Paul Wolfowitz on the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars and a Life in Foreign Policy | Uncommon Knowledge 

I am a veteran of 23 years. Paul Wolfowitz "avoided" serving in Vietnam yet he was very keen for me to fight in wars that weakened the US position on the world stage. While we should have smashed Afghanistan, we achieved all we were going to accomplish there within 6 months. A withdrawal at that time would have left a clear warning to the world not to mess with us. Our adventure in Iraq strengthened Iran and weakened us. Wolfowitz was heavily involved in "Team B" which vastly inflated the numbers and capability of soviet weaponry. I could not have less respect for this man.

I can't imagine why Paul Wolfowitz of all people is the one you want to take advice on foreign policy from.

I wish Peter wouldn’t interrupt him the whole time and let Wolfowitz speak, complete his thoughts.

Peter Robinson, please stop interrupting your interlocuteur.

Anytime a war is fought without clear objectives and a plan that makes sense for what comes after the fighting ends is a mistake. It doesn't help when policy makers realize they have made mistakes but won't change course and admit that mistakes have been made because they are more concerned about their political hides than about getting the mistakes corrected.

58:13 Sort of shows how those in academia and government, limit the candidate pool for government work. I’ve seen so many videos state that Americans should look into public service, give back to our nation, but when you look at who’s running the government, it’s the Ivy Leaguers. There are more of us who are not Ivy Leaguers that are interested in serving our government, but we slip through the cracks in order to have the well off to do land the policy jobs. Imagine that, those who did not struggle in their lives, who are well connected, make policies over the mass who know what true struggle is. Such an unfortunate thing.

Wow, a discussion totally lacking in context; Saddam just "appeared" did he? We had funded him, he was OUR guy, we had supported him in a long war against Iran, we had provided the chemical weapons for him to use against the Kurds (Rumsfeld!!!!) Bush senior laid out in his biography EXACTLY why we didnt go to Baghdad as he knew it would be a hornets nest of clan sectarianism. Iraq was targeted after 9/11 because, according to Richard Clarke, Rumsfeld and Cheney said it would be better to make an example of. Wolfowitz and co should have been on trial for war crimes but instead he gets this appalling soft-ball interview. Bush senior was right, his son and the henchmen that surrounded him have created 25 years of chaos in the most unstable part of the world.

I agree, we trained them and south vietnam to depend upon us air power and then when it was no longer present, their militaries fell apart.

28:40, it already feels pretty lonely as a 25 year old, defending the reasons to go into iraq and its only been 4 years since i have been doing it, not looking forward to a lifetime of it

They had power and wasted it.

We were never willing to stay in Iraq for another 100 years as we did in Germany, Japan or Korea. So we should never have topped Saddam out

legendary paul robinson with great questions and legendary for good or bad reason paul wolfowitz.

This is among the very best episodes of Uncommon Knowledge. Wolfowitz is calm & plainspoken in the way that only someone who knows he has offered his best to the world & made a real difference, can be. Very informative, nuanced & a blessed relief from all the shrill, adolescent self-actualization that seems to drown the subject (I was around 18 years old when 9/11, Iraq & Afghanistan happened and I remember how scarce any discussions actually worth listening to were). A bonus is that the interview seems also to have boiled a perfectly desirable amount of p...nevermind.

History teaches that undeclared wars are difficult to win.

4:42 ... Agree wholeheartedly. However ... what "The Families go through," that depends on the family.

I remember where I was on 9/11: My wife was on the bus headed to work and I had just got done feeding my son and putting him in his rocking chair for a nap, when the phone rang. My asked if I had seen the news, we’re under attack, she said. Turning the news on I was stunned by what greeted me. We spoke of what was happening and I regaled her with a story I’d heard about a B-25 accidentally flying into the Empire State Building decades before and the building withstood the impact well. Not long after a second plane struck the other tower. I lost all sense of time as I watched that fateful scene unfold before my eyes. I remember telling her “the building is trembling, you can see it shaking”, and then it collapsed. My heart literally sunk with the building after watching people jump out to their certain deaths. I looked at my infant son as if instinctively, i was raw emotion, nothing went through my mind but pure hatred for those responsible. It’s a feeling I never had prior or since. And now today we have people on American college campuses calling for repeated Oct 7 attacks and the destruction of our country. What the fuck have we let into our country?!

Can we get Bruce Gilley on the show? I would love to see Peter help focus Gilley's arguments in The Case For Colonialism.

A great conversation! As for the question at the end, artificial intelligence and foreign policy may not be as divergent as they seem ;)

Thank you for this wonderful interview. I almost forgot all of these disgusting lies that were used to bamboozle us into war. Giving our children an ocean of debt and an entire region of enemies.

HR McMaster’s 1997 book “Dereliction of Duty : Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam”. Could easily have an addendum including GW Bush and his Criminal regime.

The military force was smaller because Bush I and Clinton had got rid of Reagan's military. The force committed was smaller because the entire force was smaller. Reagan had us within 12 ships of having a 600 ship fleet, we are now down to 250 and falling. Despite all of these peace dividends, the US is bankrupt and now militarily weak.

This program stated was recorded on August 4, 2024 but today is May 1, 2024 ! WHO is withholding the future Time Machine !

The Iraq war was the worst foreign policy mistake the US has made since Vietnam, and rivals it in lies, perfidity, and lack of understanding on the part of the American leadership. Beginning this talk by referencing 9/11 reinforces the lie that the Iraq invasion was a consequence of 9/11, when in fact the Bush administration had been planning to invade Iraq since well before that event, and 9/11 and Afghanistan sort of got in the way of this plan. I consider Bush, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz to be war criminals for all the needless death and destruction they caused. It really galls me to watch Wolfowitz sit there now with absolutely no sense of shame, contrition, or even a bit of wisdom gained. He is either still lying, or still doesn't get it.

30:00 I would think that the disparity in troop numbers between 1990 and 2003 would be obvious. The US Army was much larger for that first operation, as it occurred right at the tail end of the Cold War, before the enormous cuts of the '90's. By 2003, we simply couldn't have repeated a Desert Storm-like operation on a similar scale, even had we wanted to.

The mission creep in Afghanistan and very lengthy time that NATO troops stayed was awful planning. Obviously, after the Taliban was defeated and driven to Pakistan, NATO advisors needed to stay as well as political and technical assistance. Some financial aid also but not in the way that created horrible corruption and waste of taxpayer money. The aftermath of defeat of Saddam was an awful screwup.

Excellent interview - Very thoughtful and informative!

As a deployable ANG fighter-recce pilot at the time of both Gulf Wars, I was an enthusiastic supporter of each, and unlike Tucker Carlson, I have no regrets. G.W. Bush may have wanted regime change in Iraq at some point, but the key issue for me is why the timing of Bush's order to launch Iraqi Freedom when he did? In other words, were the nonexistent, as was later alledged, WMDs merely a cynical triggering ruse to justify the invasion and regime change, or did the President and his advisors actually believe that Sadam's plans for using them were an imminent threat to the region? The political post mortems that emerged on both sides centered on the issue of Sadam's WMD posture. Did he have them as he claimed, and if so was their use imminent, or worthy of strategic delay? In retrospect, Sadam clearly had done everything possible by his nebulous claims of innocence to convince all of his antagonists that he in fact was hiding a vast and potent WMD stockpile, and what's more, was prepared to use it. The Iraqis made a great show of thwarting international inspection teams from seeing suspected UN sanctioned weapons facilities that everyone in the world was increasingly persuaded that they had. If Sadam was playing a very clever game to deter invasion, it backfired on him fatally. In Bush's final White House council of war, when Bush asked how confident they were in the WMD intelligence estimates, CIA Director Tenet, a Clinton holdover, reportedly pounded his fist on the table, and exclaimed, "It's a slam dunk, Mr. President!" That was enough for Bush, and the rest is history. As Stephen Kotkin would say, "we won the war, but lost the peace".

the Monday morning armchair generals are hilarious

Great to see Mr. Wolfowitz, he's not seen enough!

Such a gap between how Europeans and Americans perceive this… and sad to see that there is not one neocon that is able to apologize. McNamara had that decency after Vietnam.

Before I were to attempt filing lawsuits against someone i would first ask myself do I have wrong doing concerning the person I am legally satisfied SCOUT'S disrobed have a plan passes in 16 minutes 1989

I don’t know. He has a few notable lines where he models empathy…but I don’t know. My takeaway sense is that he’s your standard CYA bureaucrat. Now if he’d said something like, “We gave them no clear political endstate to achieve militarily and *I* am too responsible for that!” might present better. But he he didn’t. I was in two of his wars…he wasn’t a leader I remember, that’s for sure.

Pretty sure they have turned off comments on this. And are deleting some of them.

"By the time the Iraq war becomes non-divisive, Paul Wolfowitz and Peter Robinson will be playing golf in a different realm." Mr. Robinson, you got heaven all wrong. Chasing a tiny white ball aimlessly all day is an eternal punishment specifically reserved for the likes of Sisyphus -- and even he opted for a rock and a hill.

Where were all the parts of the plane after the impact?

How do you give a war criminal a platform and take him seriously is pure satire stuff.

37:42, the Russians never "planned" to give Moscow to Napoleon. It just happened.

Thank you Peter Robinson and Paul Wolfowitz. " Learning and moving on."

⭐

3:13mins is a clear an example of ‘duping delight’ that I have witnessed. 🤮

Our great grandfathers stormed beaches and lived in a dirt holes but we are cowed by mean names that aren't even true?

PNAC Project for a New American Century founder?

Wolfowitz resembles Fauci. Are they related?

One of the best foreign policy leaders against terror and aggression, a strong for freedom of the sea and freedom from tyranny, Russia, Iraq, a true patriot.

This guy trumped up the case for war and got Bush to convince the UK to come along. Cannot believe this guy is getting a comfy chair - should be dining on bread and water in a cell.

CIA arrived in Afghanistan on Sep 26 and SOF on October 19. The CIA had a plan ready to but the Pentagon didn’t. This fact infuriated Rumsfeld . Wolfowitz failed to acknowledge this in the video,

7:32 ... 🥳 ... ✊ ... 🎉🎉🎉🎈🎈🎈 ... ✨✨✨ ... 🇺🇸

I wonder if he was part of the decision making team who decided to ground all US aircraft… Except the aircraft flying back all the bin Laden family relatives from the United States back to Saudi Arabia… Before the FBI could even interview them. For those who don’t remember, they were allowed to fly back to Saudi Arabia without being interviewed at all. While all US citizens were on the ground, unable to fly for days. Could it be the oil and financial connections of the Bush family? They already knew who they were going to blame? For those who don't remember, it is an extremely large family, not at all like a US family, and there were dozens or hundreds of them in the United States at the time of the attack.

In the comments, it says: "Recorded on August 4, 2024" I watch this today May 1, 2024. Clearly the date is incorrect. In this age of misinformation, I am a stickler for telling the truth. Please fix this, as it detracts from your credibility on all fronts.

Wolfowitz , not a great leader

The interviewer is only asking leading questins begging the answers. What s manipulative style.

Wolfowitz. Youve got to be kidding me.

I have never seen a picture of the “airplane”that hit the Pentagon

BIG FAT MISTAKE.

OG war criminal

Absolute filth

What a waste of time.

What this guy and his cohorts did was so incompetent and based upon lies that people here shouldn't necessarily rule out the possibility that he was acting in the interests of other countries. As conspiratorial as that sounds… others here have made the claim. Multiple commenters have directly said it here. I don't think it's a crazy thing to consider.

Pure idiocity.

I get his point that using airpower we could have sustained the afghan army but to what end… taliban would have won nonetheless. After defeating them we should have taken the win and left nation building to the afghans.

Hoover does itself no favours having disgraced policy makers like Wolfowitz on, the man should be castigated and relegated to the dustbin of history instead of trying to be rehabilitated.

It’s always the 9-11 excuse…

Сидят два старика, которые знают правду о Ираке и Афганистане , но ведут наивные речи о безопасности жизни для сша???? Доя кого этот цирк? Вас слушают недоразвитые люди????? Вы не верите в свои доктрины и когда вы друг другу рассказываете , то к концу беседы вы начинаете верить !!!!! Хоть какой то смысл….. привет, Кондолизе!!! Из неё должен был получится - человек, но!!!!!! Что получилось , то получилось!!! Жаль, такой опыт и все впустую.

Pw is a 🤡

Вторглись в Ирак , разорили музеи Ирака. Увезли артефакты . Царь Нимрод вам не простит. Увезли золотые артефакты ….. так вы убийцы и варвары ….. грабите народ Ирака. У вас континент разваливается, а вы продолжаете тащить в свою нору - золото????? Это уже заболевание…….