I put this in the comments to Melanie's entry about Wofowitz's comments, but I wanted to add it here, too. (It's also posted at my blog -
different strings as part of a larger post):
I wonder if this would be a good time to remind Wolfowitz about his statement earlier this year in an interview with Sam Tannenhaus from Vanity Fair, where he explains that, while the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people by Saddam Hussein was a serious concern, on its own, it doesn't justify a war of this nature. Here is the section from the DOD transcript of the interview as posted at the DoD News site. I've highlighted the most relevent comments.
Wolfowitz: [...] 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, but -- hold on one second --
(Pause)
Kellems: Sam there may be some value in clarity on the point that it may take years to get post-Saddam Iraq right. It can be easily misconstrued, especially when it comes to --
Wolfowitz: -- there have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people. Actually I guess you could say there's a fourth overriding one which is the connection between the first two. Sorry, hold on again.
Kellems: By the way, it's probably the longest uninterrupted phone conversation I've witnessed, so --
Q: This is extraordinary.
Kellems: You had good timing.
Q: I'm really grateful.
Wolfowitz: To wrap it up.
The third one by itself, as I think I said earlier, is a reason to help the Iraqis but it's not a reason to put American kids' lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it. That second issue about links to terrorism is the one about which there's the most disagreement within the bureaucracy, even though I think everyone agrees that we killed 100 or so of an al Qaeda group in northern Iraq in this recent go-around, that we've arrested that al Qaeda guy in Baghdad who was connected to this guy Zarqawi whom Powell spoke about in his UN presentation.
In other words, had it not been for the issue of weapons of mass destruction (which we still haven't found
any evidence of) and Saddam's links to terrorism (which even Wolfowitz acknowledges were the subject of strong disagreement), it wouldn't have been worth sacrificing our soldiers just to free the Iraqi people from Saddam's tyranny.
Does that mean he would be happier if Saddam were still in power?