Friday, July 23, 2004

Wolfowitz MUST BE FIRED

Of course I have felt this way for some time, but the fact is that Wolfowitz has been an unmitigated disaster -- along with the rest of the PNAC crowd, Feith, Carbone etc.

Yesterday the 9/11 Commission reinforced what had been said about Wolfowitz before, that he advocated going into Iraq RIGHT after the September 11, 2001 and put up the most bullshit laden of arguments. Here is the example:

A. Pages 334-336

(1) First meeting in Camp David shortly after 9/11:

[Rice] recalled thatin the first Camp David session chaired by the President, Rumsfeld asked what the administration should do about Iraq.Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz made the case for striking Iraq during "this round" of the war on terrorism.


(2) Powell on Wolfowitz in the short-term wake of 9/11:

Secretary Powell recalled that Wolfowitz--not Rumsfeld--argued that Iraq was ultimately the source of the terrorist problem and should therefore be attacked.66 Powell said that Wolfowitz was not able to justify his belief that Iraq was behind 9/11. "Paul was always of the view that Iraq was a problem that had to be dealt with," Powell told us."And he saw this as one way of using this event as a way to deal with the Iraq problem."


(3) He continues to behave like a stupid zealot (which he is of course)

Within the Pentagon, Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz continued to press the case for dealing with Iraq.Writing to Rumsfeld on September 17 in a memo headlined "Preventing More Events,"he argued that if there was even a 10 percent chance that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attack, maximum priority should be placed on eliminating that threat.Wolfowitz contended that the odds were "far more" than 1 in 10...The next day,Wolfowitz renewed the argument, writing to Rumsfeld about the interest of Yousef 's co-conspirator in the 1995 Manila air plot in crashing an explosives-laden plane into CIA headquarters, and about information from a foreign government regarding Iraqis' involvement in the attempted hijacking of a Gulf Air flight.


B. Page 256, thanks to Sadly, No!:

Tenet told us that in his world "the system was blinking red." By late July (2001,) Tenet said, it could not "get any worse." Not everyone was convinced. Some asked whether all these threats might just be deception. On June 30, the SEIB contained an article titled "Bin Ladin Threats Are Real." Yet Hadley told Tenet in July that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz questioned the reporting. Perhaps Bin Ladin was trying to study U.S. reactions. Tenet replied that he had already addressed the Defense Department's questions on this point; the reporting was convincing.


There are, of course, plenty of reasons to fire Wolfowitz based on his testimony supporting the Iraqi war in late 2002/early 2003, but rarely has such a woeful failure been allowed to keep his job. But then again, its also been some time since we had a President to match such a boob.

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