This blog continues from the previous ones on the same topic. As we now know, the White House and top administration figures launched a well organized and highly concerted campaign to exploit the six-month anniversary of 9/11 to get a war with Iraq.

Fanning out on March 11, the president held a ceremonial press opportunity at the White House, the vice president appeared jointly with British Prime Minister Tony Blair in London, and the Secretary of Defense attacked Iraq at Arlington. Statements hyping Iraq concerns were made at the press daily briefing at State and in appearances by Senators McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lieberman (D-Conn.). Sympathetic stories appeared in media outlets, and rightwing Washington think tanks supported the whole effort, as did most Republicans in office with the honorable exception of Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas).

This operation exposes more than administration eagerness to invade Iraq. It also exposes how the current White House deputizes branches of U.S. government as branches of its own political operations. In an ugly continuing push, the Bush White House has engaged in the greatest enlargement of presidential power in the history of the United States, co-opting the other branches of government, the Republican Party, the press, the military, the intelligence community and even the states.

With a few heroic exceptions, there could be little resistance within the administration to inappropriate dominance by the White House or the unconstitutional invasion of a foreign country. Two weeks before March 11, Elizabeth Cheney, Vice President Cheney’s daughter, had been named Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in Near East policy. One week before that date, her husband, Philip Perry, had transferred from Justice to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

Government entities meant to bulwark fiscal probity (OMB), sane foreign policy (State), and process of law and civil liberties (Justice) were effectively sandbagged, not that this process took place overnight. Vice President Cheney’s office was particularly well represented. Along with Cheney’s daughter in State and son-in-law in the OMB, then Federal Communications Commissioner Kevin Martin, now chairman of the FCC, is the husband of Cheney spokeswoman Cathie Martin. Thus any complaints to the FCC regarding how big media outlets boosted the war would have these channels to navigate. Before going to the FCC, Martin had worked in the Bush campaign and the Bush-Cheney Transition Team. Previously, he was an associate in DC law firm Wiley, Rein and Fielding, which now offers large-scale legal services on government contracts including Iraq contracts.

The husband of then Cheney aide Nina Reese was then White House speechwriter Matthew R. Rees. Nina Rees had been an architect of the No Child Left Behind act that basically bought off Washington Post coverage on Bush. Matthew Rees later moved to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), working under SEC Chairman and longtime Bush friend William O. Donaldson. At the White House, Rees was Director for Foreign Policy Speechwriting on the National Security Council, writing for Bush, then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and then Deputy National Security Adviser and now National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, a “Project for the New American Century” teammate. Previously, Rees wrote for publications including the neocon Weekly Standard and was also a speechwriter for Robert B. Zoellick, another PNAC member, now Deputy Secretary of State.

The ground for the special day of March 11 had been carefully prepared. The White House had sent the foolish “axis of evil” signal in the 2002 State of the Union address (an axis not including massacres of millions of Africans, if you notice, but then even Bush couldn’t claim that Sudan had the bomb, and more importantly it does not have the world’s second largest oil reserves). Condoleezza Rice had made bellicose statements about Iraq in her National Security Adviser office on the Friday before March 11. The Vice President had begun his tour of the Middle East to recruit Arab heads of state for the war. The White House had released statements on what the president would be saying.

As we also know now, the launch on March 11 did not go entirely well. Take a look at March 12, with Arab leaders demurring about the whole thing, most of Europe in opposition, and Tony Blair’s government backpedaling in England. Yet the stealthy plans continued, with military actions being prepared according to the British press in Kuwait and U.S. Special Forces even inside Iraq.

So much for the unique, almost inexpressible threat represented by Saddam.