The Tragedy Zone: True Tales from the White House [vol 2]

Posted on Thursday 1 June 2006

If there comes a day of reckoning, we must not forget Paul Wolfowitz – the chief author of the Bush Doctrine and the Invasion of Iraq. The story reads like an old Hollywood Extravaganza trailer – "10 years in the making!" From 1989 until 1993, he was Undersecretary of Defense for Policy reporting to Defense Secretary, Dick Cheney. After the Gulf War, he wrote the contraversial Defense Planning Guidance with his assistant Lewis Libby which proposed to change our foreign policy of "containment" to the more aggressive "preemption" and "unilateralism." Neither Colin Powell, Chief of Staff of the military, nor President George H. W. Bush accepted the plan, and Cheney rewrote it. When Bush was defeated, Wolfowitz became Dean of the School of International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. By 1997 he was a charter member of The Project for the New American Century with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfield. He drafted their 1998 letter to President Clinton reviving his Defense Planning Guidance, the letter reprinted several posts ago on this blog. That letter is the clear origin of the march to war with Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein.

Then, after the election of George W. Bush in 2000, he returned to government as Deputy Secretary of Defense under Donald Rumsfield. In that position, he attampted to revive his "doctrine" and push for a "regime change" in Iraq. At first, the wiser principles of "containment" prevailed, but that changed with the attack of the World Trade Towers.

"9/11 really was a wake up call and that if we take proper advantage of this opportunity to prevent the future terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction, that it will have been an extremely valuable wake up call.”

“If we say our only problem was to respond to 9/11, and we wait until somebody hits us with nuclear weapons before we take that kind of threat seriously, we will have made a very big mistake.”

Though this line of thinking was opposed by Secretary of State, Colin Powell, Rumsfield and Wolfowitz pressed ahead.

“For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.”

So they created the Office of Special Plans to go around the C.I.A. and find the proof that they needed to march to war.  Wolfowitz made a lot of mistakes, over and beyond the ideas in the Defense Guidance and the distorted or invented facts his group created that lead us into the war. He was the major source of the abysmal estimates – underfunding the Afghani and Iraqi reconstructions, understaffing the campaign, missing totally what would happen after the war. It’s hard to tell if he just didn’t care or if he didn’t know. Like the rest of the neoconservatives driven by their monocular ideology, Wolfowitz only saw what he wanted to see. Likewise, I don’t know if he ran from it all to the World Bank, or someone realized he was dangerous and they sent him away to the World Bank.

When and if we survive to write the history of this nightmare in the American story, I hope he gets ample credit for the damage he’s done. And I sure hope the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University where he spent the Clinton Years will teach a course on his mistakes – something like "Malignant Narcissism in Foreign Policy: The Legacy of Paul Wolfowitz."

  1.  
    Dawn C.
    June 1, 2006 | 9:33 AM
     

    ~off topic, but are you anywhere near “Doerun”? Faux ‘news’ reporting military helicopter down, in GA.

  2.  
    June 1, 2006 | 11:10 AM
     

    Don’t know Doerun personally. We’re straight north of Atlanta in Pickens County. Doerun is south, below Albany. It’s probably in flying range of Fort Benning in Columbus…

  3.  
    June 4, 2006 | 9:56 PM
     

    […] Recently, I wrote about Paul Wolfowitz and Michael Ledeen, two of the architects of the Iraq debacle. It’s incomplete without Laurie Mylroie, though her public prominance has faded. She was a darling of A.E.I. in the Clinton years. After her book with Judith Miller [Saddam Hussein & the Crisis in the Gulf] in 1990, she wrote Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America in 2000. It was further out in right field. She proposed that Hussein was behind the first bombing attempt on the World Trade Centers, the Oklahoma City bombing, and most of the other world ills. She was a favorite of Scooter Libby while they were at A.E.I. together, his former wife worked with Mylroie. But her tour de force was Bush Vs the Beltway: How the CIA & the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror in 2003. It’s important because it is a window into the attitude of the neoconservatives towards the C.I.A. They thought the C.I.A. was misdirecting the U.S. toward Al Qaeda and away from the real culprits, Iraq and Iran. As in the P.N.A.C. letter to Clinton in 1998, there was a strongly held belief that the C.I.A. was a "liberal" group, an enemy. Indeed, on September 13, 2001, just two days after the attack on 911, Mylroie published an oped piece in the Wall Street Journal called The Iraqi Connection: Did Osama bin Laden act alone? Not likely. This is the attitude that made it easy for the Administration to ignore the C.I.A.’s evaluation of the Niger Forgeries, the I.N.C., etc. Such assertions seem ludicrous now, but at the time, she had a powerful influence in the circle that included the whole gang from A.E.I. who had been imported into Bush’s Administration. […]

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