Billmon takes on the "Clinton's fault" line

The Iraqi Liberation Act did not, by any stretch of statutory construction or right-wing imagination, authorize a military invasion of Iraq. And it certainly didn't authorize the Pentagon to begin planning a carve up of Iraq's oil fields. If Bush and his inner circle really were doing what O'Neill and Suskind have said they were doing in early 2001, it's absurd to argue they were simply continuing Clinton policies (which themselves were fairly dubious under international law.) Whether Bush's policies amounted to a conspiracy to wage aggressive war is a question for a special prosecutor -- or a war crimes tribunal. Not that I expect to see either in my lifetime.

If you're needing to refute any of that right wing clamor about how this was all Clinton's fault, check out the rest of Billmon's post.

He comments a couple times that O'Neill is "changing his story" or "backing down". I don't think that's what O'Neill is doing. I think O'Neill is one crafty booger.

I could be wrong, but if this passage from the book is any indication of what Mr. O'Neill is like, I think he drives straight to the goal, let the chips fall where they may. From what I've read at least, he's not saying that he didn't make the statements he's being accused of, or even that he misstated anything - he's saying that people are reading too much into what he said. He has to know that it doesn't matter much what he says at this point - the information is out - and that, I think was the goal.

The incident began in an unremarkable way. Jay Hair, head of the National Wildlife Federation - an umbrella for a wide array of environmental groups - announced that he was holding a press conference in Washington to cite the nation's worst industrial polluter. Word got out the next day that it would be Alcoa. This, of course, is part of a conventional public dialogue. An environmental group identifies an industrial polluter and heaps on criticism. The corporate offender is hauled to the town square for a day in the stocks, quibbles over details, says it is doing all it can and, maybe, that it will try to do more. If the "green" group is skilled, credible, or lucky, the exchange might rate a news story in The New York Times or a mention on a network news broadcast. It's part of a shadow dance that heavy industry lobbyists...know by rote.

O'Neill, CEO at that point for just over two years, had created management havoc inside Alcoa - firing many of the top executives and rethinking the company's operations in a fashion soon to be included in Harvard Business School case studies. But the sleepy, century-old company was drawing little public attention.

Hearing of the imminent attack, O'Neill jumped aboard a morning flight to Washington, swung by Alcoa's Government Affairs Office to pick up Frank Jones...and off the duo marched to a nearby office building for the midmorning conference. O'Neill sat in the center of the front row. Five feet away, at the podium, Hair made his statement as reporters scribbled and cameras rolled. Hair didn't know what O'Neill looked like. He opened it up for questions. A white-haired man leapt up, approached the podium, all but elbowed Hair aside, and said, "I'm Paul O'Neill, CEO of Alcoa. The charges just leveled at Alcoa are not true, and I believe Mr. Hair knew they were not true." He explained that the powdery substance Alcoa was releasing - aluminum oxide - had been taken off the [EPA's] toxic chemicals lists in 1988..., a material point that Hair knew but failed to mention. Before relinquishing the microphone, O'Neill called the comments by Hair - upright, but in a state of shock - a "scurrilous attack on our integrity." Then he turned and walked out of the hotel. Of course, the incident was prominently featured on several news broadcasts that night. O'Neill seemed not to think that was a problem.

And that's the incident that prompted Frank Jones to say, "Paul, you have the balls of a daylight burglar."