Wolfowitz: “Not a reason to put lives at risk”

I like Dennis Miller’s new show (which, weirdly, seems to not exist over at MSNBC’s website). Miller has turned into a cranky old bastard who almost makes Andy Rooney look like Al Roker, but he did have Scott Ritter on last week, and Scott mentioned this passage, so I dug it up. Very enlightening stuff to anyone whosays the reasons for this war were based on human rights:

“There have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people…The third one by itself is a reason to help the Iraqis but it’s not a reason to put American kids’ lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it.”

Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense
Vanity Fair, 5-15-2003

Naturally he said that before the first two reasons were all but shot down for lack of evidence. Now they openly admit there was no terrorist connection. Now that WMD and terrorist links have been disproven, the administration are betting everything on the human rights angle. With all the bad intelligence that went on in the first two angles, I have to wonder — is this administration horribly corrupt, or just horribly inept? And which is worse?

And if the argument for war is still human rights violations, then I have to ask what makes Hussein any different than these guys – because it sure isn’t WMD:

  1. Kim Jong Il — North Korea (in power since 1994)
  2. King Fahd & Crown Prince Abdullah — Saudi Arabia (in power since 1982 & 1995, respectively)
  3. Than Shwe — Burma (in power since 1992)
  4. Teodoro Obiang Nguema — Equatorial Guinea (in power since 1979).
  5. Saparmurad Niyazov — Turkmenistan (in power since 1990)
  6. Muammar al-Qaddafi — Libya (in power since 1969)
  7. Fidel Castro — Cuba (in power since 1959)
  8. Alexander Lukashenko — Belarus (in power since 1994)

That list was pulled from Parade magazine’s list of the top worst dictators, as compiled by human rights organizations. Of course there are others: Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Omar Bongo El Haj of Gabon, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela…