Is Wolfowitz Serious?
Paul Wolfowitz, the visibly-vibrating-with-barely-contained-excitement nerve center of the neocon cabal currently running the country, has been making some very odd statements lately. First there was his recent admission in Vanity Fair that the WMD justification for going to war was chosen for “bureaucratic reasons.” That news cycle is barely dead, and he’s back in the headlines for having announced to an Asian security summit that the reason we went to war with Iraq, rather than with North Korea, is that the former is “swimming” with oil. From The Guardian: Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil.
Another nice piece on the whole WMD thing, by the way (which, given the title, I can’t resist) is the following from Mother Jones: Liar, liar.
June 4th, 2003 at 1:20 pm
Now, in an attempt to be generous, there is another way in which these statements could be interpreted.
The quotation is ambiguous about exactly why Iraq’s oil reserves were a motivation for invasion; a sympathetic listener could conclude that the idea was that Iraq will always have the wherewithal to be a serious threat, given their natural resources. And that, conversely, the DPRK has no such potential for wealth, and thus can be safely handled differently.
Now, I’m not sure that I’m quite that sympathetic a listener. And even if this quote was taken way out of context, it was still exceptionally poorly phrased.
June 4th, 2003 at 7:02 pm
Onan, that is exactly the point Wolfowitz was making. I read the transcript of the Q & A session on Defenselink.com and it is very obvious that he was stating that a reason for handling North Korea and Iraq differently was that Iraq’s vast oil resources gave Saddam’s regime the financial leverage to sustain their weaponary threat, unlike North Korea.
Guardian and other news sources who are spinning this more sinister tale of Wolfowitz’s comments are force-fitting a partial quote to line up with their own political agenda.
June 5th, 2003 at 11:23 am
Wait, North Korea ALREADY has the weaponry threat, but not oil. Irak has oil, but not weaponry threat so far.
The war on Irak was launched because of the “immediate threat”, not hypothetical future threats. And while the Iraki oil is been quickly pumped to pay for the destruction caused by the Bushes’ regime invasions, North Korea is pumping up on WMD.
June 5th, 2003 at 12:49 pm
The point of my comment is to the specific article posted on Wolfowitz’s response to a question raised during the Asian Security Summit. He answered a question regarding the pre-war rationale between using force or sanctions when dealing with countries such as Iraq and North Korea. He stated (I’m paraphrasing) that sanctions, economic or otherwise, may be more effective in North Korea than in Iraq which has such vast oil resources to withstand such pressures.
Some questionable journalistic sources (i.e. Guardian) are deliberately cherry-picking a phrase outside of the context of Wolfowitz’s answer and declaring that he has admitted to the world that the US chose to invade Iraq for the oil.
If you want to debate the whole, “Yeah, but Iraq doesn’t have any WMD.” That is a separate discussion from the point this particular posted article raised.
June 5th, 2003 at 9:20 pm
In a further development, Guardian’s website has posted a correction regarding how they “mistakenly” construed that Wolfowitz was referring to oil being the reason why the US invaded Iraq. Instead the proper context was just as Onan and myself mentioned in our comments above.
June 6th, 2003 at 4:26 am
Oil was the main reason for military action against Iraq, a leading White House hawk has claimed […]. Paul Wolfowitz – who has already undermined Tony Blair’s position over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by describing them as a “bureaucratic” excuse for war – has now gone further by claiming the real motive was that Iraq is “swimming” in oil.
The latest comments were made by Mr Wolfowitz in an address to delegates at an Asian security summit in Singapore at the weekend, and reported today by German newspapers Der Tagesspiegel and Die Welt.
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.”
[The Guardian then procedes with pontification based entirely on this misrepresentation.]
So much for the Guardian. Now compare that with what Wolfowitz actually said (the except is from the Q&A):
Q: What I meant is that essentially North Korea is being taken more seriously because it has become a nuclear power by its own admission, whether or not that’s true, and that the lesson that people will have is that in the case of Iraq it became imperative to confront Iraq militarily because it had banned weapons systems and posed a danger to the region. In the case of North Korea, which has nuclear weapons as well as other banned weapons of mass destruction, apparently it is imperative not to confront, to persuade and to essentially maintain a regime that is just as appalling as the Iraqi regime in place, for the sake of the stability of the region. To other countries of the world this is a very mixed message to be sending out.
Wolfowitz: The concern about implosion is not primarily at all a matter of the weapons that North Korea has, but a fear particularly by South Korea and also to some extent China of what the larger implications are for them of having 20 million people on their borders in a state of potential collapse and anarchy. It’s is also a question of whether, if one wants to persuade the regime to change, whether you have to find — and I think you do — some kind of outcome that is acceptable to them. But that outcome has to be acceptable to us, and it has to include meeting our non-proliferation goals.
Look, the primarily difference — to put it a little too simply — between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq. The problems in both cases have some similarities but the solutions have got to be tailored to the circumstances which are very different.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz Remarks at the IISS Asian Security Conference (5/31/03)
Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz Q&A following IISS Asia Security Conference
More Wolfowitz Transcripts
Once again, side by side:
Guardian: “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.”
Transcript: “Look, the primarily difference — to put it a little too simply — between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil.”
Of course this goes beyond the simple misquote. That might (if one was extremely charitable) be excused as a problem of translating from English to German and back. (The Guardian did publish before the DOD transcript of the Q&A portion of Wolfowitz’ talk was posted.)
The real problem is extreme, blatant and willful (or shockingly ignorant) mischaracterization. The Guardian, in their lead sentence — indeed in the first clause of the first sentence — paraphrased Wolfowitz as having “claimed” that, “Oil was the main reason for military action against Iraq”. As you can certainly read for yourself, Wolfowitz claimed nothing of the kind. Not on any reading. Not in any language. Wolfowitz was merely noting that North Korea is on the verge of economic collapse, that this would present a large and possibly intolerable problem for South Korea if the regime were to suddenly implode, and that the same problem did not apply to Iraq since it had plenty of hard currency producing oil.
Furthermore, the following transcript should have been available to The Guardian, wherein Wolfowitz explicitly and forcefully repudiates the position they attribute to him:
Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz Media Availability at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo (6/3/03)
Q: I’m Satoru Suzuki with TV-Asahi of Japan. Mr. Secretary, eleven weeks have passed since the coalition forces moved into Iraq. Yet you’ve found no weapons of mass destruction in that country — no convincing evidence yet. Given that, are you still convinced that you’ll be able to find such weapons eventually and, in the absence of such weapons, how can you still justify the war, and what would you say to those critics in Japan and the rest of the world who’ve been saying that the war was mainly about oil?
Wolfowitz: Well, let me start with the last part. The notion that the war was ever about oil is a complete piece of nonsense. If the United States had been interested in Iraq’s oil, it would have been very simple 12 years ago or any time in the last 12 years to simply do a deal with Saddam Hussein. We probably could have had any kind of preferred customer status we wanted if we’d been simply willing to drop our real concerns. Our real concerns focused on the threat posed by that country — not only its weapons of mass destruction, but also its support for terrorism and, most importantly, the link between those two things. You said it’s eleven weeks since our troops first crossed the Kuwaiti border, and coalition troops first entered Iraq, as though eleven weeks were a long time. Eleven weeks is a very short time. In fact, unfortunately, significant elements of the old regime are still out there shooting at Americans, killing Americans, threatening Iraqis. It is not yet a secure situation and I believe that probably influences to some extent the willingness of Iraqis to speak freely to us.
We — as the whole world knows — have in fact found some significant evidence to confirm exactly what Secretary Powell said when he spoke to the United Nations about the development of mobile biological weapons production facilities that would seem to confirm fairly precisely the information we received from several defectors, one in particular who described the program in some detail. But I wouldn’t suggest we’ve gotten to the bottom of the whole story yet. We said, when Resolution 1441 was being adopted, that the most important thing was to have free and unintimidated access to Iraqis who know where these things are. Simply going and searching door to door in a country the size of the state of California is not the way you would find things. You would find things when people start to give you information — we’re still in an early stage of that process and there is no question we will get to the bottom of what’s there.
But there should be no doubt whatsoever this was a war undertaken because our President and the Prime Minister of England and the other countries that joined with us believe — and I think they believe correctly — that this regime was a threat to our security and a threat that we could no longer live with. It is also the case that, beyond a shadow of any doubt whatsoever, this regime was a horrible abuser of its own people and that there is no question the Iraqi people are far better off with that regime gone.
June 9th, 2003 at 3:44 am
Since day ONE I’ve said it was all about the oil.
But so few of you listened.
*shrug*