What Wolfowitz Really Said

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

> X-Sender: stef () vrx net
> Date: Sat, 31 May 2003 12:40:12 -0700
> To: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
> From: Einar Stefferud <Stef () thor nma com>
>
> It should not surprise you that this morning's Los Angeles Times
> has a top headline of "Intelligence on Iraqi Weapons Called 'Wrong'"
> and goes on to misstate the Vanity Fair interview with Deputy
> Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, the interview which is
> clarified below.                                       ---Anon
> _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _
> Weekly Standard - 06/09/2003, Volume 008, Issue 38
>
> What Wolfowitz Really Said   -   by William Kristol
>
>      The truth behind the Vanity Fair "scoop."
>
>
> AS THIS MAGAZINE goes to press, a controversy swirls about the head of
> Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. He is alleged to have "revealed,"
> in an interview with writer Sam Tanenhaus for the Manhattan
> celebrity/fashion glossy Vanity Fair, that the Bush administration's
> asserted casus belli for war against Saddam Hussein --the dictator's
> weapons-of-mass-destruction program-- was little more than a propaganda
> device, a piece of self-conscious and insincere political manipulation.
>
> Lazy reporters have been following the lead of the press release Vanity Fair
> publicists circulated about their "scoop." It begins as follows:
>
>      Contradicting the Bush administration, Deputy Secretary of
>      Defense Paul Wolfowitz tells Vanity Fair that weapons of mass
>      destruction had never been the most compelling justification
>      for invading Iraq.
>
> As it happens, this is a not-quite-accurate description of a paragraph in
> Tanenhaus's article, which itself bears reprinting for reasons that will
> become obvious in a moment:
>
>      When we spoke in May, as U.S. inspectors were failing to find
>      weapons of mass destruction, Wolfowitz admitted that from the
>      outset, contrary to so many claims from the White House, Iraq's
>      supposed cache of WMD had never been the most important
>      casus belli. It was simply one of several reasons: "For
>      bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of
>      mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone
>      could agree on." Everyone meaning, presumably, Powell and
>      the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Almost unnoticed but huge," he said,
>      is another reason: removing Saddam will allow the U.S. to take
>      its troops out of Saudi Arabia, where their presence has
>      been one of al-Qaeda's biggest grievances.
>
> Let's be clear: Though Paul Wolfowitz has friends and admirers at The Weekly
> Standard, we would be surprised and more than a little distressed had he
> actually said what he's supposed to have said in this instance.
>
> For the last 12 years, all specific and sometimes heated policy
> disagreements notwithstanding, American presidents of both parties, joining
> a near-unanimous consensus of the so-called "world community," have agreed
> that the Baath party regime's persistent and never-fully-disclosed WMD
> program represented a grave threat to international security. Al Gore, for
> example, in his much-hyped antiwar speech last September, acknowledged that
> "Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to
> completely deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as
> Saddam is in power. We know he has stored secret supplies of biological and
> chemical weapons throughout his country." The notion that the Bush
> administration's prewar reiteration of this view was a cynical ploy is
> crackpot.
>
> For that matter, the notion that the Bush administration really, really, in
> its heart of hearts, had other, preferred reasons for taking out Saddam
> Hussein --particularly, that it did so to justify removing its troops from
> Saudi Arabia-- and that the entire war was therefore a fraud . . . well,
> this idea, too, is crackpot.
>
> What gives with this Vanity Fair interview, then?
>
> What gives is that Tanenhaus has mischaracterized Wolfowitz's remarks, that
> Vanity Fair's publicists have mischaracterized Tanenhaus's
> mischaracterization, and that Bush administration critics are now indulging
> in an orgy of righteous indignation that is dishonest in triplicate.
>
> Pentagon staffers were wise enough to tape-record the Tanenhaus-Wolfowitz
> interview. Prior to publication of the Vanity Fair piece, they made that
> transcript available to its author. And they have since posted the
> transcript on the Defense Department's website (www.defenselink.mil).
> Tanenhaus's assertion that Wolfowitz "admitted" that "Iraq's WMD had never
> been the most important casus belli" turns out to be, not to put too fine a
> point on it, false. Here's the relevant section of the conversation:
>
> (set bold) TANENHAUS: (end bold) Was that one of the arguments that was
> raised early on by you and others that Iraq actually does connect, not to
> connect the dots too much, but the relationship between Saudi Arabia, our
> troops being there, and bin Laden's rage about that, which he's built on so
> many years, also connects the World Trade Center attacks, that there's a
> logic of motive or something like that? Or does that read too much into--
>
> (set bold) WOLFOWITZ: (end bold) No, I think it happens to be correct. The
> truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government
> bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which
> was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason, but . . . there have
> always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction,
> the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of
> the Iraqi people. Actually I guess you could say there's a fourth overriding
> one which is the connection between the first two. . . . The third one by
> itself, as I think I said earlier, is a reason to help the Iraqis but it's
> not a reason to put American kids' lives at risk, certainly not on the scale
> we did it. That second issue about links to terrorism is the one about which
> there's the most disagreement within the bureaucracy, even though I think
> everyone agrees that we killed 100 or so of an al Qaeda group in northern
> Iraq in this recent go-around, that we've arrested that al Qaeda guy in
> Baghdad who was connected to this guy Zarqawi whom Powell spoke about in his
> U.N. presentation.
>
> In short, Wolfowitz made the perfectly sensible observation that more than
> just WMD was of concern, but that among several serious reasons for war, WMD
> was the issue about which there was widest domestic (and international)
> agreement.
>
> As for Tanenhaus's suggestion that Wolfowitz somehow fessed up that the war
> had a hidden, "unnoticed but huge" agenda --rationalizing a pre-planned
> troop withdrawal from Saudi Arabia-- we refer you, again, to the actual
> interview. In an earlier section of the conversation, concerning the
> current, postwar situation in the Middle East, Wolfowitz explained that the
> United States needs to get post-Saddam Iraq "right," and that we also need
> "to get some progress on the Israeli-Palestinian issue," which now looks
> more promising. Then Wolfowitz said this:
>
>      There are a lot of things that are different now, and one that
>      has gone by almost unnoticed --but it's huge-- is that by
>      complete mutual agreement between the U.S. and the Saudi
>      government we can now remove almost all of our forces from
>      Saudi Arabia. Their presence there over the last 12 years has
>      been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly
>      government. . . . I think just lifting that burden from the Saudis
>      is itself going to open the door to other positive things.
>
> Tanenhaus has taken a straightforward and conventional observation about
> strategic arrangements in a post-Saddam Middle East and juiced it up into a
> vaguely sinister "admission" about America's motives for going to war in the
> first place.
>
> The failure so far to discover "stocks" of WMD material in post-Saddam Iraq
> raises legitimate questions about the quality of U.S. and allied
> intelligence -- though no one doubts that Saddam's regime had weapons of
> mass destruction, used weapons of mass destruction, and had an ongoing
> program to develop more such weapons. Furthermore, people of good will are
> entitled to disagree, even in retrospect, about the wisdom and probable
> effects of Saddam's forcible removal. But distorting an on-the-record
> interview with a Bush administration official in order to create a
> quasi-conspiratorial narrative of deceit and deception at the highest levels
> of the U.S. government is a disgrace.
>
> --William Kristol
>
> © Copyright 2003, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
> http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/757wzfan.a
> sp


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