Wolfowitz: It was the oil

Paul Wolfowitz has been speaking rather plainly lately about the reasons for the Iraq war. In a interview with Sam Tannenhaus of Vanity Fair (a complete transcript of which is available at the DOD website), Wolfowitz noted that, while there were three main reasons for invading Iraq - WMD, support for terrorism and "criminal treatment of the Iraqi people", for "bureaucratic" reasons, they chose to focus on the WMD, as it was the only one of the three that everyone could agree on - presumably as being the best reason to justify the war.

Today's Guardian is now reporting that Der Tagesspiegel and Die Welt are quoting Wolfowitz as saying that our reason for invading Iraq was the oil. According to the article, the comments were made at a security summet held in Singapore over the weekend.

Asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found, the deputy defence minister said: "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."

After having recently discovered that an earlier statement of his had been misrepresented by Reuters, I'm attempting to find confirmation of this latest pronouncement, but if this is, in fact, what he said, I suspect things are about to get a lot worse for both President Bush and Prime Minister Blair.

More on this later if and when I find out more.

Posted by thorswitch at June 4, 2003 01:54 PM | TrackBack