More on the Guardian story

Over at Calpundit, Kevin Drum pointed out a strange quirk regarding the Guardian story yesterday that claimed Paul Wolfowitz had admitted the war with Iraq was fought because of the oil (which isn't really waht he said at all).

Apparently, on May 31st, the Guardian had run a story with the correct quote in it.

The United States hopes to end the nuclear standoff with North Korea by putting economic pressure on the impoverished nation, U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said Saturday.

North Korea would respond to economic pressure, unlike Iraq, where military action was necessary because the country's oil money was propping up the regime, Wolfowitz told delegates at the second annual Asia Security Conference in Singapore.

"The country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse,'' Wolfowitz said. "That I believe is a major point of leverage.''

"The primary difference between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options in Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil,'' he said.

Then, 5 days later, they published the story headlined "Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil", and presented the statement this way:

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."

On the surface, the two versions of the comment look very similar, but in the 5/31 story, the quote is presented as an explaination of why we're still looking for other solutions in North Korea when we dismissed the idea of other solutions for Iraq. In that context, the role of oil was not something we wanted to get from Iraq, but rather something that limited what options we had. Now, I'm not going to say whether this contention makes sense or not - but it's the contention that Wolfowitz was making.

Interestingly, I tried to go to the 6/4 article at the Guardian's website, because I wanted to check some of how the reporter lead up to the the quote itself in presenting it as though Wolfowitz ws claiming we fought the war to get the oil, and the article is no longer there. The page offers no explaination, nor does it even indicate that a story has been removed. It just presents you with a basic "page not available" message. I've been looking for any kind of a correction or other note explaining the missing article, but haven't found it yet. If I do, I'll make note of it here.

UPDATE (11:21 am CST) I found this note at News 24. It had been added to the story they had published recounting the Guardian's story from yesterday. According to this note, the Guardian will be commenting on the matter tomorrow:

Although The Guardian earlier reported that US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz had said that the Iraq war was all about oil, the newspaper has now removed the article from its web site, and will print a full correction in Friday's edition. According to the Guardian's ombudsman, the quote, "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," was taken out of context, and misconstrued.

Posted by thorswitch at June 5, 2003 10:00 AM | TrackBack