From the time Bush won election he wanted to go into Iraq. Here's what Paul O'Neill recalls:

And what happened at President Bush's very first National Security Council meeting is one of O'Neill's most startling revelations.

"From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," says O'Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic "A" 10 days after the inauguration - eight months before Sept. 11.

"From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime," says Suskind. "Day one, these things were laid and sealed."

As treasury secretary, O'Neill was a permanent member of the National Security Council. He says in the book he was surprised at the meeting that questions such as "Why Saddam?" and "Why now?" were never asked.

"It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this,'" says O'Neill. "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."

Of course what Suskind contends on Day one, is complete and utter nonsense. Regime change in Iraq by "Day One" had already been adopted as official US Foreign Policy almost two and a half years before during the summer of 1998, during the Presidency of Bill Clinton.

Those at the head of the US Intelligence and Security Agencies basically remained the same, it was they who in 1997 and 1998 advised the President of the potential threat from an Iraq under Saddam who refused to comply with UNSCR 687:

"So first, let's just take a step back and consider why meeting the threat posed by Saddam Hussein is important to our security in the new era we are entering.

This is a time of tremendous promise for America. The superpower confrontation has ended; on every continent democracy is securing for more and more people the basic freedoms we Americans have come to take for granted. Bit by bit the information age is chipping away at the barriers -- economic, political and social -- that once kept people locked in and freedom and prosperity locked out.

But for all our promise, all our opportunity, people in this room know very well that this is not a time free from peril, especially as a result of reckless acts of outlaw nations and an unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers and organized international criminals.

We have to defend our future from these predators of the 21st century. They feed on the free flow of information and technology. They actually take advantage of the freer movement of people, information and ideas.

And they will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. We simply cannot allow that to happen.

There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein's Iraq. His regime threatens the safety of his people, the stability of his region and the security of all the rest of us. - Bill Clinton to Joint Chiefs of Staff and Pentagon staff 17 February 1998

The same people advised George W. Bush when asked to evaluate the greatest threat to the United States of America AFTER Al-Qaeda had illustrated how vulnerable large centres of population were to asymmetric attack. In the collective view of the US Intelligence and Security Agencies the threat had not changed one iota from their opinion given in 1998 and that is how THEY briefed the new President BEFORE he was inaugurated, Clinton had pushed it to the back burner for the final months of his second term, leaving it to the United Nations. Bush took it more seriously as there were already mutterings about having sanctions lifted. After 9/11 then the matter had to resolved and both Bush and Blair tried the UN Security Council first. It would not have mattered who had won the 2000 Presidential Election the advice and recommedations would have remained the same. The Northern Alliance would have been assisted in Afghanistan to rid the country of the Taliban Government and their Al-Qaeda "Guests" and Iraq forced to comply with UNSCR 687 within a limited time-frame - there would be no letting UNMOVIC's inspection just drift on as it's predecessor organisation UNSCOM's had been allowed to. The choice with regard to war was Saddam's and his alone. In both instances action in both Afghanistan and in Iraq was correct thing to do and the right thing to do and the soldiers who participated were most certainly not mecenaries and to accuse them of being such is a baseless and unwarranted insult.

Oh go back to Clinton's speech - pick up on the definition and origin of term "The Axis of Evil"??