Wolfowitz suggests knowing Iraq had no WMD
might have put off invasion
Yahoo News/AFP
December 7, 2005
WASHINGTON (AFP) - World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz suggested that US
forces might not have invaded Iraq if Washington had known then that the regime
of Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction.
"And I'm not sure based on the evidence we know now that we could have been
absolutely convinced that there was no danger, absolutely no danger," Wolfowitz
said at National Press Club.
"If somebody could have given you a Lloyds of London guarantee that weapons
of mass destruction would not possibly be used, one would have contemplated
much more support for internal Iraqi opposition and not having the United
States take the job on the way we did," he said.
Wolfowitz, a former deputy defense secretary and one of the architects of
the war, said the fear that Iraq would use weapons of mass destruction was a
major preoccupation of General Tommy Franks, who planned and led the
invasion.
"It was a sense that the greatest danger in taking this man on would be that
he would use them," Wolfowitz said, referring to Saddam Hussein, who is now on
trial in Baghdad.
"If you could have given us a guarantee that they wouldn't have been used,
there would have been policy options available probably," he said.
Iraq's supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction was the primary US
rationale for the 2003 invasion. Wolfowitz cited Saddam's support for terrorism
and his "genocidal" treatment of the Iraqi people as other reasons.
No banned weapons were ever found, however, and US experts concluded last
year that Iraq had abandoned its chemical and nuclear programs in 1991 and its
biological weapons program by 1995.
Asked how he accounted for the intelligence failure, Wolfowitz replied:
"Well, I don't have to, and it's not just because I don't work for the US
government anymore.
"In my old job, I didn't have to. I was like everyone else outside the
intelligence community," he said.
"We relied on the intelligence community for those judgments. So the
question is, how do they account for it or how do the commissions that have
attempted to understand and account for it?" he said.
On the insurgency that followed the US invasion, Wolfowitz defended the use
of a smaller US force. Before the invasion, Wolfowitz famously dismissed a
warning by the army's chief of staff that several hundred thousand troops would
be needed to occupy the country.
"I personally don't think more troops would have answered the problem. I
think more troops would have tended to create a problem," Wolfowitz said
Wednesday.
"The big part of the problem is the appearance that the United States was
and perhaps remaining an occupying power. And I think the best thing we could
have had from the beginning is not more American troops but more Iraqi
troops."
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