DEARBORN, Mich., 25 February 2003 — Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz reassured a strongly pro-war meeting of Iraqi Americans here Sunday that the Bush administration wants to see a democratic Iraq and so won’t settle for replacing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein with someone similar.
“It’s not going to be handed over to some junior Saddam Hussein,” he told the heavily Shiite group of about 300. “We’re not interested in replacing one dictator with another dictator.”
He added later, “We have one of the most powerful military forces ever assembled” now on the borders of Iraq. “If we commit those forces, we’re not going to commit them for anything less than a free and democratic Iraq.”
Wolfowitz, the Pentagon’s No. 2 official, also invited those meeting here to join the US military reserves and serve as interpreters in Iraq, an idea some in the group greeted with enthusiasm.
But in a two-hour “town meeting,” Wolfowitz also found himself peppered with skeptical questions about the reliability of US promises, given what questioners portrayed as a poor US record in the Middle East. Many in the meeting, which was sponsored by the Iraqi Forum for Democracy, a political group based in Ann Arbor, Mich., said they were veterans of the 1991 uprisings in the north and south of Iraq that followed the Gulf War and were put down violently by Saddam’s military.
Wolfowitz, one of the administration’s leading hawks on Iraq, frequently found himself in the unusual position of being urged to swift action, as if he were overly dovish. “It is not a very good idea to wait much longer,” one questioner admonished him.
Wolfowitz agreed that time is growing short to find an outcome other than war. “Our president is still trying to see -- not in months, but in weeks, maybe less -- if there is a peaceful way to resolve the conflict, a peaceful way to get Saddam out of power,” he said.
When he described Saddam as “one of the most evil rulers” of the last 100 years, the crowd responded with heavy applause.
In his speech, Wolfowitz repeated the administration’s standard caution that no decision has been made yet to go to war. But then he sometimes spoke as if war were inevitable. He said the United States would show concern for the safety of Iraq’s people on the day hostilities begin. He added that “when Saddam Hussein and his regime are nothing more than a horrible memory,” the United States would help the Iraqi people establish a free government.
Wolfowitz urged the meeting’s participants to consider joining the US military as reservists to help US forces if there is an invasion of Iraq. This would enable the military to capitalize “on your understanding of local languages and culture, as well as American culture and language.”
Audience members repeatedly expressed concern the United States would settle for having the country ruled by an Iraqi general, and would leave in place much of the structure of the ruling Baath party. Wolfowitz repeatedly sought to dispel those worries.
But moderator Maha Hussain, a female Iraqi American doctor who is president of the Iraqi Forum for Democracy, pointedly asked why such reassurances should be trusted.
Wolfowitz seemed momentarily nonplussed, but then responded by noting that the US government repeatedly came to the aid of embattled Muslims in recent years, first in Bosnia and Kosovo, then in Afghanistan, and probably soon in Iraq.
