Who says honesty is always the best policy? Paul Wolfowitz may be the poster child for what happens when you open your mouth and willingly insert your foot.
In an interview in the next issue of Vanity Fair magazine, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz cited bureaucratic reasons for focusing on Saddam Hussein's alleged arsenal 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 the interview.
Vanity Fair provided a slightly different version 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."
In the interview, Wolfowitz cited one outcome of the war that was "almost unnoticed -- but it's huge": it removed the need to maintain American forces in Saudi Arabia as long as Saddam was in power. Vanity Fair interpreted Wolfowitz to say that the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia was a reason for the war.
Now European governments have their knickers in a twist because they're thinking they were misled, and you know what? They may just have a point. Gee, the Shrub Administration prevaricating about their true motives? I'm shocked...well, OK, not really. What I AM shocked about is that people are even surprised that Wolfowitz as much as admitted the deception. Surely you didn't think that Shrub and his minions were above deceit and dishonesty if it served their purpose??
