Neo-conservatives under fire (AP)

Neo-conservatives under fire (AP)

Submitted by Siriel Admin on 2003 May 31 - 10:15am

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Published Saturday, May 31, 2003

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) – European critics expressed shock Friday at a
senior U.S. official’s remarks playing down Iraq’s weapons as a
reason for waging the war.

In an interview with Vanity Fair magazine, Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz, the neo-conservative who campaigned perhaps longest
and hardest for a war in Iraq, said the public focus on Saddam
Hussein’s weaponry was partly a matter of political convenience (emphasis added).

“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 said, according to the Pentagon’s own transcript
of the interview.

“Almost unnoticed – but it’s huge,” he said, is one outcome of the
war: It enabled Washington to withdraw its troops from neighboring
Saudi Arabia.

Those troops were sent to Saudi Arabia to protect it from Saddam,
whose forces invaded Kuwait in 1990, yet their presence in the home
of Islam enraged Muslim fundamentalists worldwide, including Osama
bin Laden. As long as Saddam remained in power, Wolfowitz said, the
U.S. troops had to stay.

Within two weeks of Baghdad’s fall, the United States announced it
was removing most of its 5,000 troops from Saudi Arabia.

However, the troop-removal goal was not spelled out publicly as the
United States tried to build international support for the war.
Instead, the Bush administration focused on two arguments that spoke
loudly after the Sept. 11 attacks:

• Saddam’s alleged failure to demolish chemical, biological and
nuclear weapons programs, as he promised after the Persian Gulf War.

• Saddam’s suspected connections to al-Qaida.

The failure of U.S. forces so far to find forbidden weapons or proof
of al-Qaida links in postwar Iraq has raised doubts in a skeptical
Europe about whether Saddam was as threatening as the Bush
administration portrayed.

The Wolfowitz remarks revived the controversy over the war’s
justification just as President Bush left for a European tour in
which he hopes to mend fences.

In Denmark, which supported the war, opposition parties demanded to
know whether Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen misled the public.

Niels Helveg Petersen, formerly the country’s foreign minister, said
Wolfowitz’s talk “leaves the world with one question: What should we
believe?”

In Germany, where the war was widely unpopular, the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeiting newspaper said America was losing the battle for
credibility: “The charge of deception is inescapable.”

In London, former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who quit as leader of
the House of Commons to protest the war, said, “The war was sold on
the basis of what was described as a pre-emptive strike: ‘Hit Saddam
before he hits us.’ It is now quite clear that Saddam did not have
anything with which to hit us in the first place.”

Wolfowitz said Friday that the United States had three concerns about
Iraq before the war: weapons of mass destruction, terrorism and the
abuse of Iraqi citizens. “All three of those have been there, they’ve
always been part of the rationale, and I think it s been very clear,”
he said.—-

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