supply line, and safeguarding Israel by eliminating a military threat.

So to boil all this down, we went to war, sacrificed thousands of human lives, racked up billions in bills, and flouted the rules of international law for three basic reasons: Israel, oil, and the vengeance of a son whose father didn't finish off Saddam and then was targeted for assassination by the Iraqi Horror Show in 1993? When you think that Bill Clinton was impeached and almost tossed out of office for fooling around with a willing intern and then lying about it, his sins seem like very small potatoes. Very small potatoes indeed.