Replies

Here's Mine:

To (Reporter):
george.wright@guardian.co.uk

cc (Ombudsman):
reader@guardian.co.uk

Thanks for playing "misquote the jew". Looks like you win again!

I understand that you may have been misled by the German papers cited in the article, but come now… It is absurd to think that a senior American official is going to say (even in effect or indirectly) something as stupid, wrong and inconsistent with stated policy as: "Yeah, Iraq really was a war for oil." This should have raised all kinds of red flags for fact checking. If you weren't culpable of intentionally misrepresenting Mr. Wolfowitz, then your only defense is laziness, incompetence and stupidity. Indeed it would clearly require all three factors working in consilient coordination to produce the laughable and slanted screed that proudly graced your internet frontispiece.

In case you haven't figured out that your article both misquoted Mr. Wolfowitz AND completely misrepresented the substance of his comments in context, please consult the following webpage for further information:

The Guardian Pulls a "Dowd" - Falsely Attributes War for Oil Claim to Wolfowitz w/ Misquote
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/923221/posts

And here is mine (to the editors of Die Welt, cc'ed to Tagesspiegel):

Zu: "Im Fall Nordkorea setzt Wolfowitz auf die Anrainer"; WELT vom 2. Juni

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,

Auslandskorrespondentin Sophie Mühlmann setzte am 02.06.2003 (\"Im Fall Nordkorea setzt Wolfowitz auf die Anrainer\") durch eine krass falsche Wiedergabe einer Bemerkung des Stellvertretenden US-Verteidigungsministers einen internationalen Stein ins Rollen.

Bei der Sicherheitstagung in Singapur antwortete Wolfowitz auf die Frage nach dem Grund für die unterschiedliche Behandlung Nordkoreas gegenüber dem Irak wie folgt:

ZITAT BEGINN
Q: What I meant is that essentially North Korea is being taken more seriously because it has become a nuclear power by its own admission, whether or not that's true, and that the lesson that people will have is that in the case of Iraq it became imperative to confront Iraq militarily because it had banned weapons systems and posed a danger to the region. In the case of North Korea, which has nuclear weapons as well as other banned weapons of mass destruction, apparently it is imperative not to confront, to persuade and to essentially maintain a regime that is just as appalling as the Iraqi regime in place, for the sake of the stability of the region. To other countries of the world this is a very mixed message to be sending out.

Wolfowitz: The concern about implosion is not primarily at all a matter of the weapons that North Korea has, but a fear particularly by South Korea and also to some extent China of what the larger implications are for them of having 20 million people on their borders in a state of potential collapse and anarchy. It's is also a question of whether, if one wants to persuade the regime to change, whether you have to find -- and I think you do -- some kind of outcome that is acceptable to them. But that outcome has to be acceptable to us, and it has to include meeting our non-proliferation goals.

Look, the primarily difference -- to put it a little too simply -- between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq. The problems in both cases have some similarities but the solutions have got to be tailored to the circumstances which are very different.

ZITAT ENDE (wörtliche Niederschrift des US-Verteidigungsministeriums hier: http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030531-depsecdef0246.html )

Dies wurde von Mühlmann fälschlich so berichtet:

ZITAT BEGINN
Auf die Frage, warum eine Atommacht wie Nordkorea anders behandelt würde als der Irak, wo kaum Massenvernichtungswaffen gefunden worden seien, antwortete der stellvertretende Verteidigungsminister wieder sehr offen: \"Betrachten wir es einmal ganz simpel. Der wichtigste Unterschied zwischen Nordkorea und dem Irak ist der, dass wir wirtschaftlich einfach keine Wahl im Irak hatten. Das Land schwimmt auf einem Meer von Öl.\"

ZITAT ENDE

Das wörtliche Zitat erweckt den Eindruck, er habe als Kriegsgrund eingeräumt, die USA seien in den Irak gegangen, um sich die Ölvorräte zu sichern. Tatsächlich aber sagte Wolfowitz, man habe den Irak deswegen anders behandelt, weil dieses Land aufgrund seiner Ölvorräte gegen wirtschaftlichen Druck und Sanktionen unempfindlich war.

Ein himmelweiter Unterschied! Einen Tag später wird diese Falschmeldung vom Tagesspiegel aufgegriffen, der noch die Ausschmückung hinzufügt: \"Unterdessen erweiterte Vize-Verteidigungsminister Paul Wolfowitz sein Eingeständnis, dass Massenvernichtungswaffen nicht der eigentliche Kriegsgrund waren.\" (siehe http://archiv.tagesspiegel.de/archiv/03.06.2003/596952.asp )

Am 4.6. dann trompetete der Guardian unter Berufung auf die Welt und den Tagesspiegel die Schlagzeile \"Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil\" (siehe
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,970331,00.html)

Die linksliberale Medienlandschaft in Großbritannien und den USA walzt seitdem dieses Thema genüsslich aus -- und alles geht auf die Meldung in Ihrer Zeitung zurück.

Ich wollte zuerst nicht glauben, dass Die Welt dem ultralinken Guardian Material für eine seiner typischen anti-USA-Kampagnen frei Haus liefert.

Leider ist eben dies geschehen. Hoffentlich wird sich dieser Vorfall nicht bald wiederholen.

Had to send 'em another email:

Oh, my. How could I have failed to mention, in my previous message regarding your misreporting, laziness, incompetence and stupidity (and/or willful dishonesty, as the case may be) that not only did you innovate, at least in English, a new misrepresentation of a clear and cogent statement by Mr. Wolfowitz, but you referenced an old one, unbothered by the fact that it has been thoroughly debunked in the English language press:

"Paul Wolfowitz - who has already undermined Tony Blair's position over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by describing them as a "bureaucratic" excuse for war"

You could just read the transcript to correct this one:

Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz Interview with Sam Tannenhaus, Vanity Fair
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030509-depsecdef0223.html

But if you need it spelled out, try this:

What Wolfowitz Really Said (excerpted)
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/757wzfan.asp

What gives with this Vanity Fair interview, then?

What gives is that Tanenhaus has mischaracterized Wolfowitz's remarks, that Vanity Fair's publicists have mischaracterized Tanenhaus's mischaracterization, and that Bush administration critics are now indulging in an orgy of righteous indignation that is dishonest in triplicate.

Pentagon staffers were wise enough to tape-record the Tanenhaus-Wolfowitz interview. Prior to publication of the Vanity Fair piece, they made that transcript available to its author. And they have since posted the transcript on the Defense Department's website (www.defenselink.mil). Tanenhaus's assertion that Wolfowitz "admitted" that "Iraq's WMD had never been the most important casus belli" turns out to be, not to put too fine a point on it, false. Here's the relevant section of the conversation:

TANENHAUS: Was that one of the arguments that was raised early on by you and others that Iraq actually does connect, not to connect the dots too much, but the relationship between Saudi Arabia, our troops being there, and bin Laden's rage about that, which he's built on so many years, also connects the World Trade Center attacks, that there's a logic of motive or something like that? Or does that read too much into--

WOLFOWITZ: No, I think it happens to be correct. The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason, but . . . there have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people. Actually I guess you could say there's a fourth overriding one which is the connection between the first two. . . . The third one by itself, as I think I said earlier, is a reason to help the Iraqis but it's not a reason to put American kids' lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it. That second issue about links to terrorism is the one about which there's the most disagreement within the bureaucracy, even though I think everyone agrees that we killed 100 or so of an al Qaeda group in northern Iraq in this recent go-around, that we've arrested that al Qaeda guy in Baghdad who was connected to this guy Zarqawi whom Powell spoke about in his U.N. presentation.

In short, Wolfowitz made the perfectly sensible observation that more than just WMD was of concern, but that among several serious reasons for war, WMD was the issue about which there was widest domestic (and international) agreement.

As for Tanenhaus's suggestion that Wolfowitz somehow fessed up that the war had a hidden, "unnoticed but huge" agenda--rationalizing a pre-planned troop withdrawal from Saudi Arabia--we refer you, again, to the actual interview. In an earlier section of the conversation, concerning the current, postwar situation in the Middle East, Wolfowitz explained that the United States needs to get post-Saddam Iraq "right," and that we also need "to get some progress on the Israeli-Palestinian issue," which now looks more promising. Then Wolfowitz said this:

There are a lot of things that are different now, and one that has gone by almost unnoticed--but it's huge--is that by complete mutual agreement between the U.S. and the Saudi government we can now remove almost all of our forces from Saudi Arabia. Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government. . . . I think just lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to open the door to other positive things.

Tanenhaus has taken a straightforward and conventional observation about strategic arrangements in a post-Saddam Middle East and juiced it up into a vaguely sinister "admission" about America's motives for going to war in the first place.