So here's the story with the disputed quotes from Sam Tanenhaus' article on Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in Vanity Fair. As noted here a couple days ago, the Tanenhaus article says that Wolfowitz is "confident" that Saddam played some role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and that he had "entertained" the notion that Saddam had played some role in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing as well. (Tanenhaus sources Wolfowitz's ideas about Oklahoma City to a "longtime friend" of the Deputy Secretary.)
In the portion of his article that discusses his interview, Tanenhaus quotes Wolfowitz on the 1993 bombing and then notes that Wolfowitz declined to comment on Saddam's possible involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing.
The only problem is that none of this exchange appears in the interview transcript the Pentagon later posted on its website.
So what's the score? Did Wolfowitz say this stuff or didn't he?
It turns out that the dispute centers not on what was said but on whether it was on the record.
Vanity Fair and Tanenhaus said that these statements were all on the record. Certain portions of the interview were off the record, they say, but this wasn't one of them.
Wolfowitz's office disagrees. As he did yesterday, Wolfowitz spokesman Jeff Davis told me that the "transcript is complete and accurate, minus introductory pleasantries and off-the-record comments."
Davis confirmed that the issue of the 1993 bombings was discussed during an off-the-record portion of the interview and that Wolfowitz declined to discuss the Oklahoma City bombing issue when Tanenhaus brought it up. In other words, there isn't much dispute about what was said, just whether the two were on-the-record.
Tanenhaus is a pro. So it seemed to me that there must have been some miscommunication or misunderstanding on one or both sides about when they were off and on the record. So I asked Davis precisely what had been said that made it clear they'd gone off the record. In the complete transcript, Davis told me, "it was clearly caveated that that particular discussion [of the 1993 and 1995 bombings] is off the record."
When I asked Davis if I could see a copy of the transcript and the caveats he mentioned, he declined, citing the wish to maintain the confidentiality of the Deputy Secretary's off-the-record comments. (I'd have preferred to see it myself; but Davis' point isn't unreasonable.)
Now, obviously I wasn't present for the interview and I haven't seen the unedited transcript. So make your own judgments. But that's my best effort to get to the bottom of this little mystery.
--Josh Marshall
Yesterday TPM reported that quotes from Sam Tanenhaus' interview with Paul Wolfowitz, which appeared in the Vanity Fair magazine article, don't appear in the transcript of the interview provided by the Pentagon. I'm still waiting to get the complete story from both sides. So I don't want to go into too many details quite yet. But, in the interests of not leaving the open question hanging out there, I can say that the discrepancy turns on a dispute between the two parties as to what was and what was not on the record. More on this soon.
--Josh Marshall
Coming later in June, the second TPM interview with Brookings Scholar Kenneth M. Pollack, author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.
--Josh Marshall
Was the Pentagon's transcript of Sam Tanenhaus' interview with Paul Wolfowitz scrubbed of embarrassing details?
--Josh Marshall
Is Doug Feith dusting off his resume? Or, more to the point, should Doug Feith be dusting 
off his resume? (Feith is UnderSecretary of Defense for Policy and generally considered one of the uberest of uber-hawks in the administration.)
In Washington, people seldom get fired because of manifest incompetence (God knows that's true.) Nor do folks usually get canned because of one mega screw-up. People hold their positions because of a latticework of ideological positions, interpersonal connections, reliability, their usefulness for various tasks and constituencies. When enough of those are pulled away, a person's position can grow precarious.
Feith gave an interview to the Los Angeles Times a few days ago in which he got seriously out in front of stated administration policy on possible US troop redeployments in Asia. Not that what he was saying was wrong necessarily, just not ready for public consumption.
Let's hear what Chris Nelson had to say about this in the Nelson Report a couple days ago ...
Summary: on the big Asia troop redeployment stories last week, it's now clear that Undersec. DOD Feith spoke without clearance on where to put the Okinawa Marines, and, at most, Australia looks like a future training site. General thrust of his L.A. Times interview more right than wrong. But net effect may be, finally, to show Rumsfeld why Feith is too loose a cannon to keep around....
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, interviewed in Singapore over the weekend, "clarified" the rather stunning remarks of Undersecretary for Planning Doug Feith, barely stopping short of calling Feith an idiot for his L.A. Times interview claiming that U.S. Marines now on Okinawa would likely be moved to Australia.
-- but, while Wolfowitz ridiculed Feith's "Australia" statement as a "salacious detail" from "some eighth level in the bureaucracy", he did confirm what we also reported, on Wednesday, and again Thursday, that "the story in the broad concept was generally pretty accurate."
...
-- but both formal, and informal, responses to Feith's L.A. Times interview from State Department, White House and even DOD sources, on Friday, made clear that professional Asia policy handlers viewed with great displeasure what one DOD source frankly called "Feith's obvious ignorance of the political ramifications of all this", especially for Okinawa and Australia.
Another source noted that Feith's tendency to try to work directly with Secretary Rumsfeld, at the expense of consultation with colleagues, and his habit of aggressive confrontation with perceived "opponents" within the Administration, nearly led to his being fired once before.
-- it was an open question, Friday, whether this latest episode, which went far beyond "inside baseball" to present serious international political concerns, will be the last straw for Feith, but Wolfowitz's dismissive language should be noted.
So loose cannon-hood is one issue.
Then there's the question of the 
"Road Map." People sometimes tend to lump together all the neocons and hardliners in the administration on all the issues in the Middle East. That's not accurate. Paul Wolfowitz, for instance, may be seen as the godfather of the administration neocons. But he is also quite serious, I think, about a negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Perhaps it wouldn't be one that doves have in mind, but one which would require what Israeli leaders often call 'painful compromises' -- certainly the creation of a Palestinian state, some retrenchment of settlements from the West Bank, and possibly even some compromises on Jerusalem.
Feith is a different sort of character. I think he can fairly be called a hardcore, Greater Israel, rejectionist -- someone who thinks the whole peace process, even a leaner, meaner one, is a mistake.
Up until now that fissure didn't matter quite so much. But in the present circumstances that puts him seriously off-message.
Finally, there's WMD and the intelligence failure issue.
If there's blame to go around in this administration it should cover a lot of very high-level people. But one of the key issues is the special intelligence shop that was set up over at the Pentagon because they didn't like the intell they were getting from CIA about Iraq. A lot of the intell they started working with came from Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi's 'intelligence network' inside Iraq. And a lot of that info now seems to have been pretty bogus.
That special intelligence shop, The Office of Special Plans, came under the oversight of Doug Feith. (Today he gave what The New York Times calls "rare briefing today to rebut accusations that senior civilian policy makers had politicized intelligence to fit their hawkish views on Iraq and to justify war on Saddam Hussein.")
Don't get me wrong. I don't expect Feith to be going anywhere anytime soon. I'm not even saying he'll be going anywhere at all. Canning him would be greeted with great hostility by many of Bush's most ardently pro-Israel supporters -- not so much Jews, as evangelical Christians. But that latticework that keeps people in office looks like it's fraying a bit for him. And if the WMD intell question gains too much political traction, too much heat, I'm not sure there'd be anyone quite so well-placed to take the fall.
--Josh Marshall
Okay, from the sublime to the ridiculous. As I reported earlier this afternoon, the Pentagon's transcript of the Vanity Fair interview between Sam Tanenhaus and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz seems to have left out at least one key exchange.
That's the sublime.
Now to the ridiculous.
Rush Limbaugh has a blurb up on his website that says you can debunk Hillary's new book with passages from Sid Blumenthal's new book -- a sort of inverted harmonic convergence of Clinton-hating, you might say.
Limbaugh writes that Hillary's claims to be the last one to know are bogus, as are her claims to any estrangement after Bill's confession. Everything was staged ...
Sydney Blumenthal's book blows Hillary's out of the water. He writes that Bill called him after his Lewinsky grand jury testimony to see what he thought of it. Next, Hillary picked up the phone followed by James Carville.Sydney heard Hillary and Bill talking in the background, and rejoiced that they were "still working together." They managed the entire scene at that time, pretending to be estranged. How many times did we see this Pulitzer Prize-winning photo (below) of the first family and dog departing for the Vineyard the day after Bill testified, with Chelsea between them and Hillary off to the side?
Yet Blumenthal says that Mrs. Clinton was in on the strategy, not giving her husband "the silent treatment" as we were told. This disagrees with Mrs. Clinton saying in her book that Buddy the dog came along to keep Bill company, since he's the only one who would. I have to feel sorry for the Democratic presidential nominees today, because this book is the only story out there!
As you might expect, this is rather misleading spin. He even gets the quotes wrong. Blumenthal explicitly says he never talked to Hillary about her emotions or feelings or what was happening between her and her husband. This is his description (p. 461) of his first contact with Hillary after the president's admission ...
I called Hillary. We dispensed with the extraordinarily difficult personal problem at the start. As her friend, I wanted to respect her privacy. I said that whatever "issues" anyone had, and hers was worse than anyone's, we had to think about the politics. That was her reasoning as well. She said that the President would be "embarrassed," but that was for him to deal with. And that was all she said about it.
What follows this passage is an uncomfortable description not only of Hillary's feelings of personal betrayal but of her humiliation and chagrin at having defended her husband against charges she now understood to be true. Four pages later Blumenthal describes talking by telephone to Clinton, then Hillary, then Carville and Mark Penn after the president's speech to the country. While talking to Penn he says ...
I could hear the President and Hillary bantering in the background. Whatever they would have to do between themselves to get over this episode, in the challenge to their marriage and the presidency they were still working as a team. Without that, nothing was possible.
Now that I think about it, would anyone really trust Rush Limbaugh on something like this? Doesn't one go to Rush for Vince Voster and the Temple of Doom sorta things? In any case, next back to why passages seem to have been scrubbed from the Pentagon's Tanenhaus-Wolfowitz transcript.
--Josh Marshall
Remember that transcript the Pentagon posted of the interview Sam Tanenhaus did with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz for Vanity Fair magazine? Just how complete and accurate 
is it? As I discussed in my article this morning in The Hill, what I found most surprising was a passage in which Tanenhaus discusses the portion of the interview in which he and Wolfowitz discussed the possibility that Saddam may have played a role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. According to Tanenhaus' article, Wolfowitz is "confident" Saddam played some role in the 1993 incident and has "entertained" the theory that he played a role in the Oklahoma City bombing as well. In the interview, according to Tanenhaus, Wolfowitz declined comment on the 1995 bombing.
These are theories that are, to put it mildly, not widely credited. And it raises some serious questions about just what sorts of theories gained credence at the DOD.
I wanted to see the actual interchange so I called up the transcript of the interview on the Pentagon website. And that passage is nowhere to be found.
So I called the Pentagon to see if the transcript was a complete transcript or only a partial one. A Wolfowitz spokesman, 
Jeff Davis, told me that, though he wasn't present during the interview, to the best of his knowledge it was a complete transcript -- save, possibly, for any pleasantries at the beginning of the conversation, or any parts that may have been off the record.
So what happened to the parts of the interview where the 1993 and 1995 bombings were discussed? Davis speculated that those quotes from Wolfowitz might not have been from the interview at all, but rather from published accounts of other previous statements Wolfowitz may have made, or other transcripts from the Pentagon website that Tanenhaus may have gotten his hands on.
So then I called Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair's Beth Kseniak told me categorically that Tanenhaus' and Wolfowitz's discussion of the 1993 and 1995 bombings definitely took place during their interview.
If that's true, why isn't it anywhere in the Pentagon's transcript?
--Josh Marshall
Very Friedmanesque, but also very good column by Tom Friedman in Wednesday's Times; also a good column by Maureen Dowd -- each on figuring out why we fought the war we just fought.
--Josh Marshall
Tragic. Just tragic. Back on that awful day last February 1st when the shuttle Columbia ripped and burned apart over Texas, I never really believed that some sort of rescue or repair mission wasn't possible -- either an attempt at a repair of some sort, or sending one of the other shuttles up to save the crew. Couldn't they rush another shuttle up to rescue them? Couldn't they do a spacewalk and fix the damage? The conceit of the NASA brass was that there was simply nothing that could have been done -- a claim that took a lot of sting out of the fact that so little was in fact done to find out what damage the ship had sustained.
That never sounded right to me. And now it turns out that I and, I'm sure, many, many others who were similarly unconvinced were right.
You probably remember in the movie Apollo 13 when a crack NASA team of white-buttoned-down-shirted gizmocrats ingeniously brainstormed a way to use all the available materials on the crippled spacecraft to get the three astronauts home safely. Recently, as part of the investigation, NASA set a similar team to work on devising possible rescue or repair plans -- as though they had known in time that something was wrong.
You almost wish they hadn't, but the team came up with two very credible -- though certainly not foolproof -- plans to rescue the seven astronauts. In both scenarios the ship, Columbia, was doomed. But not necessarily the crew. One plan was to quickly get the shuttle Atlantis into space for a rescue. It turns out this would have been possible. The question was how quickly they could get it to launch. And that would have been a close call. If they couldn't have managed that in time there was a repair that might have worked. A space walk to the underside of the shuttle, it turns out, would have been feasible. The plan would have been to hope the repair held on through the most violent part of reentry and then have the astronauts parachute out at about 35,000 feet.
None of these ideas were sure-fire, of course. But they would have had a fighting chance. And as the author of the MSNBC exclusive says, under the pressure of actually having lives to save, they might have come up with even more ingenious solutions.
Read it and, literally, weep.
--Josh Marshall
The Glenn Hubbard story, the struggles of a hard-working economist struggling to maintain tax progressivity while cutting or abolishing every tax paid by high-income earners ... From the Post ...
"It's hard to get a lot of progressivity at the very top," said R. Glenn Hubbard, the architect of Bush's most recent tax cut proposal and a former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. By slashing taxes on dividends, capital gains and inheritances, the cuts ensure that tax burdens will no longer rise consistently with income, as they would with a perfectly "progressive" system. "But," Hubbard added, "we've very much retained progressivity overall because so much money was dumped into the bottom rates."
Hard. So hard...
--Josh Marshall
This graph would seem to tell the tale. It's from the new Pew poll on global 
attitudes toward the United States. I was a little confused at first about the timing of the poll. It's being reported and sent around today as though it's a new release. Indeed, the International Herald Tribune says it was conducted in May. Yet the Pew site says it was released on March 18th and that the polls were conducted in the week previous to that. So I'm not quite sure what to believe. It's not an insignificant difference -- considering that that week was the one immediately prior to the beginning of the war when anti-US sentiment was presumably at its apogee.
In either case, the results are sobering. Folks tend to get their backs up when they hear about foreign disapproval. They say that what people overseas think or don't think doesn't tell us what's right or wrong. And they're correct, of course, as far as it goes. Amongst countries as amongst individuals, you must make your decisions based on what you think is right, not what everyone else says -- though unanimous disapproval should usually provoke at least some serious reflection.
The more relevant point, however, is that foreign disapproval on such a scale is a fact that must be taken into account quite apart from rights or wrongs. It is a form of collateral damage produced by the conflict -- no different from combat fatalities, expended materiel, and so forth -- part of the price we've paid for the decision to go to war.
One other point: the essence of the Atlantic Alliance -- both its values and its strength -- is that it is an alliance of democracies. That's why NATO won the Cold War. Despite some significant ebbs and flows of public opinion, the great majority of the people of Western Europe supported the alliance throughout the Cold War. Given these facts, America's standing among the people of Europe -- as opposed to the governments of Europe -- is no secondary matter. It is fundamental to the preservation of the alliance. And it is deeply frayed.
LATE UPDATE 2:01 PM: My bad -- there are two polls, one from March 18th, another embargoed till 2 PM this afternoon and to be announced at a press conference in downtown DC. The numbers in the new poll show a bounce back up in the European and other allied countries, but not nearly to the levels they were at a couple years ago, or even one year ago. And in some key countries like Turkey there is virtually no bounce back at all.
--Josh Marshall
"Former Army secretary Thomas White said in an interview that senior Defense officials 'are unwilling to come to grips' with the scale of the postwar U.S. obligation in Iraq." That's from an interview with former Army Secretary Tom White, which appears today in USA Today. Rumsfeld had wanted to fire White for months, but his unwillingness to toe the line on Iraq and troop strength issues was certainly a trigger for his defenestration last month.
--Josh Marshall
Hmmm. When I talked to Texas state rep Lon Burnam he told me he had "multiple sources" at the Texas Department of Public Safety who told him about illicit document shredding. When he was deposed yesterday he said his only source was Roberta Bilsky, a staffer for Kevin Bailey, the Democrat running the investigation in the state House. How do you explain the conflict? Good question. On an equally troubling note, the State Attorney General's Office now wants to depose Bailey. In other words, Bailey is investigating the AG's office among others to find out their role in the manhunt. And now the AG's office wants to put Bailey and his folks under oath. The saga continues.
--Josh Marshall
Just read Sam Tanenhaus's article on the neocons in Vanity Fair, the one which generated all the controversy about the quotes from Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. The piece is quite good, definitely pick up a copy. The best line from the piece: "The neocons are not usurpers. They are the new establishment ..."
To call it an article about the neocons is partly a misnomer. It's really about Wolfowitz, with biographical profiles of Perle and Kristol woven in to give a context to his place within the larger movement. The piece is quite good, I think, on Wolfowitz, capturing him in far more than wooden or two dimensional terms. It's not a portrait that will be entirely congenial to either his critics or his allies, though in many respects I think he comes off quite well.
Tanenhaus captures the aspects of the guy that make me just as much an admirer of the guy as I am, in many respects, a critic. The quotes that have generated all the commotion come at the very end of the piece. And really the whole issue of WMD only comes up in any serious way at the tail end of the piece.
In fact, for all the buzz surrounding the WMD quotes, the real stunner comes in the very next paragraph. It's there where Tanenhaus says Wolfowitz is "confident" that Saddam was "connected" to the original World Trade Center attack in 1993 and that he has "entertained the theory" that Saddam was involved in the Oklahoma City bombings in 1995.
These are both ideas advanced by Laurie Mylroie, a researcher at AEI, whose theories on Saddam (many of which are contained in The War Against America: Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks: A Study of Revenge) are often ridiculed even by some of the neoist of neocons.
--Josh Marshall
So it turns out there was more than one call to the Department of Homeland Security. Imagine that ...
--Josh Marshall
A couple months ago, I wrote briefly about an issue I was re-researching and rewriting in the final draft of my dissertation: a group of New England Indians who had been deported to Morocco in the 1670s and were still living there (and trying to get home) in the 1680s. I had a surprisingly large number of people write in and ask for more information on the question, what happened to them, and so forth. So here is the brief section of the dissertation (8 pages) which covers this question.
--Josh Marshall
Do yourself a favor and read this important new article by John Judis in The New Republic:
'History Lesson: What Woodrow Wilson Can Teach Today's Imperialists'. (It's a tribute to TNR that they give Judis a forum to argue so persuasively against the editorial line they've been pursuing for more than a year.) One isn't supposed to say such things publicly. But Judis is one of the few -- probably the only political writer, actually -- whose opinions and analyses I presumptively assume to be correct. Perhaps a better way to put it is that when I write X and he writes Y, the ground never feels wholly solid beneath my feet. This new article looks at the Iraq venture through the prism of the earlier, aborted heyday of American imperialism. We've never needed Cold War liberalism as much as we need it today -- to save us from the right and the left.
--Josh Marshall
Hmmm. This may be a bad news day for Texas Governor Rick Perry (R). One of the stunts that initially started to raise red flags about the manhunt for the Texas Democrats was the decision to send state troopers to the neonatal intensive care unit where Rep. Craig Eiland's two premature newborns were being treated.
Apparently, the order to go hunt Eiland down at the hospital came directly from Governor Perry.
Last week, Rep. Kevin Bailey, D-Houston, chairman of the House General Investigating Committee, was investigating various questions surrounding the manhunt. He interviewed Lt. Will Crais, the state trooper who also made the call to Homeland Security.
This from Monday's Houston Chronicle ...
Bailey said Crais told him, in an interview last week, that Perry had a letter that Eiland had previously written to Craddick, informing him that attention to his hospitalized infants could cause him to miss some House sessions."Perry gave him (Crais) the letter and said, `This is the hospital, send the Texas Rangers there and see if Eiland's there,' " Bailey said.
"Crais told me that directly," the lawmaker added
The Governor's spokeswoman Kathy Walt denies the charge.
--Josh Marshall
Here's a good piece in Newsweek on the intell backdrop to the failure thus far to find any WMD. To me, the authors still pull their punches with regards to the administration and the issue of conscious manipulation or willful credulousness.
A couple quotes bear repeating ...
A recently retired State Department intelligence analyst directly involved in assessing the Iraqi threat, Greg Thielmann, flatly told NEWSWEEK that inside the government, “there is a lot of sorrow and anger at the way intelligence was misused. You get a strong impression that the administration didn’t think the public would be enthusiastic about the idea of war if you attached all those qualifiers.”
And even more this one ...
The case that Saddam possessed WMD was based, in large part, on assumptions, not hard evidence. If Saddam did not possess a forbidden arsenal, the reasoning went, why, then, would he put his country through the agony of becoming an international pariah and ultimately risk his regime? Was he just bluffing in some fundamentally stupid way? Earlier U.N. weapons inspectors projected that Saddam kept stores of anthrax and VX, but they had no proof. In recent years, the CIA detected some signs of Saddam’s moving money around, building additions to suspected WMD sites, and buying chemicals and equipment abroad that could be used to make chem-bio weapons. But the spooks lacked any reliable spies, or HUMINT (human intelligence), inside Iraq.Then came the defectors. Former Iraqi officials fleeing the regime told of underground bunkers and labs hiding vast stores of chemical and biological weapons and nuclear materials. The CIA, at first, was skeptical. Defectors in search of safe haven sometimes stretch or invent the facts. The true believers in the Bush administration, on the other hand, embraced the defectors and credited their stories. Many of the defectors were sent to the Americans by Ahmed Chalabi, the politically ambitious and controversial Iraqi exile. Chalabi’s chief patron is Richard Perle, the former Reagan Defense Department official and charter member of the so-called neocons, the hard-liners who occupy many top jobs in the Bush national-security establishment.
The CIA was especially wary of Chalabi, whom they regarded as a con man (Chalabi has been convicted of bank fraud in Jordan; he denies the charges). But rather than accept the CIA’s doubts, top officials in the Bush Defense Department set up their own team of intelligence analysts, a small but powerful shop now called the Office of Special Plans—and, half-jokingly, by its members, “the Cabal.”
The Cabal was eager to find a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda, especially proof that Saddam played a role in the 9-11 attacks. The hard-liners at Defense seized on a report that Muhammad Atta, the chief hijacker, met in Prague in early April 2001 with an Iraqi intelligence official. Only one problem with that story, the FBI pointed out. Atta was traveling at the time between Florida and Virginia Beach, Va. (The bureau had his rental car and hotel receipts.)
Two points. The issue raised in the first graf of the second passage is a damn good one -- one that opponents of the war or critics of the administration need to grapple with. It's not an excuse in itself or a justification for the war. But if Saddam didn't have any WMD or only a minimal capacity why did he risk and ultimately lose his regime by stonewalling inspections? I can imagine a few possible answers. But it's a tough question.
Point two is Chalabi. And this goes to the heart of why a lot of people don't trust him. If you criticized Chalabi over the last year or so, you were immediately accosted -- verbally if not literally -- by a gaggle of conservatives joustingly asking why you were against democracy in Iraq. You don't think Arabs are capable of democracy!?!?!? You want another strongman to replace Saddam? What is it about democracy you don't like?!?!?? And so on and so forth.
It's true that there was and is a part of the foreign policy establishment that isn't crazy about the idea of pushing for straight-up democracy in the Middle East in the here and now. But most of the criticism of Chalabi was not about democracy but about Ahmed Chalabi -- and the belief that he was an untrustworthy schemer. That's a very big part of the reason why folks at the CIA -- and not just at the CIA, but all through the government -- didn't trust him. There's a long history of his gaming the Washington policy process through the 1990s, a story that's never really been told.
Even friends of mine in the Pentagon/neo-con orbit concede that it's now clear that a lot of the info that came out of Chalabi's 'intelligence network' must have been a bill of goods.
One other point bears mentioning in this 'where is the WMD' debate. It is true that it was widely accepted across the intelligence community -- and not just the US intelligence community -- that Saddam continued to maintain some WMD capacity. I was confident that he'd maintained a WMD capacity. But all WMD are not created equal. To a great degree, the entire category is misleading. A number of writers made this point over the last year. But the distinction becomes particularly relevant now.
Chemical weapons are just not a strategic threat to the United States. Chemical weapons are very hard to use effectively and they're most useful when you have dense and uncontested air superiority over a piece of land -- like what happened to the Kurds in northern Iraq. There's just no chance of that happening in the US.
Even if Saddam had given chemicals to terrorists, even that wouldn't have been that big a deal. Yes, chemical weapons are no walk in the park if you're in a crowded subway station in New York city. But then, a dozen AK-47s or some plastic explosives wouldn't be much fun either.
Biological weapons are potentially a much bigger deal. But the real issue, the real weapon of mass destruction is a nuclear weapon.
When evaluating who thought Saddam had WMD and who didn't, it's critically important to make these distinctions since it is across this spectrum of different kinds of WMD that the real distortions took place.
--Josh Marshall
A couple months back, I got a little irked that critics of my article 'Practice to Deceive' kept trying to tar the argument I made as a 'conspiracy theory' even though the article alleged no such thing.
To say that people have been dishonest isn't the same as saying they've engaged in a 'conspiracy'. It just means they haven't told the truth. Or, at least that they've been, shall we say, too parsimonious with it. But, of course, a charge of dishonesty has to be refuted on the merits while labeling an argument a 'conspiracy theory' allows you to dismiss it out of hand.
And if you'll have a difficult time refuting the claim on the merits that gives an added incentive to play the 'conspiracy' card.
Now, back then, I could scarcely reveal my irkitude to you, the vaunted TPM reading public. But in truth the irkification was there -- vouchsafed away in my heart and revealed only in hidden gritted teeth, but there nonetheless. And then one cloudy, wet, dreary day I was walking down the street in my neighborhood. And it suddenly occurred to me: most of the characters calling me a conspiracy theorist spent a big chunk of the last decade pushing the claim that Vince Foster had been whacked in a safehouse in Northern Virginia and then dumped off at Fort Marcy Park to make it look like a suicide. And then, well ... suddenly the sun started shining a bit brighter and the blue sky sloughed off its clouds. And somehow all seemed well with the world. Or at least with my neighborhood -- I don't want to project.
Admittedly, not all of them thought Hillary herself had done the deed with Walther PPK and a silencer, and wearing one of those khaki tunics Blofeld wore in You Only Live Twice. But I think you get the idea.
All of which is, I suppose, to say that this public writerly scuffling over regime change and related matters can be a rather rough business.
There's a new rush of articles claiming that the term "neoconservative" is actually no more than an anti-Jewish slur or codeword and that its use is at a minimum analytically meaningless, almost certainly ill-advised, and quite possibly a form of cloaked anti-Semitism. This of course ignores the fact that the term is itself a coinage of neoconservatives and has been in common usage by them and their opponents for almost three decades.
When the gentiles start charging Jews with uttering anti-Semitic slurs you know there's something funny in the water.
In any case, the latest brouhaha is over Sam Tanenhaus's upcoming article in Vanity Fair, Paul Wolfowitz's statement about WMD contained therein, and now whether Wolfowitz actually said what Tanenhaus claims he said. Over the weekend Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol wrote a short piece in the Standard purporting to show that Tanenhaus had in fact distorted Wolfowitz's words, taken them out of their proper context or simply twisted their meaning.
Now, the problem with verbal interviews is that, unlike the case in written English, people tend to speak in fragments and not always in a purely linear fashion. And that often makes quotations ambiguous and open to different interpretations.
Having said all that, I think that Kristol's review of Tanenhaus' material is at least not the final word.
Let's begin with the paragraph from Tenanhaus' piece that raised the whole ruckus in the first place ...
When we spoke in May, as U.S. inspectors were failing to find weapons of mass destruction, Wolfowitz admitted that from the outset, contrary to so many claims from the White House, Iraq's supposed cache of WMD had never been the most important casus belli. It was simply one of several reasons: "For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on." Everyone meaning, presumably, Powell and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Almost unnoticed but huge," he said, is another reason: removing Saddam will allow the U.S. to take its troops out of Saudi Arabia, where their presence has been one of al-Qaeda's biggest grievances.
Kristol has two beefs with Tenanhaus here -- one on the 'bureaucratic reasons' point, and another on the Saudi Arabia point. For now I'm going to focus on the second beef. Here's Kristol ...
As for Tanenhaus's suggestion that Wolfowitz somehow fessed up that the war had a hidden, "unnoticed but huge" agenda--rationalizing a pre-planned troop withdrawal from Saudi Arabia--we refer you, again, to the actual interview. In an earlier section of the conversation, concerning the current, postwar situation in the Middle East, Wolfowitz explained that the United States needs to get post-Saddam Iraq "right," and that we also need "to get some progress on the Israeli-Palestinian issue," which now looks more promising. Then Wolfowitz said this:There are a lot of things that are different now, and one that has gone by almost unnoticed--but it's huge--is that by complete mutual agreement between the U.S. and the Saudi government we can now remove almost all of our forces from Saudi Arabia. Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government. . . . I think just lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to open the door to other positive things.
Tanenhaus has taken a straightforward and conventional observation about strategic arrangements in a post-Saddam Middle East and juiced it up into a vaguely sinister "admission" about America's motives for going to war in the first place.
(Note: the transcript is one prepared by the Pentagon and online at the Pentagon's website.)
Now, if I understand Kristol, he's saying that Tanenhaus took a Wolfowitz observation about what's happening in post-war Iraq and twisted it into a statement about one of the reasons we went into Iraq in the first place. In truth, Wolfowitz's statement only talks about benefits after the fact, not explicitly at least about reasons for going into Iraq. You wish Tenanhaus had been a good reporter and followed up to clarify this point -- i.e., whether this was just a fringe benefit or whether it was one of the reasons for invading Iraq in the first place.
Well, look how Tanenhaus did follow up -- the part of the transcript which comes immediately after the portion Kristol quoted, but which Kristol didn't include.
Tenanhaus: Was that one of the arguments that was raised early on by you and others that Iraq actually does connect, not to connect the dots too much, but the relationship between Saudi Arabia, our troops being there, and bin Laden's rage about that, which he's built on so many years, also connects the World Trade Center attacks, that there's a logic of motive or something like that? Or does that read too much into --Wolfowitz: No, I think it happens to be correct. 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 --
From this point, the conversation gets interrupted a few times by a phone call, and Wolfowitz goes into his point about bureaucratic reasons. But the first chance Tanenhaus gets to speak again he returns to the same point.
Tanenhaus: So this notion then that the strategic question was really a part of the equation, that you were looking at Saudi Arabia --Wolfowitz: I was. It's one of the reasons why I took a very different view of what the argument that removing Saddam Hussein would destabilize the Middle East. I said on the record, I don't understand how people can really believe that removing this huge source of instability is going to be a cause of instability in the Middle East.
I know this referring back and forth to the transcript is a touch tedious. But looking at the interplay of the conversation it seems pretty clear to me at least that, contrary to Kristol's argument, Wolfowitz made a somewhat ambiguous statement. Tenanhaus followed up in order to clarify what he meant. And Wolfowitz goes on to say exactly what Tanenhaus said he said: that the need to get US troops out of Saudi (and eliminate the goad to terrorism and instability they created) was an important reason for the invasion.
On this point at least, Kristol seems on pretty shaky ground saying that he distorted Wolfowitz's meaning. I think Tenanhaus' point about 'bureaucratic reasons' holds up pretty well too. But I'll leave that for another post.
Now, as it happens, I think Wolfowitz was right about this -- both right in the sense that this was one of his big reasons, but also right in the sense that this was one of the strongest reasons for taking military action against Saddam. In fact, this was one of the key reasons that originally persuaded me of the need to settle our dispute with Saddam. The premise of most mainstream foreign policy types was that we had Saddam 'in a box' and that we could contain him there indefinitely. But, as I said in my original article on Iraq, I became persuaded that we were in that box with Saddam and that being there was, perversely, hurting us a lot more than it was hurting him. As I wrote then, as early as "1996 and 1997, [the in-the-box argument] was no longer clearly true. Saddam's regime was thriving under sanctions, even as his people suffered under them (a condition he could have alleviated, but didn't). As their condition deteriorated, so too did the U.N. Security Council's support for maintaining the U.S.-backed sanctions. We were in the box now just as much as Saddam was. And time was on his side, not ours."
The measures we had to take to keep Saddam in his box were leading to blowback like al Qaida's attacks on the United States.
--Josh Marshall
My God, when they say down the memory hole, they ain't kiddin! There now seems to be a secret competition -- perhaps it was announced and I just didn't hear it -- for the Iraq-hawk who can come up with the most ingenious, Orwellian, up-is-down rewriting of the history of the year-long lead-up to the Iraq war. To this point, the strongest entries are those whispers out of the Pentagon, arguing that it was Colin Powell and the State Department who made them make such a big to-do about weapons of mass destruction.
I take my hat off to those folks. That was a pretty solid entry. But when it comes to disingenuous agitprop you just never want to count Bill Safire out. And the old master comes in with a rock-solid entry in Monday morning's column.
Safire begins by asking what the greatest intelligence failure of the war was? Something to do with WMD? Not at all. "It was the nearly unanimous opinion of the intelligence community, backed by the U.S. and British military, that the 50,000 elite soldiers of Saddam's well-trained, well-equipped Special Republican Guard would put up a fierce battle for Baghdad."
This is true to a limited extent -- though the guys in uniform -- i.e., the ones who actually fight wars -- would argue that their aim was to make sure they weren't undergunned if the Republican Guard did fight to the death.
But the contest entry comes next ...
Happily, our best assessment was mistaken. Saddam's supposed diehards cut and ran. Though Baghdad's power and water were cut off, civilians were spared and our losses were even fewer than in Gulf War I.What if our planners had believed Kurdish leaders who predicted that Saddam's super-loyalists would quickly collapse? We would have sent fewer combat troops and more engineers, civilian administrators and military police. But the C.I.A. and the Pentagon had no way of being certain that the information about the Republican Guard's poor morale and weak discipline provided by Kurds and Iraqi opposition leaders was accurate.
In other words, the lack of preparation for post-war reconstruction and the shortage of nation-builders is the fault of the CIA and the Joint Staff! If Tommy Franks and Eric Shinseki and the rest of them hadn't been such whiners, Doug Feith would have been able to flood the place with MPs, bridge builders, Arabic-speakers and a whole tribe of Jerry Bremer clones! Who knew!
I think Safire is going to run away with this one.
--Josh Marshall
