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# Posted 2:07 PM by Ariel David Adesnik

FRONT PAGE "NEWS": The WaPo headline shouts: "U.S. Decision On Iraq Has Puzzling Past; Opponents of War Wonder When, How Policy Was Set"

The article then begins with this surprising revelation:

On Sept. 17, 2001, six days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush signed a 2½-page document marked "TOP SECRET" that outlined the plan for going to war in Afghanistan as part of a global campaign against terrorism.

Almost as a footnote, the document also directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq...

The article then says that Bush hid his intentions from the public for more than three months, until the Axis of Evil speech demonstrated that Iraq was on the President's mind. But even then, we didn't know what the President had in mind for Iraq.

Then, a ways into the article, we get this quote from John Ikenberry, a Georgetown prof fond of lambasting American imperialism:

The external presentation and the justification for [Bush's Iraq policy] really seems to be lacking...[but] the external presentation appears to mirror the internal decision-making quite a bit.

In other words, there is absolutely no "puzzling past" behind the administration's policy on Iraq. Only if you start from the premise that Bush has a secret plan does it seem like the administration's stance is puzzling.

In fact, the administration's Iraq policy is a straightforward reflection of political struggles within the administration that have made the front page of every national newspaper for almost twelve months now. All Glenn Kessler had to do to discover this fact was read "Bush at War", the inside account of administration politics produced by Kessler's WaPo colleague Bob Woodward. Then again, perhaps he didn't have time.

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