Wolfowitz Says U.S. Botched Iraq War

It’s not quite a mea culpa, but Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy Pentagon chief who called for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, admits that the U.S. botched parts of the invasion and allowed the country to spiral out of control. There “should have been Iraqi leadership from the beginning,” Wolfowitz told The Sunday Times, and the U.S. shouldn’t have excluded so many former Baath Party members from the reconstruction process. But that’s as far as he’ll go: the war itself, he says, was still a good idea. If we hadn’t ousted Hussein, “We would very likely either have had to go through this whole scenario all over but probably with higher costs for having delayed.”