The Crazy Aunt (and Uncle) of Iraq Policy
Oh, this is rich. I just noticed that Atrios linked to a post at Abu Aardvaark regarding my very favorite lil’ wacky neocon, Laurie Mylroie:
…Incredibly, Wolfowitz told NBC’s Tim Russert that he didn’t know who was responsible for the Cole and Khobar Tower attacks. But on that question, the agreement is all but unanimous: It wasn’t Saddam, it wasn’t Iraq. It was Osama and al-Qaida.”
What is Wolfowitz talking about? Boehlert doesn’t speculate, but I’m happy to. I would never presume to know the mind of the Wolfowitz, but I have a pretty good idea what is going on here: Wolfowitz is loyal to his friend Laurie Mylroie. Mylroie, for those who haven’t come across her before, has long been kind of the “crazy aunt” of Iraq policy. Obsessed with the idea that Saddam Hussein was behind most of the world’s evil, Mylroie has spun an astonishing web in a series of articles and a very odd book to “prove” that Iraq was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing – as well as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing (you may have thought it was Timothy McVeigh, but hello – pay attention, okay?), the 1997 Luxor attacks in Egypt, the Cole bombing, the anthrax attacks, and the cancelation of Firefly (well, maybe not that last one, but he probably *wanted* Firefly canceled).
In her brand new book, “Bush vs. the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror” (yes, you read that title right), Mylroie goes even farther, entering into tinfoil hat-country. According to Mylroie, Iraq was responsible for September 11 – not working with al-Qaeda, not coordinating with al-Qaeda, but actually responsible for it, while cleverly setting al-Qaeda and bin Laden up to take the fall. Yes, Mylroie (who was invited to testify before the 9/11 commission, co-authored a book with Judith Miller, is affiliated with AEI, is good friends with Ahmad Chalabi as well as with Paul Wolfowitz) denies bin Laden’s responsibility for 9/11… (p.51)
Go read the whole post because not only is it informative, it is also funny.
It reminded me that Wolfowitz had actually specifically endorsed some of Mylroie’s crazy rantings in the famous Vanity Fair article, but it had been overlooked in the flap over WMD and the bureaucracy.
Josh Marshall wrote at the time:
So here’s the story with the disputed quotes from Sam Tanenhaus’ article on Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in Vanity Fair. As noted here a couple days ago, the Tanenhaus article says that Wolfowitz is “confident” that Saddam played some role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and that he had “entertained” the notion that Saddam had played some role in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing as well. (Tanenhaus sources Wolfowitz’s ideas about Oklahoma City to a “longtime friend” of the Deputy Secretary.)
In the portion of his article that discusses his interview, Tanenhaus quotes Wolfowitz on the 1993 bombing and then notes that Wolfowitz declined to comment on Saddam’s possible involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing.
Now, Wolfowitz is also on record as saying that he’s unclear about Cole and Khobar Towers, which his looney friend Mylroie also claims were masterminded by the Godlike and Omnipotent Saddam Hussein.
This is some real crazy-assed thinking and when you combine it with their blind faith in the Iraqi exile hustlers, you really have to question whether we are dealing with people who are working on all cylinders.
Interestingly, when I went back to read the transcript of the vanity Fair interview (which does not contain the refences to 1993 or Oklahoma because while they claim they were off the record) I found this incredible quote from Wolfowitz:
The mistake that Saddam made was in assuming that we would behave in a certain way, i.e. we would never go to war until we’d had six weeks of bombing first. That’s a sort of classic intelligence failure, to have a certain expectation and then see all the evidence in light of that expectation.
Yup. Uh huh. He said it.