Funmurphys: the Blog

Was It About Oil? Not According To Wolfowitz

Yes, I know that the Guardian is claiming that Paul Wolfowitz let the cat out of the bag, and in response to a question about the difference in handling of North Korea and Iraq, said it was all about oil:

"Asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found, the deputy defence minister said: "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."

The problem is, he didn't say that. Sad to say, you can't believe everything you read in the paper. Here's the actual question and answer, from the DOD transcript:

"Q: What I meant is that essentially North Korea is being taken more seriously because it has become a nuclear power by its own admission, whether or not that’s true, and that the lesson that people will have is that in the case of Iraq it became imperative to confront Iraq militarily because it had banned weapons systems and posed a danger to the region. In the case of North Korea, which has nuclear weapons as well as other banned weapons of mass destruction, apparently it is imperative not to confront, to persuade and to essentially maintain a regime that is just as appalling as the Iraqi regime in place, for the sake of the stability of the region. To other countries of the world this is a very mixed message to be sending out.

Wolfowitz: The concern about implosion is not primarily at all a matter of the weapons that North Korea has, but a fear particularly by South Korea and also to some extent China of what the larger implications are for them of having 20 million people on their borders in a state of potential collapse and anarchy. It’s is also a question of whether, if one wants to persuade the regime to change, whether you have to find -- and I think you do -- some kind of outcome that is acceptable to them. But that outcome has to be acceptable to us, and it has to include meeting our non-proliferation goals.

Look, the primarily difference -- to put it a little too simply -- between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq. The problems in both cases have some similarities but the solutions have got to be tailored to the circumstances which are very different."

I suppose something can be lost in translating from english into german and then back again, since the Guardian was relying on the reporting of a couple of German newspapers. Since I don't read german, I have no idea if the fault lies with the german papers (Der Tagesspiegel and Die Welt), the Guardian, or somewhere in between.

So what Wolfowitz said was, to put it in soviet terms, in Iraq the correlation of military forces was heavily in our favor while the correlation of ecomonic forces wasn't too good; thus, the military option was used. In North Korea, the opposite balance obtains, so we are pursuing the economic option over the military. Why this is so hard for some people to grasp is beyond me - it isn't exactly rocket science.

UPDATE: The Guardian admits it was wrong:

"A report which was posted on our website on June 4 under the heading "Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil" misconstrued remarks made by the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, making it appear that he had said that oil was the main reason for going to war in Iraq. He did not say that. He said, according to the department of defence website, "The ... difference between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq." The sense was clearly that the US had no economic options by means of which to achieve its objectives, not that the economic value of the oil motivated the war. The report appeared only on the website and has now been removed."

Next question is, will all those sites that ran with this story come out and tell you that it has been retracted? I'm not holding my breath.