Berlin – Paul Wolfowitz, a Republican adviser to former U.S. President George W. Bush, plans to vote for Democrat Hillary Clinton in the November presidential election despite his “serious reservations”, Der Spiegel magazine reported on Friday.
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Wolfowitz, who served as deputy defense secretary under Bush and also as president of the World Bank, said he viewed Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as a security risk because of his admiration of Russian President Putin and his views on China, the magazine reported.
“It’s important to make it clear how unacceptable he is,” the magazine quoted Wolfowitz as saying in an interview.
Wolfowitz joins a long list of Republicans who have said they will not vote for Trump.
“I wish there was a candidate whom I could support enthusiastically. I will have to vote for Hillary Clinton, although I have serious reservations about her,” he said.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll this week showed that Clinton would win the key swing states of Florida, Ohio and Virginia, and have a 95 percent chance of beating Trump if the election were held now.
Wolfowitz rejected a common description of him as a key architect of the 2003 U.S. war against Iraq, saying that if he had truly been the architect many things would have gone differently, the magazine reported.
Wolfowitz said the goal had been to free the country, not occupy it, creating tensions with many Iraqis.
He also defended the decision to invade Iraq, saying it was based on intelligence that later turned out to be faulty.
“Of course we would have proceeded differently if we had known that Saddam Hussein was not stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, but was only planning to do so,” he said. “We would not have invaded.”
In an interview with Vanity Fair magazine in May 2003, several months after the invasion, he suggested there were multiple reasons for it, but the Bush administration highlighted Iraq’s supposed WMD as the justification for the war as the most politically convenient.
“For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on,” he said at the time.
Notably the article ran in Der Spiegel, Germany’s version of the Inquirer, right next to the article about yet another UFO invasion , and one page over from the article about the latest Elvis sighting. An appropriate forum for an attention seeker like Wolfowiz Et. Al.
That said, Wolfowitz belongs to the group of establishment politicians, that the typical US voter is fed up with. Politicians and appointees, that miss and crave the limelight, former officials that feel they are somehow entitled to the position they seek or are appointed to. The kind of politicians that so nauseate us, that we’d rather vote for an obscure communist Senator from Vermont, like Bernie , or an egotistical, flamboyant, businessman turned politician like Donald. Mr. Wolfowitz and his fellow pompous prognosticators, both Democrat and Republican need to get the message that their time has passed. no one is interested in them anymore. Perhaps we can pack these has-beens off to a retirement community for people that have been feeding at the public trough, for most of their adult lives, where they can massage each others ego’s and leave the rest of us alone !
After Bush wrecked this country his advisers have zero credibility in my eyes. Then he tires to deny the fact that they didn’t know Saddam did not have weapons. Its true they did not know that he didn’t have. But they did not know that he had either. They basically started with the belief that Saddam has weapons. Then they instructed the intelligence to produce proof to back that belief. It was a subjective analysis. And they naivley believed that if you only offer democracy of tyranny the muslims will choose demorcacy. Sorry it was a nice idea but does not work. It didn’t work in Iraq or Gaza under Bush. And Hilary continued and still continues on that same erroneous naive track. Just offer the Syrains and “moderate rebels” democracy they will surely choose that over Isis and Al-Nusra.
Re Trumps support of Putin. Thats exactly why the man has my vote. Its time to stop looking at Russia as this evil soviet empire. Especially when we can’t win a war because every time we gain ground Russia shoots back. Its nuts whats going on in Syria. We think we can fight Assad & Russia and Isis all at once. How do you expect to beat Isis that way. We need to gang up with Putin to crush Isis.
Donald Duck can quit the race today. He has no realistic chance of winning. And nobody to thank but himself! He has done nothing but divide the Republican Party and will go down in history as that. Hillary could not and would never have won on her zero merits except when she runs against such an unstable individual.
Why do all these knowledgeable people have such a negative view of Donald Trump? Ivanka, Eric and Melania think the world of him.