Here's what I'd like to see: the man who is known as the godfather of the Iraq War (a overly kind euphemism coined by an enabling media for an illegal invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation that posed no threat to us) to be reminded every time he dares to show his face in public that he is responsible for the deaths of 4,804 service members and somewhere in the neighborhood of 118,000 Iraqi civilians as well as creating millions of Iraqi refugees and that what he should be doing is facing a tribunal in the International Court in The Hague rather than a friendly anchor asking for his opinions on foreign policy.
Because Paul Wolfowitz -- for being so murderously and un-Constitutionally wrong -- deserves no such platform to criticize any other administration's foreign policy, especially as it sought to protect the lives of the diplomatic service members. And shame on Fareed Zakaria and GPS to think Wolfowitz should have anything useful to contribute to the discussion. His notions on Middle East diplomacy, on understanding the intricate, complicated and dangerously fragile state of democracy in the Middle East and of the US role in any of this are utterly disqualified.
So I don't really care what Paul Wolfowitz thinks President Obama "should've said." I think that Paul Wolfowitz should have kept his own treasonous mouth shut.
Transcript via CNN below the fold.
ZAKARIA: Paul Wolfowitz, you have been consistently in favor of democracy and openness in the Arab world. You have criticized Arab dictatorships. Many people think you were the brains, if the not the brain behind George W. Bush's freedom agenda.
Many conservatives, many of your fellow conservatives were and are very critical and really believe that the Arab Spring has really been a terrible thing for the United States, for our interests, for Israel. How do you look at what has just happened.
WOLFOWITZ: Fareed, I think -- first of all, I've said many times the Arab Spring could easily be followed by an Arab Winter and the seasonal terms don't help very much.
It's a massive upheaval that's not the product of something George Bush did, it's the product of decades of suppression and repression by these dictatorships that didn't even allow the modicum of civil society develop as it did develop, for example, in Indonesia or I think is happening in Morocco; that's the key ingredient here.
But, to turn to Libya, I think what we're seeing there -- and the only thing I would absolutely agree with what Bernard-Henri Levy said about Ambassador Stevens. He was a fantastic man who really was advancing American interests and Libyan interests and his death is an enormous loss.
I would just disagree the people who killed him weren't imbeciles. They were doing it very deliberately, precisely to damage Libya. We don't really know yet who was behind it, but I think it's very clear these are some combination of forces that want to disrupt the progress Libya has made.
Your viewers should understand, because very few Americans do, that in the elections in July, the Muslim Brotherhood came in at a distance second and the Salafis, who are responsible for much of this violence, didn't even show.
But they were able, last month, in Tripoli to destroy mosques that they considered heretical under the protection of security forces. So part of what we're seeing in Libya, I believe, is the failure of the West having done half the right thing, the failure of the United States and France and Great Britain, to equip the new Libyan Security Forces.
And, instead, we left that to countries like Qatar and that's part of the result that we're seeing, incompetent and deceitful -- disgracefully deceitful security forces in Libya.
ZAKARIA: But, Paul, what do you say to people who look at these protests and look at the Egyptian president waffling and say, look, what we've unleashed here is kind of a tidal wave of anti-Americanism.
WOLFOWITZ: Well, we didn't unleash it. Again, it was a pot that was going to burst. I believe that you said is also exactly true, earlier, this is not just -- this isn't the Muslim world against the West. This is a fight within the Muslim world.
And you're also absolutely right that it's very much in our interest to help the people who believe in a modern Islam and modernity for Muslims to win in this fight.
I think we should have been absolutely clear from the beginning. The President of the United States should have said it's unacceptable the way Egyptian security forces allowed that embassy to be sacked.
It's unacceptable that the President of Egypt hadn't, at that point yet, even condemned the protests and the destruction of the American embassy in Egypt.
We should make very clear what behavior we expect from these new governments. Whether they're democratically elected or not, there will be consequences if they don't live up to standards that are important to us.