To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (100231 ) 6/4/2003 5:45:22 PM From: NickSE Read Replies (3) | Respond to Another British Attack on Wolfowitz littlegreenfootballs.com The Guardian, not to be outdone by the Independent and Vanity Fair, is the latest anti-American rag to misquote Paul Wolfowitz, with a hideously misleading headline and a quote that’s taken so far out of context that it qualifies as deliberate deception: Wolfowitz: Iraq war was 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." Wolfowitz is on a five-day visit to Asia to coordinate U.S. military strategy with Asian allies, and will travel from Singapore to Seoul, South Korea and Tokyo. He has been calling for a "firm, common, multilateral position" among the United States, South Korea, Japan, China and Russia to put economic pressure on North Korea for a verifiable dismantling of its nuclear weapons programs. Because most aid and trade with North Korea comes from the other nations, the United States cannot go it alone, he said. could not use economic pressure to strangle Hussein's regime "because the country floats on a sea of oil. " North Korea, by comparison, is near economic collapse, and that offers "a major point of leverage," he said. Look, the primary 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.
