The Other Shoe Goes Kerplop

File this one under "See? I told you so!" That tired, last line of defense of the Bushies that their intel on Iraq's weapons program was bad finally falls by the wayside thanks to the The Sunday Times of Britain. Last week they printed a secret memo by Matthew Rycroft, a foreign policy aide to Tony Blair. The smoke from this "gun" looks something like this...

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.
[emphasis mine]

This memo is dated July 23, 2002. You may recall that the Iraq War, Part II, started in March 2003. So, for over six months before Bush issued his ultimatum he had already decided to go to war. He had been sworn in office just six months prior. Apparently the Project for the New American Century folks (at the time Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz) had attached their strings to Puppet Bush. Giving lip service to peaceable solutions was part of the plan to maneuver support for force.

The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.
[again, emphasis mine]

Yeah, I know: what else is new, huh? But it is not so much that this is really news to those of us left in the reign of Bush II. The point is that now we have concrete support to knock down the last pillar of "justification" for the US Invasion of Iraq used by our right-leaning friends. Long before the war began we knew, we knew Saddam did not have WMDs and was not a belligerant threat to his neighbors, but the neo-cons weren't going to let a little thing like facts and legality stop them.
And now over 1500 American soldiers are dead (I don't have the numbers on lost mercenaries contractors) along with over ten times that number of Iraqis. America's stature in the world has plumetted to the point where even our friends often shun us and Tony Blair took a domestic political hit for his support of the US. The national debt, which was a surplus when W took office, has been and is being pissed away at a rate of hundreds of millions each day.
All this...and for what? For what? It was a sham to begin with but to what end? Oil? There's no more oil flowing out of the MidEast that before. Stability? Don't make me laugh. Removing a potential threat from the northern border of our "friends" the Saudis? Hmm...