CNN.com – Cabinet members defend Bush from O’Neill – Jan. 12, 2004

In the book, ”The Price of Loyalty,” by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, scheduled for publication Tuesday, O’Neill says administration officials discussed plans to go to war with Iraq as early as their first weeks in office.

He also compares Bush’s presence at Cabinet meetings to ”a blind man in a room full of deaf people.” …

An interview with O’Neill aired Sunday night on the CBS program “60 Minutes.”

In it, O’Neill said the Bush administration was eyeing an invasion of Iraq “from the very beginning” — months before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, that administration officials said changed their strategic perspective. …

“For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap,” O’Neill said in the interview.

“We didn’t listen to [O’Neill’s] wacky ideas when he was in the White House, why should we start listening to him now,” said a senior official. The official said he informed Bush of O’Neill’s comments but declined to describe the president’s reaction.

Suskind said he interviewed hundreds of people for the book, including several Cabinet members who gave him their accounts of meetings with the president, their notes and documents. …

O’Neill also told Time magazine he never saw evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq –Bush’s primary justification for the U.S.-led invasion of the country in March.

None have been found, although searches have turned up evidence of continuing research on banned weapons.

O’Neill predicted that his former colleagues — one of whom has already tried to paint him as a disgruntled former employee with a “tin ear” for politics — would hit back.

“These people are nasty and they have a long memory,” O’Neill told Time.

More apt would be that Bush is a deaf man in a country full of blind people. mjh