Word: wolfowitzes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...been a preoccupation of the neoconservatives. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, they argue, it is these states that most threaten the U.S. and other democracies. They are today's beasts in the forest, and they need to be tamed. Shortly after Gulf War I ended in 1991, Wolfowitz got a chance to show how. Cheney asked him to overhaul the Pentagon's basic strategic-planning document, known as the Defense Planning Guidance. In March 1992, a draft was first leaked to the New York Times. Forward leaning wasn't the half of it; the document suggested that...
...time when the Bush Administration was trying to coax a defeated Russia and a newly unified Germany into becoming full and respected partners in the international system, the draft's bellicose terms were tactless. Cheney and Wolfowitz were told to tone them down. But from his perch at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where he waited out the Clinton years, Wolfowitz continued to talk and write about Iraq. Like a traveler struggling to keep his campfire burning amid chilly winds, he took every chance to stoke the fire, reminding all who would listen that there was unfinished...
When Cheney was tapped to create the second Bush Administration, he seeded it with men who had once worked for him. Wolfowitz became Deputy Secretary of Defense under Cheney's old friend and mentor Donald Rumsfeld (another signatory of the 1998 letter). But as is often the case, the new responsibilities of office meant that officials had to postpone trying to implement their most cherished to-do list. In the State Department, Powell was working on a plan for "smart sanctions" on Iraq--tightening the porous U.N. embargo while allowing more humanitarian support for innocent Iraqis. The neoconservatives weren...
...separate boxes. The attacks on New York City and Washington gave the neoconservatives an opportunity. The logic seemed airtight: Saddam had WMDs; terrorists had attacked America; if al-Qaeda ever got hold of Saddam's weapons, the future didn't bear thinking about. The afternoon after the attacks, Wolfowitz, in conference calls with other officials, started voicing suspicions that Iraq might somehow have been involved. Within hours, he was lobbying Cheney on the topic, arguing--a central plank of the neoconservative analysis--that Iraq was also somehow behind the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. Within days...
Cheney was skeptical of the claim. (U.S. intelligence has never been able to substantiate a link between Iraq and the 1993 World Trade Center attack--or the assault of 2001.) But Wolfowitz stayed on the case. On the weekend after Sept. 11, Bush convened his national-security team at Camp David. Wolfowitz argued that if military action was to be taken against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which was harboring the leadership of al-Qaeda, it should also be taken against Iraq. Saddam's regime had WMDs, had shown that it was willing to use them, and harbored a continuing...