Is someone trying to rebuild their shattered reputation? Here's Paul Wolfowitz disavowing some of the extremes of the Bush administration's pre-war rhetoric in a new Mark Bowden piece in the Atlantic (key passage in bold):
[BOWDEN] "You were one of those who was most emphatic prior to going into Iraq that Saddam had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction."
[WOLFOWITZ] "I don't think so."
"I can quote you."
"Okay."
I read him a line from an op-ed article under his byline in the British newspaper The Independent for January 30, 2003: "There is incontrovertible evidence that the Iraqi regime still possesses such weaopns." Wolfowitz had spoken in the same terms on numerous occasions.
"'Inconvertible evidence' is a pretty strong way of putting it,' I said. 'How did you feel when you found out they didn't have such weapons?"
"Well, I don't think they don't," he said. "You say it turned out they didn't. By the way, read me the quote again."
I did so. Wolfowitz said he needed to go back and review his prior statements.
"But clearly you believed they had stockpiles of such weapons?"
"You are putting the word 'stockpiles' in," he said.
He was right: "stockpiles" was my word.
"See, that's what -- I wasn't convinced about stockpiles. I always thought the nuclear thing was overstated. That was down the road. What really bothered me was biological weapons, and we know they made them. We know they know how to make them. We know there was a lot of deliberate effort to destroy evidence of all kinds of things. 'Inconvertible,' I agree, is a pretty strong word. But we know they've had the stuff and -- let me put it this way -- they were given a chance to come clean under [UN Resolution] 1441, to declare everything they had and to cooperate fully with inspectors. We caught them lying on the declarations on not insignificant things -- mostly on the missiles they were working on and the UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] they were working on. And there was lots of evidence of obstructing inspectors and moving things and hiding things. That was supposed to be the test of 1441 -- not whether we could prove they had stockpiles."
Has anyone of Wolfowitz's stature ever disavowed pre-war claims of stockpiles and a looming nuclear threat before?
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