Bill The Neo Con

On February 18, 1998 President Bill Clinton went to the Pentagon and delivered a speech about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and his links to "an unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers, and organized international criminals." Clinton said: "We have to defend our future from these predators of the 21st century.  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."

I read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, his terrific follow-up to 'The Tipping Point.'  In Chapter four of 'Blink' Gladwell tells of us of The Millennium Challenge of 02, a Pentagon war game that lasted 2 ½ years and cost a quarter of a billion dollars. 

It was the largest war game in US Military History, and the target of the game was a rogue military commander in the Persian Gulf having broken with his government yet with 'a considerable power base from strong religious and ethnic loyalties, and was harboring and sponsoring four different terrorist organizations.'  Threatening to plunge the entire region into war, he's one hell of a rouge commander, isn't he?  So who's the most likely model for this scoundrel?  Saddam?  As I read this chapter in Gladwell's book, I couldn't help thinking the Pentagon was gaming for the next war.

And that would be in Iraq.  The war game ended when Operation Iraqi Freedom began.

There was an interesting little factual tidbit here and if you Blinked you missed it - The Millennium Challenge had begun in August of 2000, four months before George Bush was elected President, six months before he took the oath.  As I read Chapter four I was astonished to realize the Pentagon was war-gaming with Iraq in mind ... while Bill Clinton was still President.

Go Bill.