Two more data points

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Two more data points on the order to begin planning to seize Iraq’s southern oil fields, which was included in the order Centcom got to make plans to attack Afghanistan just after September 11th, 2001.

The April 17th article on Bob Woodward’s book in the Washington Post suggested that such an idea <$NoAd$>was pushed before 9/11 by Paul Wolfowitz but rejected as “lunacy” by Colin Powell …

Early discussions among the administration’s national security “principals” — Cheney, Powell, Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice — and their deputies focused on how to weaken Hussein diplomatically. But Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz proposed sending in the military to seize Iraq’s southern oil fields and establish the area as a foothold from which opposition groups could overthrow Hussein.

Then there is this intriguing passage from Jane Mayer’s February article in The New Yorker about the Cheney Energy Task Force (itals added)…

For months there has been a debate in Washington about when the Bush Administration decided to go to war against Saddam. In Ron Suskind’s recent book “The Price of Loyalty,” former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill charges that Cheney agitated for U.S. intervention well before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Additional evidence that Cheney played an early planning role is contained in a previously undisclosed National Security Council document, dated February 3, 2001. The top-secret document, written by a high-level N.S.C. official, concerned Cheney’s newly formed Energy Task Force. It directed the N.S.C. staff to coöperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the “melding” of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: “the review of operational policies towards rogue states,” such as Iraq, and “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.”

Chatter at the time at Centcom — that is, late September 2001 — suggested Wolfowitz as the prime mover.

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