Wolfowitz Returns To Bush Administration As WMD Adviser

THINK PROGRESS

Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff reports that Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz has been rewarded with a new position in the Bush administration which will allow him to oversee classified intelligence and inform policies on WMD issues:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has offered Wolfowitz, a prime architect of the Iraq War, a position as chairman of the International Security Advisory Board, a prestigious State Department panel, according to two department sources who declined to be identified discussing personnel matters. The 18-member panel, which has access to highly classified intelligence, advises Rice on disarmament, nuclear proliferation, WMD issues and other matters. “We think he is well suited and will do an excellent job,” said one senior official.

Prior to the Iraq war, Wolfowitz established the Office of Special Plans to skirt the intelligence community and peddle the most egregiously false claims of Iraqi WMD. In a Jan. 2003 speech, Wolfowitz referenced “Iraqi efforts to procure uranium from abroad” despite the fact that the claim had already been discredited by the CIA. A few months after the Iraq invasion was launched, Wolfowitz admitted that claims of Iraqi WMD was used as a political tool to achieve consensus for the war:

The truth is that, for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason [to go to war].

When Wolfowitz left the World Bank in disgrace and landed at the American Enterprise Institute, he said he was leaving “open the possibility of rejoining the government.” Brookings analyst Philip Gordon speculated at the time that “the need for Senate confirmation would be a big political obstacle” for Wolfowitz to be named to another senior government post. Laura Rozen notes, however, that Wolfowitz’s new position “doesn’t require Senate confirmation.”

Paul Wolfowitz’s career continues to shine as a stunning example of what Paul Krugman has called the “comprehensiveness and generosity of the neocon welfare system.”

UPDATE: Siun at FDL has more.