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As Ron Suskind concludes The Price of Loyalty, he recalls a conversation with Paul O’Neill in November of 2002:
…a few weeks before the invasion we sat on the porch at the Watergate, high above the Potomac, which was bursting with the flows of early spring. O’Neill, who had sat through scores of NSC meetings, was deeply fearful about the United States’ “grabbing a python by the tail, by dropping a hundred thousand troops into the middle of twenty-four million Iraqis and an Arab world of one billion Muslims. Trust me, they haven’t thought this through,” he said.
He was still hoping there would be “a real evidentiary hearing and a genuine debate” before troops were committed. He knew that wasn’t likely. “When you get this far down the path,” he said after a long silence, “you want to have a heavy weight of evidence supporting you. If the action is reversible, or if a generation can erase its effects, it’s different than if you bring the world to the edge of a chasm. You can’t go back.”
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