As soon as the current President Bush took office in 2001, he brought a group of conservatives with him, including Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and others, who had been outspoken advocates for most of the previous decade for the forcible removal of Saddam Hussein.

At first, President Bush was publicly silent on the issue. But as Paul O'Neill has told us, the debate was alive and well.

I happen to know Paul O'Neill, and I have great respect for him. I worked with him on key issues of job safety and healthcare when he was at Alcoa in the 1990s. He's a person of great integrity, intelligence and vision, and he had impressive ideas for improving the quality of healthcare in the Pittsburgh area. It is easy to understand why he was so concerned by what he heard about Iraq in the Bush administration.

In his "60 Minutes" interview last Sunday, O'Neill said that overthrowing Saddam was on the agenda from Day One of the new administration. O'Neill said, "From the very beginning there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go ... It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president was saying, Go find me a way to do this."

The agenda was clear: Find a rationale to end Saddam's regime.

But there was resistance to military intervention by those who felt that the existing sanctions on Iraq should be strengthened. Saddam had been contained and his military capabilities had been degraded by the Gulf War and years of U.N. sanctions and inspections. At a press conference a month after the inauguration, Secretary of State Colin Powell said: "We have kept him contained, kept him in his box." The next day, Secretary Powell very clearly stated that Saddam "has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction..."

Then, on Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists attacked us and everything changed. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld immediately began to link Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida and the attacks. According to notes taken by an aide to Rumsfeld on 9/11, the very day of the attacks, the secretary ordered the military to prepare a response to the attacks. The notes quote Rumsfeld as saying that he wanted the best information fast, to judge whether the information was good enough to hit Saddam and not just Osama bin Laden. "Go massive," the notes quote him as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

The advocates of war in Iraq desperately sought to make the case that Saddam was linked to 9/11 and al-Qaida, and that he was on the verge of acquiring a nuclear capability. They created an Office of Special Projects in the Pentagon to analyze the intelligence for war. They bypassed the traditional screening process and put pressure on intelligence officers to produce the desired intelligence and analysis.

As the world now knows, Saddam's connection to 9/11 was false. Saddam was an evil dictator. But he was never close to having a nuclear capability. The administration has found no arsenals of chemical or biological weapons. It has found no persuasive connection to al-Qaida. All this should have been clear. The administration should not have looked at the facts with ideological blinders and with a mindless dedication to the results they wanted.

A recent report by the Carnegie Endowment concluded that administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs. They also concluded that the intelligence community was unduly influenced by the policymakers' views and intimidating actions, such as Vice President Cheney's repeated visits to CIA headquarters and demands by officials for access to the raw intelligence from which the analysts were working. The report also noted the unusual speed with which the National Intelligence Estimate was written and the high number of dissents in what is designed to be a consensus document.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, President Bush himself made clear that his highest priority was finding Osama bin Laden. At a press conference on Sept. 17, 2001, he said that he wanted bin Laden "dead or alive." Three days later, in an address to a Joint Session of Congress, President Bush demanded of the Taliban: "Deliver to the United States authorities all the leaders of al-Qaida who hide in your land." And Congress cheered. On Nov. 8, the president told the country, "I have called our military into action to hunt down the members of the al-Qaida organization who murdered innocent Americans." In doing that, he had the full support of Congress and the nation -- and rightly so.

Soon after the war began in Afghanistan, however, the president started laying the groundwork in public to shift attention to Iraq. In the Rose Garden on Nov. 26, he said: "Afghanistan is still just the beginning."

Three days later, even before Hamid Karzai had been approved as interim Afghan president, Vice President Cheney publicly began to send signals about attacking Iraq. On Nov. 29, he said, "I don't think it takes a genius to figure out that this guy [Saddam Hussein] is clearly ... a significant potential problem for the region, for the United States, for everybody with interests in the area."

On Dec. 12, the vice president elaborated further: "If I were Saddam Hussein, I'd be thinking very carefully about the future, and I'd be looking very closely to see what happened to the Taliban in Afghanistan."

Prior to the terrorist attacks on 9/11, President Bush's approval rating was only 50 percent. But with his necessary and swift action in Afghanistan against the Taliban for harboring bin Laden and al-Qaida, his approval soared to 86 percent.

Soon, Karl Rove joined the public debate, and war with Iraq became all but certain. At a meeting of the Republican National Committee in Los Angeles on January 19, 2002, Rove made clear that the war on terrorism could be used politically, and that Republicans, as he put it, could "go to the country on this issue."

Ten days later, the deal was all but sealed. In his State of the Union Address, President Bush broadened his policy on Afghanistan to other terrorist regimes. He unveiled the "Axis of Evil" -- Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Those three words forged the lock-step linkage between the Bush administration's top political advisers and the Big Three of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. We lost our previous clear focus on the most imminent threat to our national security -- Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaida terrorist network.

What did President Bush say about bin Laden in the State of the Union Address that day? Nothing.

What did the President say about al-Qaida? One fleeting mention.

What did he say about the Taliban? Nothing.

Nothing about bin Laden. One fleeting mention of al-Qaida. Nothing about the Taliban in that State of the Union Address.

Barely four months had passed since the worst terrorist atrocity in American history. Five bin Laden videotapes had been broadcast since 9/11, including one that was aired after bin Laden escaped at the battle of Tora Bora. President Bush devoted 12 paragraphs in his State of the Union Address to Afghanistan, and 29 paragraphs to the global war on terrorism. But he had nothing to say about bin Laden and only one single fleeting mention of al-Qaida.

Why not more? Because of an extraordinary policy coup. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz -- the Axis of War -- had prevailed. The president was changing the subject to Iraq.

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