According to a Village Voice story, Wesley Clark’s new book Winning Modern Wars is going to allege that the Bush administration had begun planning its attack on Iraq at least two months prior to the 9/11 attacks,
As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. I left the Pentagon that afternoon deeply concerned.
The most obvious problem about the above excerpt is, if it is true, why had Clark never mentioned it before? Similarly, Clark writes in the book that,
After 9/11, during the first months of the war on terror, a critical opportunity to nail Al Qaeda in Afghanistan was missed. Additionally, our allies were neglected and a counter-terrorist strategy was adopted that, despite all the rhetoric, focused the nation on a conventional attack on Iraq rather than a shadowy war against the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks: Al Qaeda. I argue that not only did the Bush administration misunderstand the lessons of modern war, it made a policy blunder of significant proportions. . . . [E]vidence and rhetoric were used selectively to justify the decision to attack Iraq. . . . [W]e had re-energized Al Qaeda by attacking an Islamic state and presenting terrorists with ready access to vulnerable U.S. forces. It was the inevitable result of a flawed strategy
But as the Voice points out, as recently as April 2003 Clark an op-ed 2003 praising President Bush and Prime Minister Blair for their courage in taking on Iraq. (And who in their right mind thinks Al Qaeda was re-energized by the war in Afghanistan? I guess that’s true if you define re-energized as seeing most of your top leaders killed and dozens others imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay — Al Qaeda seems to have largely been eliminated as a serious player in international terrorism). Source: The Secrets Clark Kept. Sydney H. Schanberg, Village Voice, September 29, 2003.