Wolfowitz, Through the Ages and Stages

Once upon a time...

“Speaking to journalists from Southeast Asia January 28, the Defense Department official drew upon the threat as a rationale for seeking to disarm the regime of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

”Wolfowitz noted that Iraqi state institutions participate in hiding and concealing Saddam Hussein's weapons. Saddam Hussein's son, Qusay, heads a large group of security and intelligence personnel that conceals Iraq's illegal weapons from the United Nations weapons inspectors, he said.

"The Defense Department official estimated that there are "some twenty Iraqi intelligence and security people hiding weapons for every single inspector there is in Iraq."

"The United States, he added, knows there are ties between Saddam Hussein's regime and "a whole range of terrorist groups, including al Qaeda."

"The United States also knows that "Saddam has these weapons," Wolfowitz said.

"The United States, he continued, is not prepared to wait until the Baghdad regime turns such weapons over to a terrorist group such as al Qaeda.

"Reprising the events that led up to the September 11 terror attacks on the United States in which 3,000 people were killed, Wolfowitz noted that by June of 2001, it was already "too late to do anything in Afghanistan."

(U.S.Embassy link)


Then, back in May of 2003...

“Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz cited bureaucratic reasons for focusing on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, and said a "huge" result of the war was to enable Washington to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia.

"The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason," Wolfowitz was quoted as saying in a Pentagon transcript of an interview with Vanity Fair.

"The magazine's reporter did not tape the telephone interview and provided a slightly different version of the quote in the article: "For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on."

(USA Today link)


And yesterday...

"Yesterday, the world’s most famous comb licker, spoke at the National Press Club. After his speech he was asked the following, "How do you account for the intelligence failures regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?"

"Well," he said after a long pause, "I don't have to."

(Washington Post link)