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Paul Wolfowitz: Deluded and At Liberty

It was all marvellous for Paul Wolfowitz to get on Australian television (why bother?) to brusquely discuss those attacks on US soil in September 2001 and criticism of the invasion of Iraq by US-led forces. After two decades, the former US deputy secretary of defense has not mellowed.

With each show, interview and podium performance Wolfowitz gives, there is a sense that the hole he has dug for himself has become an oasis of reassuring delusion. Iraq’s despot Saddam Hussein, executed at the behest of authorities sponsored and propped by the US, gave Wolfowitz an ecstatic excuse to explain the rationale of American power: he was a threat, and worldly threat at that. In 2003, there was little evidence to suggest that, but neoconservatism has always been a doctrine in search of cartoonish myths.

The fact that Weapons of Mass Destruction featured prominently as the reason for overthrowing Saddam became the necessitous outcome of bureaucratic sensibility: “for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy,” he told Vanity Fair in 2003, “we settled on the one issue everyone could agree on: weapons of mass destruction.”

When those elusive WMDs proved stubbornly elusive, PW shifted his emphasis from security rationales to one of liberation. Along the way he blamed the “consensus judgment of the intelligence community” for not getting it right in the first place, an assessment verging on the mendacious.

While Saddam Hussein was a high grade butcher and villain to many of his people, it is hard to credit him with the Bond villain, pulp view Wolfowitz gives him. Evidence chasers such as Ben Bonk at the Central Intelligence Agency were frustrated in being thrown at the fruitless effort to link Saddam to al-Qaeda. Intelligence operatives were effectively being leaned upon to confect the record and find justifications.

In 2013, Wolfowitz was still insisting on uncertainty as a principle. “We still don’t know how all of this is going to end.” He accepted that the decapitation of the Iraqi leadership without an immediate substitute might have been unwise. The “idea that we’re going to come in like [General Douglas] MacArthur in Japan and write the constitution for them” was erroneous.

That did not matter. The threat was there and present, growing like a stimulated bacillus. Depraved and disoriented, he takes the argument that invading Iraq at the time was appropriate because it would have had to happen in any case. Saddam was street store vendor, sponsor and patron of terrorism (he never defines the dimension of this, nor adduces evidence) and needed to be dealt with. The sword would eventually have to be unsheathed. “We would very likely either have had to go through this whole scenario all over but probably with higher costs for having delayed, or we’d be in a situation today where not only Iran was edging towards nuclear weapons but so was Iraq and also Libya.”

In 2003, the aptly named Jeffrey Record reflected his surname’s worth by taking a hatchet to the Wolfowitz view in a scathing assessment for the Strategic Studies Institute. In declaring a global war on terrorism (GWOT), the Bush administration had identified a range of states, weapons of danger, terrorists and terrorism while conflating “them into a monolithic threat, and in so doing has subordinated strategic clarity to the moral clarity it strives for in foreign policy and may have set the United States on a course of open-ended gratuitous conflict with states and nonstate entities that pose no serious threat to the United States.” Not sloppy, is Record.

He goes on to note, relevantly, the conflation premise: that al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein was seen, amateurishly, “as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat.” This “strategic error of the first order” ignored “critical differences between the two in character, threat level, and susceptibility to US deterrence and military action” led to “an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred Iraq. The result: “a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism” and the diversion of “attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable al-Qaeda.”

The 9/11 Commission Report, despite noting “friendly contacts” between Osama bin Laden and Iraqi officials at various points, similarly found “no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative personal relationship.” Nor was there “evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.”

Critics suggest incompetence and bungling in the invasion of Iraq. They exclude venality and calculation. Wolfowitz, as if anticipating a prosecution in some faraway court, has been busy covering his tracks and pointing the finger at other decision makers further up the greased pole. The top suspect: current retiree amateur painter President George W. Bush. “I don’t think I ever met the president alone. I didn’t meet him very often. [Secretary of State Colin] Powell had access to him whenever he wanted it. And if he was so sure it was a mistake why didn’t he say so?” What a merry band they make.

Wolfowitz, for the defence, always has to play some useful (or useless) idiot card, proffered from the surrounds of the tired lecture circuit or the American Enterprise Institute. He is ideologically inclined, evidentially challenged, and keen to accept material that confirms his prejudice rather than contradicts it. When found wanting about his decisions on accepting, for instance, the bargain basement material of Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, he returned to common cultural themes. “I don’t think anybody in that part of the world was completely straight with us.”

Perhaps, after two decades, it is time to sort the books, order the records and call forth those architects of war who, dismally deluded and acting with criminal intent and incompetence, plunged a good part of the globe into conflict, leaving a legacy that continues to pollute with tenacious determination. Along the way, we can mourn the dead of 9/11 and all the dead that followed.

 

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11 comments

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  1. Lawrence Roberts

    What’s our oil doing underneath their sand?

  2. george theodoridis

    Few in the American Congress are listenable. Few are Credible and even fewer are any higher on the honesty scale than the “Liar” notch.

    They have raised only my last bowel contents whenever they appeared before me. Nope! I listen to none from the American Congress!

    Useful idiots and useless congressmen and women.

  3. Phil Pryor

    Wolfowitz and others said that the USA had put the high value in that oil and they were going to have it and get it. The human manifestation of an irritable bowel, loaded and hair trigger ready, is the Concept of Wolfowitz, of ratbag right wing reactionary killer USA operatives. A world outlook of festering aggression, untrustworthy people and motives, gluttonous military oppression and consumption.., horrible.

  4. Neilwal

    Wolfowitz better stay in his bubble. This punk would need to watch his back anywhere in the Middle East

  5. Arnd

    george t.

    “… even fewer are any higher on the honesty scale than the “Liar” notch.”

    You, too, seem to be returning to a common cultural theme: “I don’t think anybody in that part of the world [Washington Beltway] was completely straight with us.”

    See, I came of political age in the 70s, in the W.-German Socialist Youth. My intro to US imperialism was centred on revelations of the CIA sponsorship of Operation Condor, and support for the replacement of Chile’s president Allende with Pinochet. For me, those three letters – C.I.A. – have been tainted ever since.

  6. BB

    Wolfowitz is a leading neoconservative, a member of GOP and an opportunistic warmonger.
    People like him are what’s wrong in the world. A very nasty item.

  7. RomeoCharlie29

    I think Sales and 7.30 made a mistake giving the warmonger Wolfowitz a platform to continue his self justification for invasions he helped encourage. Sales didn’t have enough deep knowledge to call out his bullshit and lies, unlike our Binoy.

  8. George Theodoridis

    Arnd, with all due respect, i said no such thing. My comment, yes, my insult was directed to the Presidents and his men. It is they who are glaring paradigms of liars and war mongers, not the common American, though the general behaviour of that “common American” also raises my eyebrow, together with my ire.

  9. DrakeN

    Arnd and George, just this morning it is revealed how much the Australian Government was involved in the overthrow of the Allende regime.

  10. BB

    Aye DrakeN

    Fuck the liberals, they are snakes in the grass, always have been and always will be. Douchebags the lot of them. Bastards!
    One fact is an absolute certainty when dealing with any Liberal. Never ever to be trusted, their promises are totally worthless!

    “Declassified documents show Australia assisted CIA in coup against Chile’s Salvador Allende”
    “Former Liberal PM Billy McMahon approved spy agency request to conduct covert operations in Chile, a move later overturned by Gough Whitlam”
    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/sep/11/declassified-documents-show-australia-assisted-cia-in-coup-against-chiles-salvador-allende

  11. Jack sprat

    “If the Nuremberg laws had of continued to the present day every US president since WW 2 would have been hanged ” Noam Chomsky

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