Late February-Early March, 2003: Retired Senator Predicts Ten-Year Occupation of Iraq

Former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY), recovering at home from emergency surgery, takes frequent phone calls from Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld to discuss US preparations for war with Iraq. “The war drums were beating as he was going in and out of the hospital,” his daughter Maura will later recall. “But he took phone calls all the time from Cheney and Rumsfeld.” Moynihan is lionized by many neoconservatives, and had, in his time, worked closely with Bush administration neoconservatives such as Elliott Abrams and Abram Shulsky, but Moynihan is also a maverick who is not interested in toeing any ideological lines. He will later tell his daughter: “Don’t worry about the war, my dear. The war will last two weeks. It is the ten-year occupation you have to worry about.” [Unger, 2007, pp. 291-292] Moynihan will die shortly after the surgery. [New York Times, 3/27/2003]