Bush Ghost-Writer: “He Was Thinking about Invading Iraq in 1999”

Shocking news! Bush was itching to invade Iraq before he was elected! Just kidding. We already knew that. But just in case, here's a repeat of the President's pro-Bush-family former ghost-writer on Bush's desire to invade Iraq. Two key paragraphs:

"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and journalist [and Bush ghost-writer] Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said to me: 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, 'If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency." Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father's shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. "Suddenly, he's at 91 percent in the polls, and he'd barely crawled out of the bunker."
...
According to Herskowitz, George W. Bush's beliefs on Iraq were based in part on a notion dating back to the Reagan White House - ascribed in part to now-vice president Dick Cheney, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan. "Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade."

(Via Crooks and Liars.)

Clearly, Bush views war as a last resort.