King George's Latest Scandal

The talk this week is that Bush authorized Scooter Libby to leak classified data about Iraq in 2003. The White House hasn't denied it, but apparently it was legal though unusual for him to do so. To me, other recent news is more interesting. First, some quotes from Bush.

I wish I wasn't the war president. Who in the heck wants to be a war president? I don't. But this is what came our way. George Bush, August 6, 2004, to a convention of 5,000 minority journalists at the Washington Convention Center, quoted in the NY Times

I didn't want war. To assume I wanted war is just flat wrong... No president wants war. George Bush, press conference, March 21, 2006, quoted by BBC News

Last week the NY Times reported (reprinted in the International Herald Tribune):

During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times. "Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning," David Manning, Blair's chief foreign policy adviser at the time, wrote in the memo that summarized the discussion between Bush, Blair and six of their top aides. "The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March," Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. "This was when the bombing would begin." Without much elaboration, the memo also says the president raised three possible ways of provoking a confrontation. Since they were first reported last month, neither the White House nor the British government has discussed them. "The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours," the memo says, attributing the idea to Bush. "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach." It also described the president as saying, "The U.S. might be able to bring out a defector who could give a public presentation about Saddam's W.M.D," referring to weapons of mass destruction. A brief clause in the memo refers to a third possibility, mentioned by Bush, a proposal to assassinate Saddam Hussein. The memo does not indicate how Blair responded to the idea. The January 2003 memo is the latest in a series of secret memos produced by top aides to Blair that summarize private discussions between the president and the prime minister. Another group of British memos, including the so-called Downing Street memo written in July 2002, showed that some senior British officials had been concerned that the United States was determined to invade Iraq, and that the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" by the Bush administration to fit its desire to go to war.

Sound like someone who didn't want to go to war?