Intelligence Design and the Architecture of War: Wolfowitz

[norml]

Intelligence Design and the Architecture of War

By Dana Milbank

Thursday, December 8, 2005; Page A03

On another day when the Iraq war was tearing Washington apart, a leading architect of that war, Paul D. Wolfowitz, was donning sheep's clothing over at the National Press Club.

The former deputy defense secretary, now president of the World Bank, gave a 30-minute speech yesterday about the virtues of peace, the ills of poverty and the benefits of multilateralism -- without a mention of Iraq.



Paul D. Wolfowitz waits to address the National Press Club, where the former deputy secretary of defense spoke for 30 minutes without mentioning the Iraq war or his role in it. (By Chris Greenberg -- Bloomberg News)

Washington Sketch
A national political reporter for the Post, Milbank writes Washington Sketch, an observational column about political theater in the White House, Congress and elsewhere in the capital. He covered the 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns and President Bush's first term. Before coming to the Post as a Style political writer in 2000, he covered the Clinton White House for the New Republic and Congress for the Wall Street Journal.

"One of the things that's fun about this job is development is a unifying mission and you can get a lot of people together across a table to put their political differences aside," said the man President Bush calls "Wolfie."

Only when questioners pressed him about Iraq would Wolfowitz address the subject. "How do you account for the intelligence failures regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?" he was asked.

"Well," he said after a long pause, "I don't have to."


snip


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/07/AR2005120702224.html

[MalachiConstant]

1. me either, thank god

but then again, i didn't go and start a war

[norml]

2. Wolfowitz: "they should ``move forward,'' and not dwell on the war"

Wolfowitz's New Job Turning Him Into Iraq War's Invisible Man


Dec. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Paul Wolfowitz's role as the architect of the Iraq war is shaping up to be one of the great disappearing acts in Washington.

Wolfowitz has kept a relatively low profile since leaving the Defense Department six months ago to run the World Bank, the largest financer of projects in poor countries. He has made about a half-dozen public appearances in the U.S., forgone official visits to Congress and stayed clear of one-on-one news interviews.

This is at a time when the former colleagues who helped him construct the Iraq invasion have been grilled before investigative commissions and criticized in opinion polls.

``Getting out of the public spotlight, maintaining low visibility is part of the effort to remove the public image'' of Wolfowitz's role in starting the war, says Stephen Wayne, a professor of government at Georgetown University in Washington.


snip


While Wolfowitz doesn't shy away from defending the war when asked, he rarely mentions Iraq in public appearances. The day after taking his post, Wolfowitz told a crowd of development and humanitarian organizations that they should ``move forward,'' and not dwell on the war.



http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=aZ9dQ2JfrKiM&refer=us