Going through the motions of peace

Like those old street repair signs, “men at work,” We need a series of warning signs in Washington labeled like those old street repair signs,”men at work.” Here’s a double-dose portrait of men at work dismantling the world — mug shots of Paul Wolfowitz and Tom DeLay at work abroad and at home. Guardian reporter Young’s concludes in his portrait of a hawk with sheathed talons that, with UN inspections, Wolfowitz lost a battle but not faintly the war to come, and this seems to me painfully on target. Jim Lobe’s portrait of Tom DeLay (“profoundly anti-government in all things except national security”) is a reminder, if we faintly needed it, that these guys were “at war” long before the President declared it so — and it’s us DeLay’s at war with. Tom

Wolfowitz lost the UN battle – the war is another matter
This most awesome of hawks has sheathed his talons for the time being
By Hugo Young, December 3, 2002, The Guardian

In Washington, as well as Europe, Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary at the Pentagon, is regarded as the most awesome of hawks in his appetite for a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein. A Republican senator I interviewed on a recent visit saw him as a weirdo whose views were so dogmatic as to put him outside the realms of normal debate. In Bob Woodward’s new book, Bush at War, an essential revelatory text, Wolfowitz is reported as arguing from the start that the right response to 9/11 would be an attack on Iraq – “a brittle, oppressive regime that might break easily” – rather than an invasion of Afghanistan risking 100,000 US troops in unwinnable mountain combat.

I asked him about hawkishness in a conversation yesterday in London, and notably his well-known opposition to sending UN inspectors on a futile mission to search out Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.

To read more of this article in The Guardian, click here.

Another toxic Texan rises to the top 
By Jim Lobe, November 16, 2002, Foreign Policy in Focus

If “European elites” and other effete multilateralists consider U.S. President George W. Bush the “Toxic Texan,” what will they think of the new Republican Majority Leader in the House of Representatives, Tom DeLay?

DeLay not only hails from Texas as does the president; he is truly toxic. Before entering politics in 1979, he ran a pest extermination business. And he still thinks all this talk about global warming, the ozone hole, and even pesticides like DDT as being potentially hazardous to human health, is a lot of nonsense.

And unlike Bush, DeLay is a real Texas cowboy (although he learned how to wrestle steers in rural Venezuela). Prominently on display in his House office are two bullwhips, and he is not averse to showing visitors how he can crack them.