Wolfowitz: Architect of Disaster

I found some incredible quotes of our illustrious Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz in an excerpt from Richard Clarke book,Against All Enemies. If its all true, Wolfovitz qualifies as a man who could have single handedly left us vulnerable to bin Laden and saw 9/11 as an opportunity to further his long standing agenda to attack Iraq. But it would appear he had plenty of company. The amazing thing is that he still works at Defence. He is a government employee charged as a specialist who repeatedly demonstrated the only specialty he has is being wrong about Iraq.

Finally, Wolfowitz turned to me. "You give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don't exist." I could hardly believe it, but Wolfowitz was actually spouting the totally discredited Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue.

Informed Comment

Wolfowitz's first reaction to September 11 was to attack Iraq. If we had carried through on this plan, leaving Bin Laden ensconced in Afghanistan as we mired ourselves in an Iraqi quagmire, al-Qaeda would have been excellently placed to continue to hit us, both in the Middle East and in the homeland. Richard Clarke was outraged that Wolfowitz and his Neoconservative circle were willing so cynically to use the tragedy that had befallen the American people to accomplish their pre-existing goals in Iraq. Wolfowitz told the US Senate that Iraqis would greet the US troops as liberators and that the US would be back down to 20,000 troops or only a division by October of 2003.


When General Shinseki said that it would take several hundred thousand troops to pacify post-War Iraq, Wolfowitz the civilian bureaucrat openly ridiculed the career officer. Wolfowitz's dismissive reply is often quoted in part, but it is worthwhile looking at more extended passages to see how badly he miscalculated. Astonishingly, Wolfowitz did not know about the Shiite Badr Corps militia that operated between Iran and Iraq, run by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. He did not know about the Sadr movement militias, which Saddam had massacred during the 1999 uprising provoked by his assassination of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. He didn't realize that Baath-on-Shiite and Baath-on-Kurdish violence had a strong ethnic-cleansing dimension, since the Baath was dominated at the upper echelons by Sunni Arabs. He didn't realize that the Sunni Arabs, the managerial and officer class, would not go quietly if dethroned, but would mount a sustained guerrilla resistance. Wolfowitz mistakenly thought that Iraqi oil would pay for reconstruction, and did not foresee the substantial sabotage of the pipelines that has made that impossible. He also thought the oil would attract France to become involved in post-War Iraqi reconstruction. (This is the same man who insisted that France be "punished" for declining to support the war at the UN Security Council).

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"On the other side, we can't be sure that the Iraqi people will welcome us as liberators, although based on what Iraqi-Americans told me in Detroit a week ago, many of them -- most of them with families in Iraq -- I am reasonably certain that they will greet us as liberators, and that will help us to keep requirements down."

Complete Article
Excerpt: 'Against All Enemies'
March 30, 2004
Richard Clarke was appointed by President Bill Clinton as the first national coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism in May 1998, and continued in that position under George W. Bush.
Until March 2003, he was a career member of the Senior Executive Service, having begun his federal service in 1973 in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, as an analyst on nuclear weapons and European security issues.
In the Reagan administration, Clarke was deputy assistant secretary of state for Intelligence. In the first Bush administration, he was the assistant secretary of state for Politico-Military Affairs.
Read an excerpt from his book, “Against All Enemies,” published by Free Press, a subsidiary of Simon & Schuster. Both CBSNews.com and Simon & Schuster are units of Viacom. [Condoleezza] Rice viewed the NSC as a "foreign policy" coordination mechanism and not some place where issues such as terrorism in the U.S., or domestic preparedness for weapons of mass destruction, or computer network security should be addressed.
I realized that Rice, and her deputy, Steve Hadley, were still operating with the old Cold War paradigm from when they had worked on the NSC. Condi's previous government experience had been as an NSC staffer for three years worrying about the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Steve Hadley had also been an NSC staffer assigned to do arms control issues with the Soviet Union. He had then been an Assistant Secretary in the Pentagon, also concerned with Soviet arms control. It struck me that neither of them had worked on the new post-Cold War security issues.
I tried to explain: "This office is new, you're right. It's post-Cold War security, not focused just on nation-state threats. The boundaries between domestic and foreign have blurred. Threats to the U.S. now are not Soviet ballistic missiles carrying bombs, they're terrorists carrying bombs. Besides, the law that established the NSC in 1947 said it should concern itself with domestic security threats, too." I did not succeed entirely in making the case. Over the next several months, they suggested, I should figure out how to move some of these issues out to some other organization.
Rice decided that the position of National Coordinator for Counterterrorism would also be downgraded. No longer would the Coordinator be a member of the Principals Committee. No longer would the CSG report to the Principals, but instead to a committee of Deputy Secretaries. No longer would the National Coordinator be supported by two NSC Senior Directors or have the budget review mechanism with the Associate Director of OMB. She did, however, ask me to stay on and to keep my entire staff in place. Rice and Hadley did not seem to know anyone else whose expertise covered what they regarded as my strange portfolio. At the same time, Rice requested that I develop a reorganization plan to spin out some of the security functions to someplace outside the NSC Staff.
Within a week of the inauguration, I wrote to Rice and Hadley asking "urgently" for a Principals, or Cabinet-level, meeting to review the imminent Al Qaeda threat. Rice told me that the Principals Committee, which had been the first venue for terrorism policy discussions in the Clinton administration, would not address the issue until it had been "framed" by the Deputies. I assumed that meant an opportunity for the Deputies to review the agenda. Instead, it meant months of delay. The initial Deputies meeting to review terrorism policy could not be scheduled in February. Nor could it occur in March. Finally in April, the Deputies Committee met on terrorism for the first time. The first meeting, in the small wood-paneled Situation Room conference room, did not go well.
Rice's deputy, Steve Hadley, began the meeting by asking me to brief the group. I turned immediately to the pending decisions needed to deal with Al Qaeda. "We need to put pressure on both the Taliban and Al Qaeda by arming the Northern Alliance and other groups in Afghanistan. Simultaneously, we need to target bin Laden and his leadership by reinitiating flights of the Predator."
Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld's deputy at Defense, fidgeted and scowled. Hadley asked him if he was all right. "Well, I just don't understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden," Wolfowitz responded.
I answered as clearly and forcefully as I could: "We are talking about a network of terrorist organizations called Al Qaeda, that happens to be led by bin Laden, and we are talking about that network because it and it alone poses an immediate and serious threat to the United States."
"Well, there are others that do as well, as least as much. Iraqi terrorism, for example," Wolfowitz replied, looking not at me but at Hadley.
"I am unaware of any Iraqi-sponsored terrorism directed at the United States, Paul, since 1993, and I think FBI and CIA concur in that judgment, right, John?" I pointed at CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin, who was obviously not eager to get in the middle of a debate between the White House and the Pentagon but nonetheless replied, "Yes, that is right, Dick. We have no evidence of any active Iraqi terrorist threat against the U.S."
Finally, Wolfowitz turned to me. "You give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don't exist."
I could hardly believe it, but Wolfowitz was actually spouting the totally discredited Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue.
It was getting a little too heated for the kind of meeting Steve Hadley liked to chair, but I thought it was important to get the extent of the disagreement out on the table: "Al Qaeda plans major acts of terrorism against the U.S. It plans to overthrow Islamic governments and set up a radical multination Caliphate, and then go to war with non-Muslim states." ...
Hadley suggested a compromise. We would begin by focusing on Al Qaeda and then later look at other terrorism, including any Iraqi terrorism. Because dealing with Al Qaeda involved its Afghan sanctuary, however, Hadley suggested that we needed policy on Afghanistan in general and on the related issue of U.S.-Pakistani relations, including the return of democracy in that country and arms control with India. All of these issues were a "cluster" that had to be decided together. Hadley proposed that several more papers be written and several more meetings be scheduled over the next few months.
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