Wolfowitz over the line

There are a couple quotes from Paul Wolfowitz being spread throught the liberal blogs today. Most of the sites are 2 questions and excerpts from Wolfowitz's answers from a recent Georgetown Q&A session. I am going to go ahead and post both the questions and his complete answers, so that it's clear that the outrageousness of his answers isn't due to selective editing, but is because Wolfowitz quite simply crossed a line when he told these two people that they don't love America. [Note: Emphasis added to make the specific offending statements easier to locate.]

Q: Hi, Mr. Wolfowitz. My name is Ruthy Coffman. I think I speak for many of us here when I say that your policies are deplorable. They're responsible for the deaths of innocents and the disintegration of American civil liberties. [Applause] We are tired, Secretary Wolfowitz, of being feared and hated by the world. We are tired of watching Americans and Iraqis die, and international institutions cry out in anger against us. We are simply tired of your policies. We hate them, and we will never stop opposing them. We will never tire or falter in our search for justice. And in the name of this ideal and the ideal of freedom, we assembled a message for you that was taken away from us and that message says that the killing of innocents is not the solution, but rather the problem. Thank you. [Applause and jeers]

Wolfowitz: I have to infer from that that you would be happier if Saddam Hussein were still in power. [Applause]

I wish you could have come with me in July when we visited a little Marsh Arab village called al Amarah near the Iranian border. To get there you have to fly over desert the size of New Jersey. It is a man-made desert, created by Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of the Gulf War. For thousands of years it's been a lush marsh. The Marsh Arabs are one of the oldest continuous human civilizations. They had figured out how to get milk out of water buffalo by breeding a new kind of water buffalo. It's not a small achievement. They produced some very large percentage of the vegetables for the entire country. They were peaceful people, but they also provided a refuge for the rebels that Saddam Hussein feared. So in the true traditions of Nebuchadnezzar, he simply proceeded to wipe them out by drying them out, by creating an environmental catastrophe.

There were half a million Marsh Arabs in 1991. The estimates today are somewhere between 40,000 and 200,000. When we got off the helicopters, the population was overwhelmingly women and children. The children's hair had that ugly rusty color that indicates severe malnutrition. But they were smiling and cheering and saying "Thank you Bush", "Down with Saddam" and finally hopeful that they might have a future.

For most of the Marsh Arabs liberation was too late, but for those people it came just in time. I think you ought to think about that. They're innocents as well. Far, far more innocent.

This has been a war that's been -- War is an ugly business. It is a brutal business. And a lot of those innocents died, by the way, because Saddam Hussein put his weapons in hospitals and other places. But it's ugly and it's brutal. But the alternative was far, far uglier, far more brutal. There's no question about that in my mind. [Applause]

Q: I'd just like to say that people like Ruthy and myself have always opposed Saddam Hussein, especially when Saddam Hussein was being funded by the United States throughout the '80s. And -- [Applause] And after the killings of the Kurds when the United States increased aid to Iraq. We were there opposing him as well. People like us were there. We are for democracy. And I have a question.

What do you plan to do when Bush is defeated in 2004 and you will no longer have the power to push forward the project for New American Century's policy of American military and economic dominance over the people of the world? [Applause]

Wolfowitz: I don't know if it was just Freudian or you intended to say it that way, but you said you opposed Saddam Hussein especially when the United States supported him.

It seems to me that the north star of your comment is that you dislike this country and its policies. [Applause] And it seems to me a time to have supported the United States and to push the United States harder was in 1991 when Saddam Hussein was slaughtering those innocents so viciously.

Look, let's back up a little bit. You and I should both calm down a little here.

Q: Okay. [Laughter]

Wolfowitz: This is not ideological, I don't believe. I think it is a moral issue. I respect the fact that you and the last questioner have deep moral concerns. War is an ugly thing. I agree with that. But butchers like Saddam Hussein are incredibly ugly.

I've known a lot of dictators fairly up close and personal. I take some pride in having helped to get rid of Ferdinand Marcos. I tried to get some changes in Indonesia and I took some pleasure when President Suharto left. But to quote that famous Vice Presidential debate, or to paraphrase it from a few years ago, Ferdinand Marcos was no Saddam Hussein. Ferdinand Marcos was not responsible for the deaths of a million Muslims.

I don't think there's much question here about the morality of having gotten rid of that regime. I also think that it's worth stopping and thinking from the point of view of the Iraqi people, and I'm not saying that they're the ones who should vote in our election. We should decide our President based on who Americans think is good for the American people. But I have to tell you that it sends a very unsettling message to Iraqis that our elections might decide their future.

When I visited the city of Najaf in July, met with the town council, and as I guess most of you, a well-informed audience know, this is one of the two holy cities of Shia Islam. It was pretty remarkable to be sitting with a town council that included one woman, a religious cleric as the head, and about 15 or 16 professionals for the most part in the rest of the group.

One of these professionals, I can't remember whether he was an architect or an engineer, asked me a two-part question. Part two, I'll start with, borders on the paranoid. He said are you Americans just holding Saddam Hussein as a trump card over our head? You may think that's paranoid, but if you'd been through what they went through in 1991, the suspicions about our intentions run very deep. The fear of what can happen to them if that regime comes back is palpable and enormous.

But the first question wasn't paranoid at all. In fact it was pretty sophisticated. He said what's going to happen to us if George Bush loses the election?

I told him as best I could, and I still believe it, that at bottom, no matter how partisan we get in our political debates, the American people stay to a certain center. If you look at the perseverance we had over many years of the Cold War, in spite of some pretty fierce policy debates, the United States really did stay the course. I think I did a pretty good job, maybe not of convincing him completely, but convincing him that we were with the people of Iraq until they succeeded.

I think this Madrid Conference sends a message that it's not just the United States. It's 70 countries in the world. And the fact that Najaf is now under the direction of a Spanish brigade with a Polish commander probably sends a good message.

But I have to tell you that when they hear the message that we might not be there next year they get very scared, and that fear leads them not to give us information about where the bad people are. It leads them not to want to serve on the town councils. It leads them not to want to risk their lives as policemen.

There are thousands of Iraqis right now who are risking their lives for future freedom for that country, and I think it would be good if they got an unequivocal message of support from this country. Thank you. [Applause]

I wonder if this would be a good time to remind Wolfowitz about his statement earlier this year in an interview with Sam Tannenhaus from Vanity Fair, where he explains that, while the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people by Saddam Hussein was a serious concern, on its own, it doesn't justify a war of this nature. Here is the section from the DOD transcript of the interview as posted at the DoD News site. I've highlighted the most relevent comments.

Wolfowitz: [...] 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 -- hold on one second --

(Pause)

Kellems: Sam there may be some value in clarity on the point that it may take years to get post-Saddam Iraq right. It can be easily misconstrued, especially when it comes to --

Wolfowitz: -- 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. Sorry, hold on again.

Kellems: By the way, it's probably the longest uninterrupted phone conversation I've witnessed, so --

Q: This is extraordinary.

Kellems: You had good timing.

Q: I'm really grateful.

Wolfowitz: To wrap it up.

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 UN presentation.

In other words, had it not been for the issue of weapons of mass destruction (which we still haven't found any evidence of) and Saddam's links to terrorism (which even Wolfowitz acknowledges were the subject of strong disagreement), it wouldn't have been worth sacrificing our soldiers just to free the Iraqi people from Saddam's tyranny.

Does that mean he would be happier if Saddam were still in power?

Posted by thorswitch at November 2, 2003 04:45 PM | TrackBack