Originally posted by: KenGr
The "quote" used by many news sources changed a couple of words, but most importantly it took it completely out of context. Wolfowitz provided a list of reasons why Iraq had to be dealt with and was explaining that the WMD issue was most directly linked to existing policy. The quote used was actually a sentence fragment that was interrupted by a phone call and never completed, leaving some question as to what was actually being said.
Well, according to a CNN article and Pentagon news release, the Pentagon complained that the quotation;
"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"
got turned into ;
"For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on."
So its not exactly a "misquote", but it was indeed taken out of context. The full context, however, from the official transcript released by the Pentagon (
here) makes, I believe, more damning reading than the original quote did. If we take out the interruption of the phone call, and merely collate Wolfowitz's continuing remarks (as he was clearly intent on finishing his train of thought) then he was quite clear on his beliefs in this matter. I quote;
"-- 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. Sorry, hold on again
...
To wrap it up.
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 UN presentation." [emphasis mine]
After reading the quotation in full context his argument seems quite coherent. Namely that there were three individual reasons to go to war with Iraq, but that
a) Iraqi human rights was not worth risking American troops for (giving the lie to 'Operation Iraqi Freedom')
b) Saddam's links to terrorism could not be agreed upon even within the administration,
leaving just the issue of WMDs.
it seems to me that he was not misquoted at all. In actual fact, he should be grateful he was not quoted further as the full context seems worse, in PR terms, that the first quotation on its own.