The Hudson Institute is one of the Neoconservative Think Tanks. They had a panel on [my favorite] Doug Feith’s book, War and Decision with Paul Wolfowitz as a discussant.
Wolfowitz Concedes He Was ‘Clueless,’
But Still Contends Shinseki Was Wrong On Postwar Troop LevelsWOLFOWITZ: “I think a sensible counterinsurgency strategy would not have been to flood the country with 300,000 Americans, but rather to build up Iraqi forces to be able to protect the population much more quickly.”Wolfowitz’s theory about a “sensible counterinsurgency strategy” ignores one key point: The U.S. did not have to “build up Iraqi forces” after the invasion because they were already there. Instead Iraq viceroy L. Paul Bremer III ordered Iraqi forces to be disbanded shortly after he took over governing Iraq. Placing blame on others for the war’s failures is typical of those responsible for starting it. By claiming that the lack of Iraqi – not American – forces is what failed to quell the insurgency after the invasion, Wolfowitz is just another in a long series of war architects that simply cannot accept their role in the “disaster” that is President Bush’s foreign policy.
As I become increasingly familiar with the history that lead up to the Iraq War, I find myself angrier and angrier at Paul Wolfowitz. He was the progenitor of the fixation on Iraq and Saddam Hussein. He was the author of George H.W. Bush’s aborted Defense Guidance [while working for Cheney]. He was the force that created the Office of Special Plans where he allowed Douglas Feith, a real loser, free reign. In this clip, he dodges responsibility for things that were disasterous decisions, decisions he personally made. He talks like the Iraq War just happened to him rather than it being his baby from conception through adulthood. The ThinkProgess comments above are right in spirit, but not at a high enough volume. This man had a very bad idea and made it much worse at each step along the way. We don’t need him to make concessions. We need something like a full fledged apology, or maybe a full fledged expose`? What bother me most about Wolfowitz is that I’ve never felt that he took the gravity of the policies he made into account. He seems almost ‘flip’ to me…
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