Obama v. McCain/Paul Wolfowitz - Who Is The Naive Idealist Re Foreign Policy?

[Median Democrat]

Remember Paul Wolfowitz who declared prior to the Iraq war told a Congressional panel that oil revenue earned by Iraq alone would pay for Iraq's reconstruction after the Iraq war; he testified: "The oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years. Now, there are a lot of claims on that money, but ... We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.” By March 2005, two years later, oil revenues were not paying for the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq, Wolfowitz's estimation of 50 to 100 billion US dollars had not materialized, and, in light of his miscalculation, detractors criticized his appointment to head of the World Bank.

Likewise, John McCain declared before the Iraq war: "There's no doubt in my mind that we will prevail and there's no doubt in my mind, once these people are gone, that we will be welcomed as liberators." --on the Iraq war, "Hardball" interview, March 24, 2003

Also, remember this McCainism: “There’s not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shiahs. So I think they can probably get along.” (MSNBC, 4/23/03)

Mccain - "I believe that the success will be fairly easy." (9/24/02)

McCain - "We will win this conflict. We will win it easily." (1/22/03)

Yet, the GOP claims that Barack Obama is the one with naive views on foreign policy?

:sarcasm:

Paul Wolfowitz:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Wolfowitz#Wolfowitz.27s_economic_arguments_pertaining_to_the_Iraq_War

Deputy Secretary of Defense
From 2001 to 2005, during the George W. Bush administration, Wolfowitz served as U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense reporting to U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

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In the first emergency meeting of the U.S. National Security Council on the day of the attacks, Rumsfeld asked, "Why shouldn’t we go against Iraq, not just al-Qaeda?" with Wolfowitz adding that Iraq was a "brittle, oppressive regime that might break easily—it was doable," and, according to John Kampfner, "from that moment on, he and Wolfowitz used every available opportunity to press the case." The idea was initially rejected, at the behest of U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, but, according to Kampfner, "Undeterred Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz held secret meetings about opening up a second front—against Saddam. Powell was excluded." In such meetings they created a policy that would later be dubbed the Bush Doctrine, centering on "pre-emption", American unilateralism, and the war on Iraq, which the PNAC had advocated in their earlier letters.

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, the U.S. had to deal immediately with the threat of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001. Victory was declared on March 6, 2002. Just under a month later, on October 10, 2001, George Robertson, then Secretary-General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, went to the Pentagon to offer NATO troops, planes and ships to assist. Wolfowitz rebuffed the offer, saying: "We can do everything we need to." Wolfowitz later announced publicly, according to Kampfner, "that 'allies, coalitions and diplomacy' were of little immediate concern."

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Following the declaration of victory in Afghanistan the Bush administration had started to plan for the next stage of the War on Terror. According to John Kampfner, "Emboldened by their experience in Afghanistan, they saw the opportunity to root out hostile regimes in the Middle East and to implant very American interpretations of democracy and free markets, from Iraq to Iran and Saudi Arabia. Wolfowitz epitomised this view." Wolfowitz "saw a liberated Iraq as both paradigm and linchpin for future interventions." The 2003 invasion of Iraq began on March 19.

Prior to the invasion, Wolfowitz had a plan to sell the war to the administration as well as the general public, as he later stated: "For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on."

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During Wolfowitz's pre-war testimony before Congress, he dismissed General Eric K. Shinseki's estimates of the size of the post war occupation force as incorrect and estimated that fewer than 100,000 troops would be necessary in the war. Two days after Shinseki testified, Wolfowitz said to the House Budget Committee on February 27, 2003:

There has been a good deal of comment—some of it quite outlandish—about what our postwar requirements might be in Iraq. Some of the higher end predictions we have been hearing recently, such as the notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq, are wildly off the mark. It is hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army—hard to imagine.

On October 26, 2003, while in Baghdad staying at the Al-Rashid Hotel Wolfowitz narrowly escaped an attack when six rockets slammed into the floors below his room blowing out the windows and frames. Army Lt. Col. Charles H. Buehring was killed and seventeen others soldiers were wounded.<48> Wolfowitz and his DOD staffers escaped unharmed and returned to the United States on October 28, 2003.