GOP insider: 9/11 fit White House plan

The attacks of 9/11 fit in very well with the already planned war to topple Saddam, says a former speechwriter for the first President Bush in a scathing denunciation of the current Bush presidency.

In his book "Invasion of the Party Snatchers: How the Holy Rollers and Neo-Cons Destroyed the GOP" [Sourcebooks, 2007], Victor Gold says the neo-conservatives around the current President Bush were highly motivated to arrange a pretext for war.

Gold writes, "Had it not been for 9/11, the Bush White House, determined to go to war, would no doubt have seized on some synthetic provocation, on the order of the one LBJ used to push through the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1965," adding that a number of elder neocons were at the time Johnson Democrats.

The expansion of the war to include North Vietnam and to justify major troop deployments was based on a murky incident in the Gulf of Tonkin in which North Vietnamese coast guardsmen may have fired on a U.S. destroyer.

Citing a 1998 neocon letter to President Clinton urging "regime change" in Iraq, Gold says that once Bush gained office war was a foregone conclusion. "There would be regime change in Iraq. All that the Neo-Con war hawks, in the Bush administration and out, needed to bring it about was an excuse to invade. Looking back a half-decade and knowing what we now know, who could doubt that if al Qaeda hadn't obliged the Neo-Cons with 9/11, the Kristolites would have torn a page out of history and, with Rupert Murdoch playing the role of William Randolph Hearst, given us a reprise of the sinking of the Maine?"

Bill Kristol, editor of the Murdoch-published Weekly Standard, is a leading neocon.
In 1898, the battleship Maine inexplicably blew up in Havana Harbor and the Hearst press led a cry for war against Spain, though Spain's complicity in the incident was unlikely.

Gold said that, even with 9/11, war against Iraq was a hard sell, and the WMD deception was necessary. He takes pains to point out the holes in the official WMD line and has some acerbic comments about Israel's low-profile responses to this alleged threat.

Gold is a Goldwater conservative, having served as press aide to Goldwater and later to Spiro Agnew. In the 1980s, Gold was a senior adviser to President George H.W. Bush and co-wrote a book with him. Gold also describes himself as a friend of the Bush family.

Gold applauds Goldwater's response to Jerry Falwell as someone the GOP should have kicked in the pants and laments the influence of "theo-cons" in the GOP. An oustpoken faction of the religious right, especially those with TV access, have promoted a strong backing of the state of Israel based on certain interpretations of scripture.

Gold's stinging rebuke of the current state of GOP affairs is part of a growing chorus of noted Republicans who express severe dissatisfaction with the younger Bush.
However, Democrats are in no mood to begin impeachment proceedings, seeing little partisan gain. Thus, unless more GOP critics are more forthright about 9/11 suspicions, impeachment or forced resignation seems unlikely.