June 1-9, 2003: Administration Defenders Say Wolfowitz Was Misquoted in Stating WMD Were ‘Bureaucratic Rationale’ for War

Conservative defenders of the Bush administration contend that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was misquoted by Vanity Fair reporter Sam Tanenhaus. In an upcoming profile of Wolfowitz, Tanenhaus quotes him as saying, “For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on” (see May 30, 2003). [Jamieson and Cappella, 2008, pp. 150] According to a Defense Department transcript of the original May 9, 2003 interview, Wolfowitz’s actual words were: “The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason, but… 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. Actually I guess you could say there’s a fourth overriding one, which is the connection between the first two.” [Vanity Fair, 5/9/2003] Some of the controversy centers on which portions of the interview were on the record and which were not. [Talking Points Memo, 6/7/2003] Neoconservative pundit and columnist William Kristol is at the forefront of the counterattacks on Wolfowitz’s behalf. After appearing on Fox News where he accuses Tanenhaus of “misquot[ing]” Wolfowitz’s words and “taking [them] out of context,” he writes a column railing against “[l]azy reporters” who don’t bother to accurately report Wolfowitz’s words, and noting, “Tanenhaus has mischaracterized Wolfowitz’s remarks,… Vanity Fair’s publicists have mischaracterized Tanenhaus’s mischaracterization, and… Bush administration critics are now indulging in an orgy of righteous indignation that is dishonest in triplicate.” Kristol concludes: “In short, Wolfowitz made the perfectly sensible observation that more than just WMD was of concern, but that among several serious reasons for war, WMD was the issue about which there was widest domestic (and international) agreement.… Tanenhaus has taken a straightforward and conventional observation about strategic arrangements in a post-Saddam Middle East and juiced it up into a vaguely sinister ‘admission’ about America’s motives for going to war in the first place.” Kristol is joined by the Wall Street Journal editorial board, which calls the Tanenhaus piece “spin.” [Weekly Standard, 6/9/2003; Jamieson and Cappella, 2008, pp. 150]