IRAQ -- 'I WAS A DISSENTING VOICE':   Bush doubles down on the disastrous war in Iraq, writing, "Saddam Hussein didn't just pursue weapons of mass destruction. He had used them." "He deployed mustard gas and nerve agents against the Iranians and massacred more than five thousand innocent civilians," Bush said, adding that he believed Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was stunned to find out that he didn't. It was "unbelievably frustrating," Bush told Fox News' Sean Hannity. "Of course, it was frustrating. It -- everybody thought he had WMD. Everybody being every intelligence service, everybody in the administration ." "No one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn't find the weapons. I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do," Bush writes in his book. When asked by NBC's Matt Lauer if he filtered out dissenting voices against the war, Bush retorted, "I was a dissenting voice. I didn't want to use force. I mean force is the last option for a president. And I think it's clear in the book that I gave diplomacy every chance to work. And I will also tell you the world's better off without Saddam in power. And so are 25 million Iraqis."


Recently declassified documents and press accounts, however, contradict Bush's version of events and reveal that his administration was looking for a way to "decapitate" the Iraqi government since 2001. As Bush's Treasury Secretary Paul OÕNeill -- who Bush fired for "disagreeing too many times" with him -- puts it, Bush was "all about finding a way to [go to war]. That was the tone of it. The President saying 'Go find me a way to do this.'" In 2002, Bush also reportedly told then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, while she was in a meeting with three U.S. Senators on how to approach Iraq diplomatically, "F--- Saddam. We're taking him out." In "talking about why we needed this war," Bush also later referenced an alleged Iraqi assassination plot against Bush's father: "We need to get Saddam Hussein...that Mother F----- tried to take out my Dad." Asked by Lauer if he ever considered apologizing to the American people over the war and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, Bush replied, "I mean, apologizing would basically say the decision was a wrong decision," Bush replied. "And I don't believe it was the wrong decision."

(The Progress Report)