Long Time No See, Wolfowitz!
Page January 25th, 2008
We knew they’d find a way to sneak him back into the administration. The Boston Globe reports:
Paul Wolfowitz, the former World Bank president and former deputy secretary of defense who was instrumental in the US decision to invade Iraq in 2003, has been named chairman of a panel that advises the State Department on arms-control issues.
“Arms control”, as in WMDs. Oh, the irony…
In case you’re wondering where Wolfowitz has been since his demise last year as president of the World Bank, he’s been hanging out with the sensitive, thoughtful souls at the American Enterprise Institute.
The State Department panel that he will chair is the ISAB, or the International Security Advisory Board. As described on the State Department website:
The Secretary of State’s International Security Advisory Board (formerly called the Arms Control and Nonproliferation Advisory Board (ACNAB)) provides the Department with independent insight and advice on all aspects of arms control, disarmament, international security, and related aspects of public diplomacy. The ISAB is sponsored and overseen by the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security. The Board provides its recommendations directly to the Secretary of State.
The Boston Globe article continues with a great quote from an expert in the field of nuclear nonproliferation:
Joseph Cirincione, a senior fellow and director for nuclear policy at the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based policy research group, criticized Wolfowitz’s appointment.
“The advice given by Paul Wolfowitz over the past six years ranks among the worst provided by any defense official in history,” Cirincione said. “I have no idea why anyone would want more.”
As Arms Control Wonk’s Jeffrey Lewis mentioned here and here, it’s noteworthy that Wolfowitz will be chairing a panel that already leans to the right. It includes Kathleen Bailey, Amb. Robert Joseph, and Keith B. Payne, who are members of a right wing think tank that has advocated the development of nuclear “bunker busters”. The board also includes James R. Schlesinger (Secretary of Defense under Presidents Nixon and Ford), and former CIA director R. James Woolsey (1993-1995), who, on September 12, 2001, claimed that “the most likely, certainly not the only possibility [behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks) is Iraq.”
One of the other board members is William van Cleave, who, like Wolfowitz, was a member of the infamous “Team B“, way back when George H. W. Bush was head of the CIA:
The outside experts on Team B were led by Harvard Professor Richard Pipes and included such well-known hawks as Paul Nitze, William Van Cleave, and Paul Wolfowitz. Not surprisingly, Team B concluded that the intelligence specialists had badly underestimated the threat because they relied too heavily on hard data, instead of extrapolating the Soviets’ intentions from ideology.[1] According to some Team B members, “the principal threat to our nation, to world peace, and to the cause of human freedom was the Soviet drive for dominance based upon an unparalleled military buildup.”[2]
Although the Team B report contained little factual data, it was enthusiastically received by conservative groups such as the Committee on the Present Danger, whose members included Ronald Reagan, and the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. But the report turned out to be grossly inaccurate.
[snip]
Team B was right about one thing. The CIA estimate was indeed flawed. In 1989, the agency published an internal review of the threat assessments from 1974 to 1986. The report concluded that the Soviet threat had been “substantially overestimated” every year. In 1978, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that the selection of Team B members yielded a flawed composition of political views and biases.[4] Consequently, the Team B analysis was deemed a gross exaggeration and completely inaccurate.
In other words, Wolfowitz learned the art of threat inflation way back during the Cold War, and perfected it in the buildup to the Iraq war. So, he’ll definitely be in good company in his new job.
So, what’s the next threat inflation project? Iran?
