Posted on 05/18/2004 10:48:05 AM PDT by AntiGuv
WASHINGTON - As details of prison abuses in Iraq surfaced, many Democrats on Capitol Hill demanded that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld resign. But not Sen. Carl Levin. The top Senate Democrat on a key military committee said he is wary about who might be the post-Rumsfeld secretary.
"If it would be his deputy, I don't see that that would represent a change at all in terms of the direction we should go," Levin told reporters this month.
Rumsfeld's deputy is Paul Wolfowitz. If Democrats are dissatisfied with Rumsfeld, that doesn't compare to the disdain some feel for the man seen as the intellectual architect of the Iraq war.
Some of their anger spilled out at last week's Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., told Wolfowitz his credibility had been undermined because he had "made numerous predictions, time and time again, that have turned out to be untrue and were based on faulty assumptions."
Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., accused Wolfowitz of "dissembling and avoidance of answers."
He also faced tough questioning Tuesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where committee members have accused the Pentagon repeatedly of planning inadequately for a post-Saddam Iraq.
Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., told Wolfowitz that senators had asked before the war about plans for securing weapons of mass destruction and dealing with a possible negative response from the Iraqi people.
"I, frankly, feel we were never given real answers to that, and I have a feeling that it's because there wasn't a serious plan, and I think at this point we're paying a serious price for it," Feingold said.
Wolfowitz responded that "there was a serious plan" and said he would provide details. "A lot of thought went into it. It may not have been perfect, but there was a lot of work done on it."
Wolfowitz is at the center of the Iraqi storm because few other high-level Bush administration officials have argued as forcefully about the need to topple Saddam Hussein and as optimistically about prospects for post-Saddam Iraq.
To Republicans who supported the war, Wolfowitz was a prescient critic of U.S. policies in the 1990s, which sought to restrain Saddam without necessarily bringing him down. Wolfowitz spoke out about Saddam's brutality to his people and how he threatened the Middle East.
He had criticized the first Bush administration, in which he served as undersecretary of defense for policy, for failing to "deal with Saddam" after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
In the 1990s, as dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, Wolfowitz described the Clinton administration's policy on Iraq as "a muddle of confusion and pretense" and urged it to move more forcefully against Saddam.
As the Bush administration began setting its sights on Iraq, it was Wolfowitz who frequently went to Capitol Hill to warn of Saddam's dangers. He described how a liberated Iraq could spread democracy through the region and advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
He also sought to assuage lawmakers' worries about the difficulties and costs of winning the war and setting up a democratic government.
After Gen. Eric Shinseki, then the Army chief of staff, said in February 2003 that several hundred thousand troops would have to stay in Iraq after the war, Wolfowitz told a House panel that "we can say with reasonable confidence" the estimate was "way off the mark."
He also suggested that countries that were unwilling to participate in the war against Saddam would be willing to send in peacekeeping troops after the conflict was ended.
A year after Saddam was toppled, no such surge in foreign troops has appeared, and the United States still has 135,000 soldiers in the country. Wolfowitz said last week he had rejected Shinseki's estimate because it was different from that of Gen. Tommy Franks, who oversaw military operations in Iraq as head of Central Command.
Wolfowitz also predicted before the war that Iraqis "are going to welcome us as liberators. And when that message gets out to the whole Arab world, it is going to be a powerful counter to Osama bin Laden." But surveys have shown that Iraqis have mixed opinions about the war, and U.S. prestige among Arabs in general has been especially hurt by the prison abuse scandal.
Wolfowitz had assured lawmakers that the costs of a war to U.S. taxpayers would be limited because of Iraq's oil revenue and frozen assets. He said Iraqi oil could generate $50 billion to $100 billion in revenues over two or three years "We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon," he told a House committee in March 2003.
Questioned Tuesday by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., about those comments, Wolfowitz noted he had said then that no one could predict reconstruction costs. But he said Iraqis have spent $21 billion of their own money on reconstruction and that oil revenues are above target because of increased production and higher oil prices.
While he didn't have precise figures, Wolfowitz told Boxer: "I don't think in the end those numbers will turn out to be too far off the mark."
Looks like it's Wolfiwitz's turn in the barrel this week. The dems are so obvious.
Well, targeting Rumsfeld didn't work. We'll try the next step down and see if that will work. Like gnawing Rats, chewing away on whatever is chewable, trying to break down as much of the administration, military and defense of country as possible for political advantage.
It would be nice if, just once, Democrats targeted the foreign enemies of our nation... but they shoot back.
Who died and left Levin the arbiter of the way we should go?
your right and if our forgein enemys shoot back... with the likes of John Kerry at the helm, we see how much of a stomach they have for a fight.
They really are obvious, these liberals, and funny in how they keep trying the same failed strategy of personal destruction. I find the strategy oddly reminiscent of what Al Quaeda is doing by trying to pick off our allies in Iraq, here the liberals are trying to pick off President Bush's colleagues.
Rummy, Swing and amiss, strike two.
Here comes strike three.
To be fair is he is guilty..of not having us steamroll the terrorists once we won the war in two weeks. Politics either tied our hands or we once again became too "compasionate" or complacent. Now the libs have the foot in the door and..BINGO..we lose another war.
1. The majority of Iraqis support the US and freedom---and the Democrats know it.
2. The "prison abuse scandal" has been shamelessly demagogued by the media and Democrats---and both guilty parties know that too.
Duncan Hunter, appearing on C-SPAN this morning was livid because the top three generals who are conducting the war in Iraq have been summoned by the Armed Services Committee to testify tomorrow. Does anyone think the hearing will be about money? Hardly. Why are these men being called back from their appointed duty to endure harangues and harassment from the likes of Kennedy and Klinton? Don't they have better things to do?
What nasty little "V" word has been tossed around the last few months by the RATS? It's the same little word that Komrade Kerry uses as his trump card. It's also the same word that is associated with failure, disdain for our troops and turning tail. Vietnam. Isn't it ironic that those who swear support for our troops are now using the same tactics (second guessing, micromanagement by politicians, hand wringing, extreme opposition) as were used thirty years ago? Coincidence?
Mark Steyn, Telegraph Opinion Page, 12/30/2003.
Moreover, this is a long haul. The occupation of Germany and Japan took five years, and while not as violent, were every bit as difficult with the different parties. People actually questioned whether or not Germany was "capable" of democracy. Likewise, it took TWO YEARS and 70,000 troops to quell the uprising in the Philippines after the Sp. Am. War. In fact, I would argue that the whole "won the war in two weeks" was an illusion of Saddam's strategy, which was precisely a guerilla war in which he gambled that he could hide out and escape long enough to return to power.
We still win, but it won't be as satisfying and convincing as a knock out. Few wars really are. Rather in five years Iraq will be reasonably peaceful and reasonably stable and will be a solid base for fighting still other terrorism in the region.
Mark Steyn, Telegraph Opinion Page, 12/30/2003.
LOL! Thanks for posting that. I missed it before. Steyn does it again!
There's at least a dozen Freepers who can't stand Wolfowitz or his 'kind.'
OK, I give up. What's the answer?
"If I went to your town and asked someone there whether folks there told the truth, would they say yes?"
If the answer is "yes" the guy is from the truth-telling town. In both cases the person in the town would say "yes" if asked the question. But a person from the lie-telling town if asked what his townsperson would say would lie and say "no." I think.
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