I Said What?!?
So Wolfowitz, one of the chief architects of the invasion of Iraq, now says he doesn’t believe Iraq had anything to do with the September 11, 2001 flying bomb attacks on New York and Washington. I think this is the start of a scorched earth policy before the next US Presidential election, with the Bush Gang floating a trial balloon. The last thing they want is months of ebbing and flowing calls to “Prove it!” concerning an Al Qaeda-Iraq link, so they’ve decided to see how a naked admission that this “link” was bogus will float. Wolfowitz is a useful straw man for this sort of thing — they used him a few months ago to put it about that the WMD “threat” was itself a bureaucratic smokescreen pretext for the Iraq invasion.
Earlier here.
Actually he didn’t say that at all. Read the transcript, or just the parts that Leopold qutoes more carefully.
He’s using the gateway argument… we must invade all the towelhead nations because otherwise *one day* they will rise up against us.
–
Q: Now did you think right away that Iraq could have been involved in this?
Wolfowitz: Right away the focus was on what do you need to do. And how do you start shutting down flights and we had several false alarms of flights coming in. There was really frankly I’d say for the first 24 hours too much to do to think about who was behind it.
Q: And when did you start to think that perhaps Iraq had something to do with it?
Wolfowitz: I’m not sure even now that I would say Iraq had something to do with it. I think what the realization to me is — the fundamental point was that terrorism had reached the scale completely different from what we had thought of it up until then. And that it would only get worse when these people got access to weapons of mass destruction which would be only a matter of time.
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030801-depsecdef0526.html
Mike,
I don’t disagree with you say in the comment, but that is different from saying Wolfowitz has said Iraq was not involved in the September 11, 2001 attacks. He said he isn’t “sure” they were involved and that the U.S. had to take over Iraq as part of the “war on terror” because there is a great enemy out there that needs to be defeated, which isn’t anything new from the Bush Administration.
I said “Wolfowitz, one of the chief architects of the invasion of Iraq, now says he doesn’t believe Iraq had anything to do with the September 11, 2001 flying bomb attacks”
You agree with me. What, exactly, are we disagreeiong with hewre?
i think the issue is that the Bush Gang presented a face of absolute certainty to the world that they knew was false and based on shaky evidence. By Wolf.’s admission, even the central figures didn’t even believe it.
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030509-depsecdef0223.html
Wolfowitz: Yeah. There was a long discussion during the day about what place if any Iraq should have in a counterterrorist strategy. On the surface of the debate it at least appeared to be about not whether but when. There seemed to be a kind of agreement that yes it should be, but the disagreement was whether it should be in the immediate response or whether you should concentrate simply on Afghanistan first.
There was a sort of undertow in that discussion I think that was, the real issue was whether Iraq should be part of the strategy at all and whether we should have this large strategic objective which is getting governments out of the business of supporting terrorism, or whether we should simply go after bin Laden and al Qaeda.