vanity fair - well known and named - to all performances (part 1)

[Aliette Guibert]

A cynicistic birthday...

Voici les deux interviewes de Wolfowitz, citées dans le mail précédent.
Edifiantes... je ne peux les traduire faute de temps ; mais je pense que
j'ai assez donné pour que des amis s'y mettent à leur tour afin de nous
renvoyer une version française ? Je pense qu'avant l'anniversaire du 6 juin,
cet anniversaire là, celui-ci de mai, à propos de l'Irak, est informant...

Allez, une traduction rapide avec un traducteur en ligne supervisée, de
sorte qu'on puisse l'envoyer sur les listes de diffusion francophones ?

A+ L.



PLease, have a look on that follows (from Vanity fair, may 2003) in the site
of US Defense! (Wolfowitz himself who has supervized Guatanamo system, was
in Abu Ghraib with General Janice Zarpinski, in July 2003 -photo in  Le
Monde)... and do not beleive the inverse reference which was the camps
(human pyramide. They have played with something which is a bad subject

http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030509-depsecdef0223.html :

Quote:

Updated 29 May 2003
   United States Department of Defense.

Presenter: Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz Friday, May 9, 2003

Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz Interview with Sam Tannenhaus, Vanity Fair




Q: What do you think all the conspiritorial talk is? Do you have any notion,
in Europe and here? What are people looking at this way?

Wolfowitz: I think it's pretty obvious and I think it's pretty disgraceful
but all you can do is ignore it and go on and get the job done.

Q: What is it? I mean some say anti-Semitism. I guess in Europe that would
be --

Wolfowitz: I just said all I'm going to say about it.

Q: Okay. There's a question now as to whether in Iraq itself --

Wolfowitz: You know it's completely out in the open who holds what views in
this Administration. You couldn't be more transparent about what the
arguments are. The most significant thing that has produced what is
admittedly a fairly significant change in American policy is the events of
September 11th which are going to count as one of the -- If you had to pick
the ten most important foreign policy things for the United States over the
last 100 years it would surely rank in the top ten if not number one. It's
the reason why so much has changed, and people who refuse to look at that,
for whatever reason, or are unwilling to face up to the implications of that
then go around and look for some nefarious explanation. But it's shameful.

Q: Since you brought that up let me ask you something related to that. I've
looked at the remarkable Defense Policy Guidance of 1992 --

Wolfowitz: Wait a minute. Did you look at the guidance or did you look at
the draft that was leaked before I saw it?

Q: That's a very good point. Actually all I saw were summaries of it. Is
there a big discrepancy as to what was reported and what was in it?

Wolfowitz: Yes. In short. At some point I guess it's acquired such a life of
its own I ought to go back and refresh my memory.
But the way I remember it approximately is as follows. I gave a quite
substantial briefing to Secretary Cheney and what was then called I guess
the Defense Resources Board on a post-Cold War defense strategy, the essence
of which was to shift from a strategy for being prepared to fight a global
war, to being focused on two possible regional conflicts. And to downsize
the U.S. military by some 40 percent.
That was sort of taken to the President, promulgated in a speech in Aspen on
August 2, 1990, which you may recall happened also to be the day that Iraq
invaded Kuwait. In fact we had, in that briefing that I gave in May I think,
it focused on the Iraqi threat to the Arabian peninsula as one of the
regional problems we needed to be prepared to deal with. At the time that
was considered a revolutionary idea. By the time the President gave the
speech it had already happened. [Laughter]
Then that general briefing had to be translated into a guidance document for
the department. Some people on my staff wrote a draft. Before I even got to
see the draft someone leaked it to the New York Times, apparently because
they didn't like it. The New York Times then wrote about the draft.
If you go back, and you can do this with Lexis/Nexis. If you go back, the
excerpts from the draft are nowhere near as hysterical as the way the New
York Times reported it. So people in the first place were reacting to the
New York Times description of the draft as opposed to the actual text of the
draft which the Times in fact did publish.
I repeat, it was not a draft that I'd even reviewed yet.
As I recall, one of the pieces of hysteria was the idea that this is a
blueprint for a massive increase in U.S. defense spending, when in fact it
was a blueprint for a 40 percent reduction in U.S. defense spending. It goes
on from there.
When we did a revised draft that in fact I had reviewed carefully, the State
Department initially didn't want us to put it out, I think because it was a
little too much. Well, I don't know why. They didn't want us to put it out.
I don't want to speculate on motives. But in January of 1993 as we were
about to leave, I said to Cheney don't you think we should publish it? And
he said yes, we should. So it's available in the full text as the Regional
Defense Strategy of January, 1993.
I know people say oh well, they just sanded off the corners because the real
thing received such an adverse reaction. But the truth of the matter is what
the Times was writing about was something that I'd never seen. What is
published, while I will admit some of the corners are rounded off on it,
reflects my views.

Q: What did you make of the reaction at the time? You were an important
public official then, but you weren't particularly visible. And I looked at
the Times -- That was the right hand column front page story on the same
day, by the way, that the Whitewater story broke in the paper, March 8,
1992.
And of course there were Democratic primaries coming up, Super Tuesday. Was
this your first taste of what the media will do to you when they think they
have a story? Or were you schooled in that before?

Wolfowitz: I've run into it before. If the media had more of a right wing
bias I would have run into it in a major way with the Philippine policy. We
had a few shots at us from the conservative press that we were undermining
Reagan's good friend Ferdinand Marcos. No, I've been shot at from both
directions.
I think the first time was over the Team B exercise back in 1976.

Q: Oh, that's right.

Wolfowitz: It seems to go with the territory.

Q: And there again you'd written a fairly straightforward account, wasn't it
of intermediate missiles or something?
Wolfowitz: That's right. Which turned out to be, I wouldn't say prophetic,
but it was prescient. It was completely borne out by what came subsequently,
but it was again -- I don't know whether people caricature it in order to
discredit it, or they caricature it because they don't understand it. Or
maybe some of both.
But the way I would put it in terms of the '92 document and briefings is
that, you have to remember, the Cold War had ended. There were a lot of
people who said we don't need any of these Cold War alliances any more. We
don't need NATO any more. Then President Bush was asked why do you need NATO
now that the threat's gone away? He said the threat's still there. They said
what is it? He said the threat's uncertainty, and people sort of laughed at
that.
Well, it's not a bad description for what's happened in the Balkans in the
intervening period. And what we were basically arguing in that document is
that while we can manage with a substantially reduced U.S. defense force,
for a lot of people to retain 60 percent of it in those alliance
commitments, they somehow, I guess, thought we could go to complete
disarmament or something. I'm not sure what their model was.
In fact the New York Times specifically had this absurd line, I remember,
that we had abandoned 50 years of reliance on the doctrine of collective
security, I think. I'd have to go back and get the quote. But basically it's
as though for 50 years we'd been relying on the United Nations and this
document was going to undo it, as opposed to for 50 years we'd relied on
NATO and our alliances in Northeast Asia and this document was trying to
support them.
I remember at the time that a couple of Democratic senators -- It's easy to
recover them. You just go and look in Pat Buchanan's book -- sort of became
hysterical about this grand plan for continuing and maybe even expanding
American commitments. Because we did, in a sense one of the more radical
things in there was, if I can use an awful phrase, the adumbration of NATO
enlargement. We weren't quite so bold as to say it but we were hinting at
it. There was some discussion about, in a complementary document that was
also leaked, about whether the United States could honor a defense
commitment to Lithuania if we had one. This was considered wildly outrageous
and various Democratic senators attacked us.
Pat Buchanan's "Republic Not an Empire" book spends its first chapter
attacking the so-called Wolfowitz Memorandum.

Q: Right, I know that book.

Wolfowitz: And he laments the fact that these same Democratic senators who
were attacking--in his view, appropriately attacking--the Wolfowitz
Memorandum, had climbed on board the whole policy when it became Clinton's
policy in the mid 1990s. He's correct in saying that what was considered by
the New York Times to be such an outrageous document was U.S. consensus
foreign policy, but during the Clinton Administration, not in this
Administration. That is that these alliances needed to be retained, that
NATO could be enlarged successfully, that we could downsize our military but
we needed to retain a capability to deal with two major regional conflicts,
which, by the way, is something that needed revision by the time I got back
here. But it was the defense policy of the Clinton years, ironically.

Q: In fact John Louis Gaddis said that.

Wolfowitz: Who?

Q: John Louis Gaddis has said that, that if you look at Clinton's policy it
actually does come out of the '92 guidance to some extent.

Wolfowitz: Not to some extent. It's pretty much verbatim.

Q: But you're --

Wolfowitz: -- without acknowledgement.

Q: Except you have been skeptical about Clinton's, the sentimental
liberalism in his ideas, his approach to foreign policy, right?

Wolfowitz: Well, yes but let's remember that -- I think they made a serious
over-reach in Somalia when they went beyond just ending starvation and tried
to do nationbuilding. I think Haiti was a waste of American effort. I think,
as we've learned, the North Korea Framework Agreement was delusional. But on
two of the key things they did, namely Bosnia and Kosovo, Bob Dole supported
Clinton quite strongly and I would say courageously on Bosnia and I'm proud
to claim some credit in having advised --

Q: You did too.

Wolfowitz: I did too, but I also was there when Dole was being pushed by
some of his Republican colleagues to go after Clinton saying this would be a
catastrophe. I said no it won't be, and moreover, it's the right thing to
do.
If they had dropped the arms embargo on the Bosnians as they promised to do
when they came into office it might not have been necessary to still have
thousands of foreign troops in Bosnia. But by the time you got to it in 1995
it was the only alternative.
And similarly, on Kosovo, when Bush was deciding whether to support it or
not, I was strongly urging him to do so. When some Republicans tried to
undercut Clinton on Kosovo, it was Bush and McCain together who told them
don't do that. It's wrong.
So it's not that everything they did was wrong, but I think things like
Haiti and Somalia were over-reached and generally there was, I think, a
difficulty in distinguishing what was American interest from what were sort
of vaguely seen as international community preferences. But I'm not a
unilateralist by any means. In fact I don't think you can get much done in
this world if you do it alone.

Q: Do you think there was a reluctance on their part even to use the threat
of force? To make force an option in the way that it's now become -- I think
about North Korea, Syria and Iran, and actually --

Wolfowitz: And Iraq.

Q: And Iraq. When I think about it, these other three that have now been
brought up, being discussed, have actually been very kind of multinational
and diplomatic and yet it's partly the threat of force that seems to
strengthen the approach, doesn't it?

Wolfowitz: There's no question that in certain -- First of all, diplomacy
that it's just words is rarely going to get you much unless you're dealing
with people who basically share your values and your interests. I'm not
against, I mean sometimes it does help to just have a better understanding.
But if you're talking about trying to move people to something that they're
not inclined to do, then you've got to have leverage and one piece of
leverage is the ultimate threat of force. It's something you need to be very
careful about because, as Rumsfeld likes to say, don't cock unless you're
prepared to throw it.
By the way I think there was a tendency to cock it too often with Kosovo. If
you go back and look at the year and a half or so leading up to when we
finally did use force there were so many empty threats issued that Milosevic
clearly concluded, ultimately wrongly, that we weren't serious.
So I think yeah, I think the threat of force is one of the instruments of
diplomacy, but it's one that needs to be used carefully.
I'm going to have to break here for a few minutes and we'll try to get back
to you soon.

Q: Thanks so much. Goodbye.


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