CHENEY

VP

There is one part of this story that people seem to keep forgetting. Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense during "Desert Storm." Under his leadership in the Defense Dept. The UN did drive Saddam's army out of Kuwait, but they believed that after all the destruction and sanctions, the masses would rise up against Saddam and either assassinate him or throw him out of office. Neither happened.

So, after all that effort and bloodshed, they still had a leader that they wanted to put out of commission. And then 9/11 occurred. It didn't matter if Iraq had nothing to do with it, it gave Cheney a chance to take Saddam out, to let him redeem himself for the mistakes he made before. The "cabal", I think, existed between Rumsfeld and Cheney. Yeah, Bush was right to go after OBL and Afghanistan's Taliban, but Iraq was solely between a former Defense Secretary and a sitting Defense Secretary.