Hawk Denies 2+2=4
Sunday, August 17th, 2008Christopher Hitchens wants to know, in re: the 79 billion dollars of petrol-fueled surplus funds the Iraqi government is expected to accrue by year’s end, if “we [may] take a moment to apologize to Paul Wolfowitz? Of all the many slanders hurled at this advocate for Iraq’s liberation, probably none was more gleefully bandied about than his congressional testimony that Iraq’s recovery from decades of war and fascism could be self-financing.” Well, before we decide whether we owe Wolfowitz an apology, it might be helpful to take account of what Wolfowitz actually said. Wolfowitz’ 2003 statement to Congress on the eve of the invasion didn’t refer to “Iraq’s recovery from decades of war and fascism” — and note the classic Hitchens gambit of putting his own highly tendentious characterization of an event into other people’s mouths, the better to stack the deck rhetorically in favor of the moral blackmail* sure to come within a few paragraphs — but it did include a handy timeline and some dollar estimates: (more…)