Leading White House Hawk Admits U.S. Invaded Iraq for its Oil
June 2003
By Craig Cox,
Utne.com
One of the Bush administration’s leading foreign policy architects has admitted that the U.S. invaded Iraq for its oil.
Speaking to delegates at an Asian security summit in Singapore last weekend, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said the United States chose military action over diplomacy in Iraq because the country was “swimming” in oil, reports George Wright in the Guardian.
The comment came in response to a question about why the Bush administration has treated North Korea, a known nuclear power, so much differently than Iraq, which has no proven nuclear capability. “Let’s look at it simply,” Wolfowitz said. “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.”
Wolfowitz’s admission comes at a time when the White House and the British government are both under extreme pressure to justify their invasion of Iraq. Committees in the British Parliament and in the U.S. Congress are pressing for inquiries about alleged manipulation of intelligence surrounding Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction.
It isn’t the first time Wolfowitz has alluded to government deception around the Iraq invasion. Last month in a Vanity Fair interview, he described how the Bush administration had decided to use Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as a public motive for the invasion.
My email to the UR reporter:
Your story is wrong. Why would you put quotes around comments translated from English to German and back, when you could get the original transcript from the DOD? You should give up reporting for blogging if you aren't willing to do the leg work.Here is the email I sent to The Guardian reporter...