Former Bush Official: We Went Into Iraq Because 'We Were Looking For Somebody's Ass To Kick': Report
New York Times reporter Peter Baker is out with a new book that reportedly reveals some eyebrow-raising details about the Iraq War.
A senior official from former President George W. Bush's administration is quoted in “Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House” saying American troops went into Iraq because the U.S. was looking for a fight.
"The only reason we went into Iraq, I tell people now, is we were looking for somebody’s ass to kick. Afghanistan was too easy," the anonymous official said, according to Politico.
Politico also reports the book details the differences in Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. The two reportedly "were on opposite sides of almost every major issue" when they left office in 2009.
source including video:
.........................and a few excerpts from Politico
APPE-TEASER! PETER BAKER, chief White House correspondent for the N.Y. Times, is out Tuesday with his tour de force, “Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House” (Doubleday; 816 pages – 650 pages of text, plus footnotes, etc.). Here are a few notes from early readers: By the time they left office, Bush and Cheney were on opposite sides of almost every major issue, including North Korea, Syria, Lebanon, Russia, Middle East peace talks, gun rights, gay rights, climate change, surveillance, detention and the auto bailout. And that was all before the Scooter Libby pardon. … There were more doubts about invading Iraq inside the Bush team than were publicly known at the time. Karen Hughes, one of the president's closest confidantes, worried that it would be a mistake to go to war and brought up her concerns with Bush. The president sent her to Condoleezza Rice for reassurance, but she was never fully convinced and at several points tried to keep Bush from feeling trapped into going to war. As one senior official who came to rue his involvement in Iraq put it, “The only reason we went into Iraq, I tell people now, is we were looking for somebody’s ass to kick. Afghanistan was too easy.”
--MORE PETER NUGGETS: Iraq took more of a toll on Bush than he was willing to let on. As violence worsened in his second term, one adviser said Bush was discouraged “almost to the point of despondence” and at some briefings “it was almost as if he was pleading with us not to give him any more bad news.” It got to the point that Bush was grinding his teeth so hard they hurt. Laura Bush took to inviting his brother, Marvin, to the White House on weekends to distract the president from his troubles. … What really sank the Harriet Miers nomination to the Supreme Court was not opposition among conservatives but secret murder boards by administration lawyers who discovered how little she understood about constitutional issues like Fourth Amendment search and seizure rules or the Fifth Amendment bar on self-incrimination. “She literally knew nothing about it at all, nothing,” said one official. Cheney could only shake his head. “I tried to tell him,” he confided to an aide. … When Bush first met Vladimir Putin and declared that he had “a sense of his soul,” Cheney’s staff was “rolling our eyes.” Cheney told people that when he looked into Putin’s soul, he saw: “KGB, KGB, KGB.”
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