Wolfowitz on Iraq: “Murky intelligence” suffices for pre-emptive wars

Wolfowitz on Iraq: “Murky intelligence” suffices for pre-emptive wars
By Patrick Martin
1 August 2003

US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has just returned from his first inspection trip to occupied Iraq, in the course of which he memorably declared, while standing in Baghdad behind a phalanx of American troops, “I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq.”

He was, of course, referring not to the United States, but to Iraq’s neighbors, Syria, Turkey and Iran, as well as Russia, Germany, France and other potential threats to US domination of the oil-rich nation.

In a series of television interviews Sunday, July 27, Wolfowitz presented a picture of conditions in Iraq that was so distorted as to be unrecognizable. He told his interviewer on Fox News, Brit Hume, “What the Iraqi people are feeling is, number one, an almost unanimous—well, not quite unanimous—sense of gratitude for helping to liberate them,” as well as “an enormous amount of fear” that Saddam Hussein’s regime might come back.

During the nine-day period that included Wolfowitz’s brief tour of the country, US forces staged hundreds of heavily armed raids in cities and towns throughout the center and north of Iraq. In three cases American soldiers opened fire on crowds of unarmed civilians, in Mosul, Baghdad and Karbala. The last city is in the predominantly Shia-populated southern half of Iraq, an area that Wolfowitz called “largely stable.”

The Washington Post described the scene in Mosul, citing eyewitness accounts of the incident, which took place the same day as the US assault in that city that killed Uday and Qusay Hussein: “They said a crowd of 40 or 50 young men had gathered just after 1 p.m., after the firefight had stopped, in an area near a traffic light at least 400 yards from the house where the Hussein brothers were killed. They said the crowd wanted to enter their mosque for prayers, but soldiers kept them away because it was too close to the firefight scene. The men became angry, yelled at the soldiers, and a few began throwing rocks, the witnesses said. At that moment, from four to eight soldiers fired short bursts into the crowd.”

--snip--/--much more--

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/aug2003/wolf-a01.shtml

They don't even report attacks that don't produce casualties and Bremer the other day was crowing about getting Baghdad airport going again.

The thing Bremer didn't say was that the airport contained a US prison, functions only as a US airbase, has one mysterious carrier that makes one flight only to former East Germany and no other sane carrier would set foot there because the thing is under nightly mortar attack.

"The Seven Pits of Ignorance"

Someimtes these administartion officials are idiots. Well, most of the time. Okay fine, all of the time! Anyway, Wolfowitz is among the most idiotic of the lot, aside from perhaps Bush. His quote about the war in Iraq not being about WMD, and now this.