[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?)."