[Jack Simth]

Dislaimer: I say "Could," "Might," "if," and "had" on these. The article simply doesn't quote sufficiently to preclude mis-quoting, and so I am simply showing a way that things could have been warped; after all, I encounter such warps fairly frequently in my local paper; I can be suspicious of something Online. The article might be fairly representing things; but there isn't any way to tell. Likewise, I have no particular reason to believe what I have been typing here is necessarily true; the point is that Wolfowitz may not be fairly represented, and there is no way to tell if he is or not.

Edit: Oh, I guess there is a way to tell - find the transcript of the session the quotes come from. My bad....

Originally posted by rextorres:
Wolfowitz: "Iraq war was about oil"

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/...970334,00.html

The only place the 'Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil' part appears in the linked article is in the title - and it is missing the quotes. The article quotes Wolfowitz only a five times, and they are single-word quotes on three of them:
1) "bureaucratic",
2) "swimming",
3) "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.",
4) "for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on: weapons of mass destruction.",
5) "end"

1, 2, and 5 were used in what the reader will assume are paraphrasings of what Wolfowitz said; it would be very easy for these to have been taken out of context, as they are single-word quotes.

3 is odd, but it is of note that it doesn't say exactly what was asked, just "Asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found". Had the exact question been "Why is North Korea being treated differently from Iraq?" with the part about nuclear power and WMD's being added later, then 3 could simply be a portion on a cognizant essay on why a regeme change in NK wouldn't work well - NK doesn't have much in the way of resources that would be necessary for rebuilding the economy, while Iraq does.

4 Isn't necessarily condeming. It could readily have been a matter of some people not thinking that Human Rights violations weren't enough to warrent intervention while others thought that treaty violations weren't enough to warrent intervention so they settled on WMD's. All the options listed here could have been cases made, and all could have been true (in that Iraq was doing Human Rights violations, violating the treaty, and holding WMD's); however, if everyone involved disagreed on what exactly constitued sufficent cause, but everyone agreed on the WMD's as being sufficent cause, then 4 would still make perfect sense to utter.

[ June 04, 2003, 20:54: Message edited by: Jack Simth ]