Paul Wolfowitz is sworn in as Deputy Secretary of Defense under Donald Rumsfeld, a big brain regarded for his strategic studies knowledge. He was another in the stable of national security experts to school and provide cover for the inexperienced George W. Bush.
On Iraq in particular, Wolfowitz as Pentagon policy chief under Bush the elder (and a deputy to then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney) was in favor of finishing the job in Iraq. He wrote after he left office that the United States should have marched on Baghdad, and as Deputy Secretary, even before 9/11, agitated for a more aggressive policy, engaging the Iraq opposition, which of course, provided bad intelligence on both the existence of the WMD and the internal state of the country. Based on that, Wolfowitz uttered the now famous claim to Congress on February 27, 2003: “I am reasonably certain that they will greet us as liberators … the notion of hundreds of thousands of American troops is way off the mark.”
Day: March 2, 2021