Conor O'Clery
North America Editor
in New York
Former Treasury Secretary, Mr Paul O'Neill, has launched a scathing attack on President George Bush, saying he ran cabinet meetings "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people" and planned to topple Saddam Hussein long before the attacks of September 11th, 2001.
Mr O'Neill, who was fired a year ago for opposing tax cuts, also accused Vice President Mr Dick Cheney of being part of a small "praetorian guard that encircled the President" to block out contrary views. The comments of Mr O'Neill, who served for two years as the President's chief economic adviser, come in a new book, The Price of Loyalty by Pulitzer Prize-winner Ron Suskind. On CBS last night, the former treasury secretary said that preparations to attack Iraq came long before Mr Bush announced his doctrine of a pre-emptive strike in June 2002.
"From the very beginning there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," said Mr O'Neill.
It was topic "A" 10 days after Mr Bush's inauguration.
Mr O'Neill recalled his surprise that at the first meeting of the National Security Council no one asked such questions as, "Why Saddam?" and "Why now?" "It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President saying 'Go find me a way to do this'," said Mr O'Neill in the first insider account by a cabinet member of a White House noted for its tight control on information. In a separate interview with Time magazine, Mr O'Neill said: "In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterise as evidence of weapons of mass destruction."
The book details early White House plans for peacekeeping troops in Iraq, war crimes tribunals, and dividing up Iraq's oil wealth.
A Pentagon document dated March 5th, 2001, included an oil exploration map and lists of outside oil companies.
Mr O'Neill, who once ran the Alcoa aluminium giant and has a reputation for outspokenness, told CBS he found the President's style disconcerting. At his first hour-long, one-on-one meeting with Mr Bush he had a long list of things to engage on "and I was surprised that it turned out me talking, and the President just listening. As I recall, it was mostly a monologue". The President was disengaged at cabinet meetings, he said, and there was no free flow of ideas or open debate.
He was "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people . . . there is no discernible connection". Officials have to act on "little more than hunches about what the President might think."
Mr Suskind, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, said Mr O'Neill gave him access to 19,000 internal documents, including transcripts of National Security Council meetings. Mr O'Neill fell out with the administration when it decided to go for a second round of tax cuts. He said he thought "the weight of working on social security and fundamental tax reform was a lot more important than a tax reduction". The White House also became disillusioned with Mr O'Neill for off-the-cuff remarks that affected the dollar and for being out of the country during stock market plunges, including a trip to Africa with Bono to look at the AIDS crisis.
His firing came shortly after conference on the second tax cut at which Mr Bush appeared to have second thoughts. The President asked, according to the transcript, "Haven't we already given money to rich people? This second tax cut's gonna do it again." White House political adviser Mr Karl Rove jumped in, saying to the President, "Stick to principle. Stick to principle". Mr O'Neill said that the deficit heading up to $400 billion showed he was correct. Without the cut the economy would still have grown sharply but there would be a better hope of transforming social security.
Democratic presidential candidate Mr Howard Dean said the revelations underscored the continuing importance of examining "the true circumstances of the Bush administration's push for war".
A senior administration official said Mr O'Neill's "suggestion that the administration was planning an invasion of Iraq days after taking office is laughable.
"Nobody listened to him when he was in office. Why should anybody now?"