Deep Blade Journal

The smart ones did lie

With Wolfie in the news for corruption behind the anti-corruption veneer at his World Bank post, the ever engaging and insightful Jonathan Schwarz has up a fine post about whether or not “members of the Bush administration were lying about Iraq’s non-existent WMD.”

Because, as Schwarz puts it, “the smarter ones were lying, while the stupider ones believed what they said,” it turns out Wolfie is a great source on this matter. According to Jonathan Schwarz,

I’m pretty sure Wolfowitz’s pre-war view was this: Iraq may or may not have WMD. But due to Iraq’s oil wealth, they will eventually be able to build them, and—also due to their oil wealth—we’ll never have much leverage on them short of invasion. So it’s better to do it now.

Depending on the crowd you run with, that’s a halfway defensible argument. Certainly it’s far more persuasive than the Bush administration’s sledgehammer propaganda line. However, it’s also much more difficult to use to whip up war fever, at least if you believe Americans are a bunch of half-witted ten year-olds who need you to protect them.

So I suspect Wolfowitz decided just to go along with the propaganda—some deception of Americans was required to make necessary things happen. Moreover, he likely realized many of his superiors and co-workers were idiots who really believed all the crap they were saying, and it would be extremely impolitic and counterproductive to contradict them.

Schwarz has good evidence to back this up. Of course, in Deep Blade Journal, I have blogged about Wolfie’s obsession with forming NSC-68-like-Cold-War guiding principles for the Clash Against Islamo-fascism, because, as Wolfie put it in his 2004 tribute to the late Cold Warrior Paul Nitze, “the ideology of terrorist fanaticism is even more dangerous” than the Soviet threat. See HERE and HERE, and also HERE for more on Wolfie’s squirm over the “accuracy” of WMD claims.