[source: New York Times, by Maureen Dowd, March 2]

MAUREEN DOWD HITS WOLFOWITZ-LIBBY-PERLE-FEITH

"IMPERIAL BLUEPRINTS," AS THE REAL REASON FOR IRAQ WAR.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd locates the origins

Of President Bush's speech at the American Enterprise Institute,

in the neo-con chickenhawks' plans drawn up ten years ago.

"Conservatives began drawing up steroid-fueled plans to

reorder the world a decade ago, imperial blueprints fantastical

enough to make `Star Wars' look achievable," Dowd writes.

"In 1992, Dick Cheney, the defense secretary for Bush 41, and his

aides, Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby, drafted a document

asserting that America should prepare to cast off formal

alliances and throw its military weight around to prevent the

rise of any `potential future global competitor' and to preclude

the spread of nuclear weapons."

Dowd then notes that the "solipsistic grandiosity" of their

plan was offputting to Bush 41, and that for Bush 41 and Colin

Powell, "this looked like voodoo foreign policy, and they

splashed cold water on it." She continues:

"In 1996, Richard Perle, now a Pentagon adviser, and Douglas

Feith, now a Rumsfeld aide, helped write a report about how

Israel could transcend the problems with the Palestinians by

changing the "balance of power" in the Middle East, and by

replacing Saddam.

"The hawks saw their big chance after 9/11, but they feared

that it would be hard to sell a eschatological scheme to stomp

out Islamic terrorism by recreating the Arab world. So they found

Saddam guilty of a crime he could commit later: helping Osama

unleash hell on us."

And now, Dowd adds, "After obscuring the real reasons for

war, the Bushies are now obscuring the Pentagon's assessments of

the cost of war ($60 billion to $200 billion?), the size of the

occupation force (100,000 to 400,000?) and the length of time

American troops will stay in Iraq (2 to 10 years?)."