The National Security Archive has obtained documents confirming and expanding on what we already knew: The Bush administration was determined to invade and occupy Iraq whether there was justification or not.

Planning for this debacle began in earnest just months after the invasion of Afghanistan and covered such topics as how to sell a war without reason.

Even though the determination of the Pentagon neocons (Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle and friends) to invade Iraq is well documented, the National Security Archive’s wealth of material brings new depth to the story.

As Think Progress gleaned from one of the documents:

[T]he most alarming part of the document is a bullet point titled, “How start?” (which is a discussion that actually appears after the planning of the entire war). The participants in the Rumsfeld-Frank meeting discussed possible ways to provoke a conflict with Iraq, including an attack by Saddam Hussein against the Kurdish north, the U.S. discovering a “Saddam connection” to 9/11 or the anthrax attacks, or a dispute over WMD inspections. It appears from the language of the talking points that the Bush administration had already decided to go to war with Iraq and was looking for an opportunity to invade. …

There’s a lot more where that came from. — PZS