After President Bush’s January 30, 2001, National Security Council meeting, “Treasury Secretary [Paul] O’Neill was convinced that ‘getting Hussein was now the administration’s focus, that much was already clear.’ But O’Neill believed, the real destabilizing factor in the Middle East was not Saddam Hussein but the Israeli-Palestinian conflict–the issue Bush had just turned his back on. Ten years after the Gulf War, said O’Neill, ‘Hussein seemed caged and defanged. Clearly, there were many forces destabilizing the region, most particularly the Arab-Israeli conflict itself, which we were now abandoning.’ ”
– James Bamford, A Pretext for War, Pages 267-268