USATODAY.com - Wolfowitz comments revive doubts over Iraq's WMD: "Posted 5/30/2003 3:21 PM Updated 6/1/2003 2:54 PM
BRUSSELS (AP) — As President Bush begins a European tour to patch up trans-Atlantic relations, comments from senior defense officials about Iraq's weapons have revived controversy in Europe over whether the war was justified.
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Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz cited bureaucratic reasons for focusing on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, and said a "huge" result of the war was to enable Washington to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia.
"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," Wolfowitz was quoted as saying in a Pentagon transcript of an interview with Vanity Fair.
The magazine's reporter did not tape the telephone interview and provided a slightly different version of the quote in the article: "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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However, the remarks were widely published in Europe and were seen by skeptical Europeans as a tacit admission that the United States overstated Iraq's weapons threat.
The Daily Express of London ran a report Friday on the statements by the two U.S. officials with the headline "Just Complete and Utter Lies."
"Claims that the world was lied to about the reasons for going to war in Iraq gathered pace yesterday as fresh doubts were cast on Britain and America's account of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction," the newspaper said.
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In Germany, where the war was widely unpopular, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeiting newspaper said the comments showed America is losing the battle for credibility.
"The charge of deception is inescapable," the newspaper said.
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Wolfowitz insisted in the interview, and in Singapore on Friday, that there had always been three major concerns.
"One was weapons of mass destruction, second was terrorism, and the third ... was the abuse of Iraqis by their own government," Wolfowitz said at the sidelines of the Asia Security Conference in Singapore.
"And in a sense there was a fourth overriding one, which was the connection between those first two, the connection between the weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. All three of those have been there, they've always been part of the rationale and I think it s been very clear."