Two architects of tragic and unnecessary US military endeavors have found each other.
And having found each other, remind us of why neither should ever be allowed near the levers of power committing US lives again.
Former Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz of Iraq/CPA fame is now supporting Secretary Clinton who voted to invade Iraq and then went on to create the Libyan War.
Former Bush administration official and key Iraq war planner, Paul Wolfowitz said in an interview published Friday that he will likely vote for Hillary Clinton as he believes Donald Trump would be a danger to American national security.
Wolfowitz was one of the fiercest backers of the invasion of Iraq and is frequently described as an “architect” of the war.
Wolfowitz believes “Trump is going to be ‘Obama squared,’ a more extreme version of the same thing.”
Instead, Wolfowitz is going to support Secretary Clinton and to seek to work to continue replicating Iraq and Libyan “successes” into the future.
Set next to Wolfowitz and Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump becomes the soul of reticence and statesmanship.
President Obama’s has shown more insight than either Clinton or Wolfowitz in understanding that the Libyan War was a “turd sandwich.” He later added that his worst mistake was having “no plans for the day after in Libya” is a very searing indictment across the board of Secretary Clinton’s leadership.
Paul Wolfowitz wants to use his past performance to personally attack Donald Trump.
And the candidate he supports followed in his footsteps in replicating the worst aspects of the Iraq War in Libya. Hillary got the same result: A dead dictator, civil war, chaos, with no planning for anything — and more dead Americans without an end in sight or any strategic objectives realized.
Since Wolfowitz is now becoming a Secretary Clinton supporter, Senator Sanders’s “feel the burn voters,” who were cheated and betrayed by her, should genuinely appreciate my article written five years ago.
“America and NATO are bogged down in an “no end game” — “end game” in Afghanistan, and now the Three Amigos, Secretary Clinton, NSC Samantha Power and Ambassador Rice, have given Obama in his reported words a “turd sandwich” of a war in Libya.
Currently, it is highly likely that the pernicious and insidious strategy by the Main Stream Media will be to simply turn a blind eye as the Libyan War turns messy and unpredictable-thus not holding those responsible accountable. (That was a Bingo!).”
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2011/04/hope_is_not_a_strategy.html
Just like Hillary’s run up to Libyan attack, “we came, we saw, he died.”
A Mother Jones article captures Paul’s vision for “the day after” in Iraq:
“These are Arabs, 23 million of the most educated people in the Arab world, who are going to welcome us as liberators.
And when the message gets out to the whole Arab world, it’s going to be a powerful counter to Osama bin Laden…
It will be a great step forward.”
Paul Wolfowitz might debate about some details of what he wanted in opting for the war, but not only was the mission of rebuilding Iraq not executed (by not insuring the integrity of the post invasion process), but he had no plans for the follow up beyond clandestine moves aimed at buying and fixing the Iraqi electoral process.
The invasion plan, which left the post war reconstruction to his undersecretary Douglas Feith, never included dealing with reconstruction. The original plan, which I reviewed and could not believe was the plan, was simply to add one senior American and one assistant to each of Saddam’s Government Departments.
That was it.
Like Hillary Clinton in Libya he had no real concern about the day after.
Wolfowitz had no larcenous intent when he engaged a relatively unknown Iraqi businessman named Nadhmi Auchi to assure the success of Ahmed Chababi, his business partner and the head of the Iraqi National Congress, and Wolfowitz’s candidate for president of Iraq.
But this allowed and even encouraged Nadhmi Auchi and Ahmed Chalaibi to be the main political fixers for post victory Iraq.
This proved to be a buy in to corruption from the outset.
It was very clear to informed observers that Auchi and Chalabi were crooks, but apparently DSD Wolfowitz and his team were confident they could get away with anything until brilliant reporting by Lisa Myers and Aram Roston in NBC Nightly News and the Secretary of Defense’s Office of International Technology Security (ITS) surfaced its 142 page report showing Auchi, as the central player of the largest corruption case in Iraqi CPA reconstruction.
Auchi managed to fix and profit from the $3 billion Iraqi telecommunications contract and paying over $30 million in bribes to foreigners charged with running the process.
A coalition spokesman said he could not talk about the deliberations that led to the award [of the Iraqi telecommunication contract], but U.S. officials who issued the contract must not have checked with U.S. intelligence.
A senior U.S. official tells NBC that Nadhmi Auchi “plays all sides of the fence in Iraq … and was in business dealings with the former regime, including Saddam.”
DoD’s International Technology Security office had both the role as the OSD Office for “reach-back” support to assist in the rebuilding of Saddam’s Ministry of Transportation and Communication, and had a nascent Inspector General mission in Iraq.
Together they created Auchi’s worst nightmare: A group of honest Americans with badges.
The on the ground mission in Iraq which they conducted was to travel throughout Iraq to seek out and identify the illegal conventional contraband munitions and technology shipped in via the “Oil-for-Food” program.
The “Iraq Technology Transfer List” project, (shipping bad things to bad people)
http://www.strategycenter.net/research/pubID.242/pub_detail.asp
To accomplish their IG mission, ITS had a Memorandum of Understanding agreed on by Mike Wynne, Undersecretary for AT&L and Joe Schmitz DOD IG. The MOU was supported by Secretary Rumsfield and unsuccessfully opposed by Doug Feith, Wolfowitz’s Undersecretary, who it was said voiced very strong anger personally with the DoD Inspector General when it surfaced.
An idea of ITS’s reach into Iraq can be grasped by recounting the event of the three days before the ITS IG Team was inbound to Iraq in December 2003. Deputy Under Secretary Defense, DUSD, John “Jack” Shaw leading our team, received actionable intelligence from an old Middle East hand and personal friend, British Ambassador Julian Walker, that Saddam Hussain was evading capture by quickly moving back into areas recently cleared by US Troops.
Shaw quickly passed that word back through secure channels to Iraq.
Three days later, acting on that intelligence the US Army made history as Shaw and his team were on the airplane about to land in Iraq:
Operation Red Dawn was launched after gaining actionable intelligence identifying two likely locations of Saddam’s whereabouts code-named Objective Wolverine 1 and Wolverine 2, near the town of ad-Dawr.
The First Brigade Combat team of the 4th ID, in addition to Special Forces from Task Force 121 were assigned the mission to capture or kill Saddam Hussein. [This was exactly in the quadrant indicated by Julian Walker]
Because ITS leadership, especially DUSD Shaw, had extensive sources and contacts in the Middle East and was able to draw on other resources across the US government, it was able to surface a corruption campaign that seemed to begin in Iraq but which turned out to have compromised three or four successive U.S. administrations and had Nadhmi Auchi and Hillary Clinton as the most important elements in its conspiracy.
Even though Auchi and Chalabi’s corrupt machinations went unnoticed in the United States, except for the powerful NBC story, they were finally surfaced in much greater detail by this small OSD Office.
It is a very ugly story of greed and high level corruption brought on by a small group supporting Wolfowitz, who then worked to cover it up by a smear campaign and a well-funded attempt to discredit all reports of what had really happened and their office’s central role in it.
Nadhmi Auchi was an early Saddam adherent; he was accused of hiding the machine gun used by Saddam in his first unsuccessful coup attempt. With Saddam’s success Nadhmi Auchi emerged in the 80s and 90s as Saddam’s financial enforcer in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
Through his control of General Mediterranean Holdings he used a consortium of banks and holding companies to orchestrate corrupt deals in Italy and France after he had established his network from Morocco to Baghdad and beyond.
He is now an Iraqi billionaire in England hiding behind English Libel Law. He has bribed his way to respectability and political influence over four successive presidential administrations.
Nadhmi Auchi is virtually unknown, but is worth many billions of dollars, his Chicago investment alone worth $2 billion and no one has any idea how much he has cumulatively paid to the Clintons over the past twenty-five years. He was an early donor to the Clinton library, Al Capone was a parochial Chicago pirate compared to Auchi.
In 2003 he was convicted of a major role in the Elf Aquitaine case in France, the largest corruption case in French history, and fined several million dollars. So he may crave buying “honors” to flaunt in UK but he is a convicted felon.
Now one can only imagine the next chapter in “WikiLeaks” building on the ITS 2004 report:
US Defense Inspector General: Mobile Telecommunications Licenses in Iraq, 2004
https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Nadhmi_Auchi
Auchi, without the knowledge of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, had been sold to a small group surrounding Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz who were anxious to make Auchi’s erstwhile business partner Ahmed Chalabi president of Iraq. Chalabi was projected to be “The George Washington of Iraq”, while a highly respected CIA analyst warned the ITS team that Chalabi was not to be trusted and extremely close to Iran.
That semi-secret adoption by the Paul Wolfowitz’s DOD’s policy wing was the culmination by Auchi and Chalabi of over a decade’s investment in political donations to various White Houses and nearly a hundred million dollars of investment in Chicago and in the American heartland.
The high point of Auchi’s political largess had been the Clinton White House, and then his main U.S. partner Antoine “Tony” Rezko saw to it that Chicago became the fountainhead for Auchi’s giving in the Obama Administration.
Auchi boasted in 2002 that he had been “to two White Houses” and his web site carried picture of him with both Bill and Hillary and Bill and Al Gore.
Hillary and Bill Clinton no doubt thought that the Clinton foundation was an inspired way to generate some Middle Eastern money for their coffers, but decades ago they had already worked with an itinerant Middle East mobster and his emerging Chicago “outfit” which was laying the rails for a Baghdad to Washington railroad running through Chicago.
Hillary Clinton will no doubt soon welcome Paul Wolfowitz aboard the ‘Clinton Flyer” her own Baghdad to Washington train that Nadhmi Auchi helped to build. Hillary Clinton is now vying for the presidency with the help of billions of foreign dollars contributed to the Clinton Foundation, whatever the cost in squandering U.S. military lives.
https://wikileaks.org/wiki/From_Baghdad_to_Chicago:_Rezko_and_the_Auchi_empire
Clintons’s tentacles are deep into so many nefarious operations worldwide, it is a wonder that one person can have such intense venal insight. She probably cant, but together with the prince of amorality, her husband, she may be able to pull it off, especially with so many starry eyed young things doing her bidding.
Interesting.