In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

chapter 2 Public Opinion on the War in Iraq The American invasion of Iraq, buttressed by a much smaller contingent of British forces, began 26 months after the Bush administration took of‹ce. The president and three of his top advisers—Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and the latter’s top deputy, Paul Wolfowitz— placed regime change in Baghdad at the top of their foreign policy agendas from the beginning. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz had served in the elder President Bush’s administration during the 1990–91 Gulf War. Although they had not dissented from the president’s decision in 1991 to leave Saddam Hussein in power rather than to deal with the uncertainties and burdens that a post-Saddam Iraq might impose on the United States, during the eight-year period between the two Bush administrations they had become outspoken advocates of an active American policy to “‹nish the job” in Iraq. They joined the Project on a New American Century, a conservative group organized by William Kristol and Robert Kagan in 1997, which had a regime change in Baghdad as one of its primary goals. In a letter dated January 26, 1998, to President Clinton, they asserted that the Saddam Hussein regime represented “a threat more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War,” and that the policy of containment of Iraq was steadily eroding. Given the magnitude of the threat, the current policy, which depends for its success upon the steadfastness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam Hussein, is dangerously inadequate. The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use 24 weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.We urge you to articulate this aim,and to turn your Administration’s attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam Hussein from power. . . .We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council.1 The Iraq issue came up at the ‹rst meeting of the new administration’s National Security Council, and at its second meeting Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld raised the issue of removing Saddam Hussein from power. He also cut off Secretary of State Colin Powell when he tried to discuss new sanctions strategies .2 Thus, even prior to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, Baghdad was high on the foreign policy agenda of many top of‹cials in the new administration, but initially it also had to compete with other top policy priorities , including enactment of a major tax cut. The president’s daily brie‹ng on August 6, 2001, included a memo from Richard Clarke, counterterrorism adviser to the National Security Council, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” which began, “Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US.” The memo went on to state,“We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a [deleted] services in 1998 saying that Bin Laden wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain a release of ‘Blind Shayak’ Umar Abd al-Rahman and other US-held extremists. Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attack, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.” The memo would appear to have validated the last-day brie‹ngs on major national security challenges by the outgoing Clinton administration , but it did not precipitate any extraordinary action by the administration , not even additional serious efforts to tighten airport security. Nor had policymakers been moved by an earlier memo, ‹ve days after the inauguration, from Clarke stating, “We urgently need a principals level review of the al Qida network.” That memo included two attachments: “Strategy for Eliminating the Threat from the Jihadist Network of al-Qida: Status and Prospects” and “PolMil Plan for al-Qida.”3 Public...

Share