Paul Wolfowitz on the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars and a Life in Foreign Policy | Uncommon Knowledge
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- čas přidán 30. 04. 2024
- Recorded on April 4, 2024.
Currently a fellow at the Hoover Institution, Paul Wolfowitz previously served as director of policy planning at the State Department, as US ambassador to Indonesia, as under secretary of defense for policy, as dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, as deputy secretary of defense, and as president of the World Bank. He is perhaps best known as a policymaker during the war in Afghanistan and the first and second wars in Iraq, and that is what we delve into in great detail in this episode. Wolfowitz gives his views on what the United States got right and got wrong in both Iraq and Afghanistan, recounting the data available to decision makers at the time and the decision-making processes. He also gives new details on why the Bush administration believed Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and determined an invasion of Afghanistan was necessary after 9/11, and how the idea for the surge in Iraq was conceived and executed.
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I am a veteran of 23 years. Paul Wolfowitz "avoided" serving in Vietnam yet he was very keen for me to fight in wars that weakened the US position on the world stage. While we should have smashed Afghanistan, we achieved all we were going to accomplish there within 6 months. A withdrawal at that time would have left a clear warning to the world not to mess with us. Our adventure in Iraq strengthened Iran and weakened us. Wolfowitz was heavily involved in "Team B" which vastly inflated the numbers and capability of soviet weaponry. I could not have less respect for this man.
He should be in jail
@@dgib1694Maybe something more severe however you’re correct
I can't imagine why Paul Wolfowitz of all people is the one you want to take advice on foreign policy from.
Conservatives really are the Stupid Party. In this case, they're too stupid to realize that this guy isn't so much incompetent as he evil.
Yeah, he was the Deputy Secretary of Defense of the world's most powerful country. What does he know about foreign policy?
Yeah…because thanks to his expertise and great advice things turned out so great in Afghanistan and Iraq …!
@@dfdf-rj8jr and he proved what a terrible monster he was by helping lie our way into slaughtering a million Iraqis for nothing
Only the worst kind of rats support this man
@tripp8833 rests his case.
I wish Peter wouldn’t interrupt him the whole time and let Wolfowitz speak, complete his thoughts.
Peter is getting worse and closing his eyes more. One does slow down as one ages.
Wow, a discussion totally lacking in context; Saddam just "appeared" did he? We had funded him, he was OUR guy, we had supported him in a long war against Iran, we had provided the chemical weapons for him to use against the Kurds (Rumsfeld!!!!) Bush senior laid out in his biography EXACTLY why we didnt go to Baghdad as he knew it would be a hornets nest of clan sectarianism. Iraq was targeted after 9/11 because, according to Richard Clarke, Rumsfeld and Cheney said it would be better to make an example of. Wolfowitz and co should have been on trial for war crimes but instead he gets this appalling soft-ball interview. Bush senior was right, his son and the henchmen that surrounded him have created 25 years of chaos in the most unstable part of the world.
he was one of the geniuses behind 'de-baathification' in Iraq too. I bet Iran loves this guy.
Well said
@@tripp8833I thought Paul Brehmer was the one responsible for the de Baathification?? Either way he was part of the Bush administration
Anytime a war is fought without clear objectives and a plan that makes sense for what comes after the fighting ends is a mistake. It doesn't help when policy makers realize they have made mistakes but won't change course and admit that mistakes have been made because they are more concerned about their political hides than about getting the mistakes corrected.
I knew this bad results would occur educated in California junior, high and colleges from 1959-85 couldn’t attend the colleges of my choice because colleges and high school counselors including the college still impacted since 1969 to present year of 2024! Another college didn’t have enough classes with teachers in junior and senior year to graduate thus was impossible to graduate within the 4 years then required to pay for another year for teaching credential with teachers graduating but NOT enough jobs for the graduates to teach. I predicted everything because isn’t required to attend college for knowledge this is a racket for corporate since follow the money best education my parents gave purchased my books for private library of $5,000 better than college. PS . Stanford reputation is fake !
The objective was clear for Afghanistan, destroy the terror camps and prevent their return. Then we began to learn on the fly how tribal and difficult Afghanistan is, especially when the enemy (the Taliban) take refuge across a border into, what was supposed to be, a country allied with the U.S.
@@danielmartin7838 You just explained why the objective was not clear in Afghanistan. Everyone should have known that the Taliban came from Pakistan and were supplied by Pakistan. Therefore their ability to take refuge there was no surprise. Yet, there was no effectual plan to deal with this problem. It was like Vietnam, where the enemy used its own territory, plus Laos and Cambodia to attack the South. And our ground forces were prohibited (other than one incursion into Cambodia) from pursuing them. That is a war that cannot be won. Bush ruined everything he touched, foreign and domestic, with one exception.
Peter Robinson, please stop interrupting your interlocuteur.
58:13
Sort of shows how those in academia and government, limit the candidate pool for government work. I’ve seen so many videos state that Americans should look into public service, give back to our nation, but when you look at who’s running the government, it’s the Ivy Leaguers. There are more of us who are not Ivy Leaguers that are interested in serving our government, but we slip through the cracks in order to have the well off to do land the policy jobs. Imagine that, those who did not struggle in their lives, who are well connected, make policies over the mass who know what true struggle is.
Such an unfortunate thing.
Yeah, it's definitely strange that tech startups and the like pay far better than US Govt jobs but have way less restrictions. You don't even need a college degree to make it in Silicon Valley, for example.
I agree, we trained them and south vietnam to depend upon us air power and then when it was no longer present, their militaries fell apart.
28:40, it already feels pretty lonely as a 25 year old, defending the reasons to go into iraq and its only been 4 years since i have been doing it, not looking forward to a lifetime of it
legendary paul robinson with great questions and legendary for good or bad reason paul wolfowitz.
We were never willing to stay in Iraq for another 100 years as we did in Germany, Japan or Korea. So we should never have topped Saddam out
I remember where I was on 9/11: My wife was on the bus headed to work and I had just got done feeding my son and putting him in his rocking chair for a nap, when the phone rang. My asked if I had seen the news, we’re under attack, she said. Turning the news on I was stunned by what greeted me. We spoke of what was happening and I regaled her with a story I’d heard about a B-25 accidentally flying into the Empire State Building decades before and the building withstood the impact well. Not long after a second plane struck the other tower. I lost all sense of time as I watched that fateful scene unfold before my eyes. I remember telling her “the building is trembling, you can see it shaking”, and then it collapsed. My heart literally sunk with the building after watching people jump out to their certain deaths. I looked at my infant son as if instinctively, i was raw emotion, nothing went through my mind but pure hatred for those responsible. It’s a feeling I never had prior or since.
And now today we have people on American college campuses calling for repeated Oct 7 attacks and the destruction of our country.
What the fuck have we let into our country?!
They had power and wasted it.
History teaches that undeclared wars are difficult to win.
4:42 ... Agree wholeheartedly.
However ... what "The Families go through," that depends on the family.
Can we get Bruce Gilley on the show? I would love to see Peter help focus Gilley's arguments in The Case For Colonialism.
This is among the very best episodes of Uncommon Knowledge. Wolfowitz is calm & plainspoken in the way that only someone who knows he has offered his best to the world & made a real difference, can be. Very informative, nuanced & a blessed relief from all the shrill, adolescent self-actualization that seems to drown the subject (I was around 18 years old when 9/11, Iraq & Afghanistan happened and I remember how scarce any discussions actually worth listening to were).
A bonus is that the interview seems also to have boiled a perfectly desirable amount of p...nevermind.
A great conversation! As for the question at the end, artificial intelligence and foreign policy may not be as divergent as they seem ;)
Israeli AI programs “Lavender” and “Where’s Daddy” adding significantly to Netanyahu’s war crimes in Gaza.
AMERICA IS GOOD....NOT PERFECT .....THAT HAS TO BE THE START OF OUR FOREIGN POLICY....
Thank you for this wonderful interview. I almost forgot all of these disgusting lies that were used to bamboozle us into war. Giving our children an ocean of debt and an entire region of enemies.
This program stated was recorded on August 4, 2024 but today is May 1, 2024 ! WHO is withholding the future Time Machine !
The military force was smaller because Bush I and Clinton had got rid of Reagan's military. The force committed was smaller because the entire force was smaller. Reagan had us within 12 ships of having a 600 ship fleet, we are now down to 250 and falling. Despite all of these peace dividends, the US is bankrupt and now militarily weak.
HR McMaster’s 1997 book “Dereliction of Duty : Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam”. Could easily have an addendum including GW Bush and his Criminal regime.
As a deployable ANG fighter-recce pilot at the time of both Gulf Wars, I was an enthusiastic supporter of each, and unlike Tucker Carlson, I have no regrets. G.W. Bush may have wanted regime change in Iraq at some point, but the key issue for me is why the timing of Bush's order to launch Iraqi Freedom when he did? In other words, were the nonexistent, as was later alledged, WMDs merely a cynical triggering ruse to justify the invasion and regime change, or did the President and his advisors actually believe that Sadam's plans for using them were an imminent threat to the region? The political post mortems that emerged on both sides centered on the issue of Sadam's WMD posture. Did he have them as he claimed, and if so was their use imminent, or worthy of strategic delay? In retrospect, Sadam clearly had done everything possible by his nebulous claims of innocence to convince all of his antagonists that he in fact was hiding a vast and potent WMD stockpile, and what's more, was prepared to use it. The Iraqis made a great show of thwarting international inspection teams from seeing suspected UN sanctioned weapons facilities that everyone in the world was increasingly persuaded that they had. If Sadam was playing a very clever game to deter invasion, it backfired on him fatally. In Bush's final White House council of war, when Bush asked how confident they were in the WMD intelligence estimates, CIA Director Tenet, a Clinton holdover, reportedly pounded his fist on the table, and exclaimed, "It's a slam dunk, Mr. President!" That was enough for Bush, and the rest is history. As Stephen Kotkin would say, "we won the war, but lost the peace".
Wow a nuanced and intelligent comment!
Our elites do not pay a rice for making stupid decisions, so they continue to make them. Anyone familiar with the Middle East could have told Bush Jr. that taking out the ONLY real counterweight to Iran was supremely dumb. In the Middle East you can’t calculate these things as single order of magnitude problems. The secondary effects ALONE should have cautioned some of our ‘best and brightest’. But here we have Wolfowitz looking well fed and sanguine as heaps of bodies are piled up behind him….most of which he seems totally unaware of.
how many fuck ups you guys need to understand that you should not be in there ?
Tenet was a half-wit, as was Bush. There was no evidence of a nuclear program (WMDs is a BS term, all that matters is nukes). It was gone in 1991 and inspections continued for years thereafter. Saddam didn't have the money or the human resources to rebuild his nuclear program. The criminal & incompetent Bush regime didn't seek expertise from actual experts in nuclear weapons programs. Greg Cochran was one such expert and he wrote an explanation of Iraq's incapacity before the invasion. He was duly ignored by Bush and his Trotskyist friends like Wolfowitz. The handful of people who knew it was impossible were simply shut out of the bureaucratic loop--intentionally. Bush & Co are war criminals. They are traitors. One of the best things Trump has done is to bury the reputation of Bush among most Republicans. Bitterenders about the Bush regime remind me of Chinese who sentimentalize Mao today. They'll only be cured by leaving this world.
30:00 I would think that the disparity in troop numbers between 1990 and 2003 would be obvious. The US Army was much larger for that first operation, as it occurred right at the tail end of the Cold War, before the enormous cuts of the '90's. By 2003, we simply couldn't have repeated a Desert Storm-like operation on a similar scale, even had we wanted to.
Excellent interview - Very thoughtful and informative!
The mission creep in Afghanistan and very lengthy time that NATO troops stayed was awful planning. Obviously, after the Taliban was defeated and driven to Pakistan, NATO advisors needed to stay as well as political and technical assistance. Some financial aid also but not in the way that created horrible corruption and waste of taxpayer money.
The aftermath of defeat of Saddam was an awful screwup.
The “Afghanistan Papers”. 20 years of public lies / 20 years of private truths
The Iraq war was the worst foreign policy mistake the US has made since Vietnam, and rivals it in lies, perfidity, and lack of understanding on the part of the American leadership. Beginning this talk by referencing 9/11 reinforces the lie that the Iraq invasion was a consequence of 9/11, when in fact the Bush administration had been planning to invade Iraq since well before that event, and 9/11 and Afghanistan sort of got in the way of this plan. I consider Bush, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz to be war criminals for all the needless death and destruction they caused. It really galls me to watch Wolfowitz sit there now with absolutely no sense of shame, contrition, or even a bit of wisdom gained. He is either still lying, or still doesn't get it.
He's a typical Trotskyist, full of Chutzpah.
Exactly, except that the Irak war was much worse, for its consequences, then the Vietnam war. The whole Middle East is chaos now and Iran is doing fine
9/11 was how the American public knew that Islam is at it's core, evil - the Ottomans genocided, colonized and occupied my birthplace for 500yrs
Such a gap between how Europeans and Americans perceive this… and sad to see that there is not one neocon that is able to apologize. McNamara had that decency after Vietnam.
Chutzpah is characteristic of one tribe above all others.
Europeans understand nothing about American politics, society, or culture, and are every bit as ignorant when it comes to the US as they claim Americans are about the rest of the world. Let's be real - before this video, you thought America was an evil empire, responsible for everything wrong with the world, filled with greedy warmongers, and after this video, you think the exact same.
From the US Perspective, Vietnam was the same as Iraq - a good idea, but terribly executed. North Vietnam was a Soviet-backed state trying to spread a demented ideology, and Saddam Hussein was trying to become a regional hegemon in an unstable yet globally vital region. He refused to comply with weapons inspections and refused to condemn the worst terrorist attack in human history.
Any other opinion, and you're really just a useful idiot for Arab terrorists or Western leftists who repeatedly have tried to wreck an era with unprecedented levels of peace.
Also, McNamara never formally apologized for Vietnam itself, just for his mistakes in the conflict.
Europeans understand nothing about American society, politics, culture, they're every bit as ignorant about Americans as they claim the rest of the world to be. Before this video, you thought the US was an evil empire, the root of everything wrong with the world, and after it, you think the same. You will never understand that the peace and stability Europe enjoys is a direct result of US hegemony, and could easily go away if the US stopped interfering in world affairs (including in the Middle East) - but of course, when Russia acts up, you run crying to the US for help. The same with Israel/Saudi Arabia and Iran, with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China.
Vietnam and Iraq were poorly executed, but ultimately the idea was good. Vietnam was a front in the Cold War, and the country could have ended up more like South Korea instead of North Korea had the US planned it properly. Saddam Hussein refused to condemn 9/11 or comply with weapons inspections and, given the speed with which Eastern Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia democratized after the end of the Cold War, one would have expected the same in Iraq - the non-neocon conservatives (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell) screwed the thing up.
Because the difference is they did for a foreign power.
apologize for dealing with the core of what Islam is? the Ottomans colonized, genocided, and pillaged my birthplace for 500yrs, and Muhammad was a pedophile warlord
Great to see Mr. Wolfowitz, he's not seen enough!
He should speak more often tbh...influential and quite intelligent
the Monday morning armchair generals are hilarious
"By the time the Iraq war becomes non-divisive, Paul Wolfowitz and Peter Robinson will be playing golf in a different realm."
Mr. Robinson, you got heaven all wrong. Chasing a tiny white ball aimlessly all day is an eternal punishment specifically reserved for the likes of Sisyphus -- and even he opted for a rock and a hill.
Golf is fun, you can take lsd and smoke a dozen cigars, while walking around gorgeous parkland.
I don’t know. He has a few notable lines where he models empathy…but I don’t know. My takeaway sense is that he’s your standard CYA bureaucrat. Now if he’d said something like, “We gave them no clear political endstate to achieve militarily and *I* am too responsible for that!” might present better. But he he didn’t. I was in two of his wars…he wasn’t a leader I remember, that’s for sure.
were you involved in any of the crash retrieval programs in those wars? or the stateside reverse engineering teams?
How do you give a war criminal a platform and take him seriously is pure satire stuff.
No platforming is a communist strategy. The flaw here is that Robinson is too weak or foolish to hold this criminal to account with a brutal interrogation.
You two are nutballs...
This guy trumped up the case for war and got Bush to convince the UK to come along. Cannot believe this guy is getting a comfy chair - should be dining on bread and water in a cell.
saddam was fucking around with tech and powers you still don't know about, he was playing with fire and got burned
Before I were to attempt filing lawsuits against someone i would first ask myself do I have wrong doing concerning the person I am legally satisfied SCOUT'S disrobed have a plan passes in 16 minutes 1989
Thank you Peter Robinson and Paul Wolfowitz. " Learning and moving on."
37:42, the Russians never "planned" to give Moscow to Napoleon. It just happened.
Our great grandfathers stormed beaches and lived in a dirt holes but we are cowed by mean names that aren't even true?
what are you talking about
3:13mins is a clear an example of ‘duping delight’ that I have witnessed. 🤮
⭐
One of the best foreign policy leaders against terror and aggression, a strong for freedom of the sea and freedom from tyranny, Russia, Iraq, a true patriot.
Wolfowitz resembles Fauci. Are they related?
In the comments, it says: "Recorded on August 4, 2024" I watch this today May 1, 2024. Clearly the date is incorrect. In this age of misinformation, I am a stickler for telling the truth. Please fix this, as it detracts from your credibility on all fronts.
Thank you for correcting.
That’s what I said this is FAKE
Self-deception at it’s finest, it’s not a “fake”
Where were all the parts of the plane after the impact?
Pretty sure they have turned off comments on this. And are deleting some of them.
is that why I can say you're full of shit?
CIA arrived in Afghanistan on Sep 26 and SOF on October 19. The CIA had a plan ready to but the Pentagon didn’t. This fact infuriated Rumsfeld
. Wolfowitz failed to acknowledge this in the video,
Allowing Pakistan off the hook for allowing the Taliban to cross their border for refuge was an enormous mistake
7:32 ... 🥳 ... ✊ ... 🎉🎉🎉🎈🎈🎈 ... ✨✨✨ ... 🇺🇸
PNAC Project for a New American Century founder?
Wolfowitz , not a great leader
Wolfowitz. Youve got to be kidding me.
Feith,WOLFOWITZ, RUMSFELD GREAT MEN......RANDI WEINGARTEN IS A GREAT MAN TOO
he knows shit you don't, homeboy
I wonder if he was part of the decision making team who decided to ground all US aircraft… Except the aircraft flying back all the bin Laden family relatives from the United States back to Saudi Arabia… Before the FBI could even interview them.
For those who don’t remember, they were allowed to fly back to Saudi Arabia without being interviewed at all. While all US citizens were on the ground, unable to fly for days.
Could it be the oil and financial connections of the Bush family? They already knew who they were going to blame?
For those who don't remember, it is an extremely large family, not at all like a US family, and there were dozens or hundreds of them in the United States at the time of the attack.
Absolute filth
Not filth.
@@danielmartin7838only a filthy rat would say that
Hoover does itself no favours having disgraced policy makers like Wolfowitz on, the man should be castigated and relegated to the dustbin of history instead of trying to be rehabilitated.
he knows shit you don't bro
What this guy and his cohorts did was so incompetent and based upon lies that people here shouldn't necessarily rule out the possibility that he was acting in the interests of other countries. As conspiratorial as that sounds… others here have made the claim.
Multiple commenters have directly said it here.
I don't think it's a crazy thing to consider.
the WMD saddam had was the same kind of tech used in Havana syndrome- the kind of tech the federal commissions on Havana openly admit is destabilizing if revealed to the general public
if the enemy has silent weapons that can kill at a distance, disclosing that to the public can be catastrophic- there's a Scientific American article about this
I have never seen a picture of the “airplane”that hit the Pentagon
The interviewer is only asking leading questins begging the answers. What s manipulative style.
What a waste of time.
I get his point that using airpower we could have sustained the afghan army but to what end… taliban would have won nonetheless. After defeating them we should have taken the win and left nation building to the afghans.
Imagine if we gave up in our postwar occupation of Japan or Germany. Iraq is a multidecade project.
Pure idiocity.
OG war criminal
Who? Well anyway's, you should go get that Bad-Guy. Take'im'Out ... like a Real-Man. Otherwise you're NOTHING!
only a war criminal if you don't know how inherently evil Islam is
BIG FAT MISTAKE.
Сидят два старика, которые знают правду о Ираке и Афганистане , но ведут наивные речи о безопасности жизни для сша???? Доя кого этот цирк? Вас слушают недоразвитые люди????? Вы не верите в свои доктрины и когда вы друг другу рассказываете , то к концу беседы вы начинаете верить !!!!! Хоть какой то смысл….. привет, Кондолизе!!! Из неё должен был получится - человек, но!!!!!! Что получилось , то получилось!!! Жаль, такой опыт и все впустую.
Condi is a person for fucks sake
It’s always the 9-11 excuse…
Pw is a 🤡
Ever met him?
Вторглись в Ирак , разорили музеи Ирака. Увезли артефакты . Царь Нимрод вам не простит. Увезли золотые артефакты ….. так вы убийцы и варвары ….. грабите народ Ирака. У вас континент разваливается, а вы продолжаете тащить в свою нору - золото????? Это уже заболевание…….
They took away artifacts that the natives did not know the significance of, and could not properly use or care for.
Saddam knew and cared, but tried to pervert the artifacts to suit his narrative.