Posted on 05/30/2003 1:11:24 PM PDT by fritter
Wolfowitz says Saudi troop withdrawal was 'huge' reason for war with Iraq
Associated Press
BRUSSELS, Belgium -- European critics of the Iraq war expressed shock Friday at published remarks by a senior U.S. official playing down Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as the reason for the conflict.
In an interview in the next issue of Vanity Fair magazine, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz cited "bureaucratic reasons" for focusing on Saddam Hussein's alleged arsenal and said a "huge" reason for the war was to enable Washington to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia.
"For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on," Wolfowitz was quoted as saying.
He said one reason for going to war against Iraq that was "almost unnoticed but huge" was the need to maintain American forces in Saudi Arabia as long as Saddam was in power.
Those troops were sent to Saudi Arabia to protect the desert kingdom against Saddam, whose forces invaded Kuwait in 1991, but their presence in the country that houses Islam's holiest sites enraged Islamic fundamentalists, including Osama bin Laden.
Within two weeks of the fall of Baghdad, the United States announced it was removing most of its 5,000 troops from Saudi Arabia and would set up its main regional command center in Qatar.
However, those goals were not spelled out publicly as the United States sought to build international support for the war. Instead, the Bush administration focused on Saddam's failure to dismantle chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.
The failure of U.S. forces to locate extensive weapons stocks has raised doubts in a skeptical Europe whether Iraq represented a global security threat.
Wolfowitz's comments followed a statement by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who suggested this week that Saddam might have destroyed his banned weapons before the war began.
On Friday, the commander of U.S. Marines in Iraq said he was surprised that extensive searches have failed to discover any of the chemical weapons that U.S. intelligence had indicated were supplied to front line Iraqi forces at the outset of the war.
"Believe me, it's not for lack of trying," Lt. Gen. James Conway told reporters. "We've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad, but they're simply not there."
The remarks by Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld revived the controversy over the war as President Bush left for a European tour in which he hopes to put aside the bitterness over the war, which threatened the trans-Atlantic partnership.
In Denmark, whose government supported the war, opposition parties demanded to know whether Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen misled the public about the extent of Saddam's weapons threat.
"It was not what the Danish prime minister said when he advocated support for the war," Jeppe Kofod, the Social Democrats' foreign affairs spokesman, said in response to Wolfowitz's comments. "Those who went to war now have a big problem explaining it."
Former Danish Foreign Minister Niels Helveg Petersen said he was shocked by Wolfowitz's claim. "It leaves the world with one question: What should we believe?" he told The Associated Press.
In Germany, where the war was widely unpopular, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeiting newspaper said the comments about Iraqi weapons showed that America is losing the battle for credibility.
"The charge of deception is inescapable," the newspaper said Friday.
In London, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who quit as leader of the House of Commons to protest the war, said he doubted Iraq had any such weapons.
"The war was sold on the basis of what was described as a pre-emptive strike, 'Hit Saddam before he hits us,' " Cook told British Broadcasting Corp. "It is now quite clear that Saddam did not have anything with which to hit us in the first place."
During a visit to Poland, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Friday he has "absolutely no doubt" that concrete evidence will be found of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.
"Have a little patience," Blair told reporters.
Wolfowitz was in Singapore, where he is due to speak Saturday at the Asia Security Conference of military chiefs and defense ministers from Asian and key Western powers.
He told reporters at the conference that the United States will reorganize its forces worldwide to confront the threat of terrorism.
"We are in the process of taking a fundamental look at our military posture worldwide, including in the United States," Wolfowitz said. "We're facing a very different threat than any one we've faced historically."
That was a joke :<(, not a corollary.
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By Paul Waugh, Deputy Political Editor
31 May 2003
Independent (UK)
Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, insisted yesterday that weapons of mass destruction were still in Iraq as Washington and London rejected claims that they used intelligence as "propaganda".
But the fightback was immediately undermined when former Washington security officials claimed that US "intelligence had been cooked to the recipe of policy".
Mr Rumsfeld triggered an outcry from critics of the war earlier this week when he suggested that the Iraqi regime may have destroyed chemical and biological weapons before the Anglo-American invasion. However, he told a radio phone-in yesterday that he personally believed that evidence of the secret programme would be found in the country.
In his latest remarks, he said the reason that weapons had not been found was because the government of Saddam Hussein had worked so hard to hide them. "It is not because they are not there," he said. Mr Rumsfeld also rejected the idea that the war was waged under any false pretext. The US and British case against Iraq was based on what he called "good intelligence".
Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst who briefed the former president George Bush Snr, said the Pentagon's claims about WMD in Iraq were "an intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions". Mr McGovern, who heads the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a new group, told BBC Radio 4's PM programme that Mr Rumsfeld set up his own intelligence unit because he didn't get the "correct answers" from the CIA and other agencies.
In London, Baroness Amos, the International Development Secretary, insisted that the Government's dossier on WMD in Iraq had been "thorough and accurate". Lady Amos told BBC Radio 4's The World at One programme: "It is absurd to suggest that we invented, exaggerated or distorted evidence for our own ends. There have been successive United Nations Security Council resolutions about Iraq's WMD. We have evidence that Iraq used its WMD against its own people. These are the facts."
Fresh doubts about how politicians manipulated intelligence reports came when Patrick Lang, a former director of Middle East analysis at the Pentagon's Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), criticised the American claims.
Mr Lang attacked the Office of Special Plans, a unit set up by Mr Rumsfeld inside the Pentagon to rival the CIA and the DIA. The unit relied heavily on information from Ahmed Chalabi, the exiled leader of the Iraqi National Congress and a favourite of hawks in Washington. The Office of Special Plans "started picking out things that supported their thesis ... It's political propaganda".
Both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate and House of Representatives are to hold hearings to determine whether "the analysis relayed to our policy-makers was accurate and unbiased".
Baroness Williams, Leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords, said yesterday: "As new and disturbing facts emerge, the war on Iraq begins to look more like a tragic mistake ... It is very depressing to see our fears confirmed."
According to what was reported on FNC today .. there WAS more to Wolfowitz's quote that Vanity Fair choose not to report ..
How does that response have anything to do with my post? I don't believe the demoncRATS will ever quit attacking. It is what they do best.
Maybe I'm just tired from the long week, but that sentence made no sense whatsoever to me.
The liberals have an agenda and will distort any statements they can to get the firestorm going!
All I am doing is staing the obvious. Billbears is a big Libertarian on FR. He automatically believes a truncated quote that makes the war in Iraq look immoral.
I.E. billbears(big Libertarian) like those on the left are grasping at straws to find anything that would discredit the victory in Iraq. It is not a coincidence that those on the far left(Greens, Barney Frank) also have drug validation as a major tenet as do the Libertarians.
My contnetion is that the modern Libertarians are in tune with the greens and far left, anti-war and pro-drug.
I am so glad to see your quote instead of the often misquoted "You are either with us or against us." Lots of countries are happy to be "against us" but the don't want to be "with the terrorists."
Reply 21 - Posted by: J.R. Dunn, 5/29/2003 11:11:08 PM
I've been told in passing by a member of the State Department that a number of WMDs have in fact been found--along with evidence implicating France, Russia, and a number of other peace-loving countries in their manufacture.
It seems that the administration is using this info to bend those countries our way before releasing anything. Which is smart, effective, and very much like W.
In due time.
Well just to prove you absolutely wrong Dane, I am against legalization of drugs at any level. What I am for is no federal prosecution, such as the BATF. The issue is not covered in the Constitution, therefore it is the responsibility and the right of the separate and sovereign states under the 10th Amendment to prosecute any drug war
So then a source that's not in the DOD can say anything about the DOD and you would believe it. That is your level of objectivity.
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