Tony Snow Gets Tough With Wolfowitz
So I have a hobby of looking at old DOD transcripts and this one came up with Wolfowitz on Fox News with Tony Snow. And Snow, as you will see if you read this mostly boring interview is hinting towards invasion of Syria and Iran, and Wolfie kind of ducks it saying we have to focus on the task at hand.
Smart guy.
Anyway, so Snow winds up and gives Wolfie this one.
Snow: There is not a long history in recent years of democracy in Iraq, and many of these people have no residual notion how it works. We saw in East Germany it took quite a while for people to get accustomed again to any kind of freedom -- that's a Westernized nation. What makes you confident that democracy can take hold in a nation that has been more or less under the thrall of Ba'athist dictatorships for more than 40 years and does not have the kind of history that other nations have?
Now this is a sensible question especially at the time of the interview. Score one for Snow, he was so smart the White House had to hire him. But read his response and watch for the Freudian slippage.
Wolfowitz: I don't think you can be confident. I think cautiously optimistic might be the right word. But look, we've had a -- I was going to use the word "experiment," it's not an experiment -- we've had an experience for the last 12 years in northern Iraq where Saddam Hussein's forces were pushed out of that part of the country in early April of 1991 by a coalition force that included U.S. and British and several other European countries contributed. That force left, I believe, on September 1st, 1991, and the people of northern Iraq have been running their own affairs reasonably successfully for 12 years now.
This really shows the true pathos of the mindset behind this invasion. An experiment. An experiment only possible within a certain window. Earlier that week on an even more boring interview on 60 Minutes II Wolfie made this analogy with regards to planning of a new government in Iraq.
But the other task is to work with the various disparate Iraqi groups. Some of them outside the country, and more and more will be from inside the country, to help design a process that leads to a free and representative government. It's a process, someone, in fact it was George Schultz really, whom I once worked for, who said that that kind of process is more like tending a garden than building a house. You don't go buy a blueprint. You create conditions in which plants can grow. You clear out the weeds and you discover what it turns into.
In this case I think Wolfie's little garden is in trouble. Perhaps he should have consulted his Farmers Almanac.
