What Wolfowitz Really Said
EDITORIAL What Wolfowitz Really Said As this magazine goes to press, a controversy swirls about the head of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. He is alleged to have "revealed," in an...
...A majority of the people in California {voting for Proposition 209) told California to use them no more...
...What gives is that Tanenhaus has mischaracterized Wol-fowitz's remarks, that Vanity Fair's publicists have mischar-acterized Tanenhaus's mischaracterization, and that Bush administration critics are now indulging in an orgy of righteous indignation that is dishonest in triplicate...
...In other cases, they help schools devise curricula, train teachers, or even provide classroom instruction...
...Education officials clearly believe that race-neutral approaches will eventually yield racial and ethnic diversity—meaning an integrated student body...
...In arguing that the Constitution forbids "race-based policies when race-neutral alternatives are available," the Justice Department gave as examples of the latter the policies used by Texas, California, and Florida that guarantee admission to the highest-ranked students in each high school graduating class—the top 10 percent in Texas, the top 4 percent in California, and the top 20 percent in Florida...
...Actually I guess you could say there's a fourth overriding one which is the connection between the first two...
...Since then the office has continued to collect and distribute information on race-neutral alternatives...
...For that matter, the notion that the Bush administration really, really, in its heart of hearts, had other, preferred reasons for taking out Saddam Hussein—particularly, that it did so to justify removing its troops from Saudi Arabia— and that the entire war was therefore a fraud . . . well, this idea, too, is crackpot...
...It was simply one of several reasons: "For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on...
...Both the class-rank and socioeconomic approaches operate at the point where students seek admission...
...Under this approach, as Richard Kahlenberg, author of The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action, explained during the conference, preferences are extended to students who have performed well academically despite having faced various social and economic obstacles...
...For this reason, the Office for Civil Rights is also drawing attention to "developmental" approaches—such as "partnerships" in which universities work with nearby low-performing elementary and secondary schools...
...For the last 12 years, all specific and sometimes heated policy disagreements notwithstanding, American presidents of both parties, joining a near-unanimous consensus of the so-called "world community," have agreed that the Baath party regime's persistent and never-fully-disclosed WMD program represented a grave threat to international security...
...government is a disgrace...
...What gives with this Vanity Fair interview, then...
...In an earlier section of the conversation, concerning the current, postwar situation in the Middle East, Wolfowitz explained that the United States needs to get post-Saddam Iraq "right," and that we also need "to get some progress on the Israeli-Palestinian issue," which now looks more promising...
...And they have since posted the transcript on the Defense Department's website {www.defenselink.mil...
...they may get higher GPAs as a result of taking AP courses, which sometimes carry extra points...
...government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason, but...
...The project has proceeded quietly, with the Education Department taking the lead...
...In determining socioeconomic disadvantage, admissions officers take into account, among other factors, parents' education, family income, family structure, and school quality...
...One must hope that the Court's decisions in the Michigan cases won't cut short this important initiative...
...to take its troops out of Saudi Arabia, where their presence has been one of al-Qaeda's biggest grievances...
...And some race-neutral alternatives have drawn criticism on grounds that they aren't really race-neutral...
...and allied intelligence—though no one doubts that Saddam's regime had weapons of mass destruction, used weapons of mass destruction, and had an ongoing program to develop more such weapons...
...We've spent a lot of time defining the present [preferential] system," said Gerald Reynolds, the assistant secretary for civil rights, during the Miami conference...
...So a still broader conversation on diversity has been left for others to join...
...The conversation the Education Department has begun is worth having precisely because it is past time that colleges and universities stopped treating applicants in a racially discriminatory manner...
...As for Tanenhaus's suggestion that Wolfowitz somehow fessed up that the war had a hidden, "unnoticed but huge" agenda—rationalizing a pre-planned troop withdrawal from Saudi Arabia—we refer you, again, to the actual interview...
...As it happens, this is a not-quite-accurate description of a paragraph in Tanenhaus's article, which itself bears reprinting for reasons that will become obvious in a moment: When we spoke in May, as U.S...
...Almost unnoticed but huge," he said, is another reason: removing Saddam will allow the U.S...
...And a savvy governor {Jeb Bush) employed an executive order to tell Florida that the era of racial preferences was over...
...That second issue about links to terrorism is the one about which there's the most disagreement within the bureaucracy, even though I think everyone agrees that we killed 100 or so of an al Qaeda group in northern Iraq in this recent go-around, that we've arrested that al Qaeda guy in Baghdad who was connected to this guy Zarqawi whom Powell spoke about in his U.N...
...He is alleged to have "revealed," in an interview with writer Sam Tanenhaus for the Manhattan celebrity/fashion glossy Vanity Fair, that the Bush administration's asserted casus belli for war against Saddam Hussein—the dictator's weapons-of-mass-destruction program—was little more than a propaganda device, a piece of self-conscious and insincere political manipulation...
...The result has been to broaden discussion of this subject beyond where the Justice Department left it in its Michigan briefs...
...The University of California, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Vermont, and the University of Florida have partnerships with such schools...
...Class-rank and percentage plans in particular are said to be constitutionally dubious...
...Pentagon staffers were wise enough to tape-record the Tanenhaus-Wolfowitz interview...
...We know he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country...
...Soon enough, we'll know whether the Supreme Court has engaged it...
...I think just lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to open the door to other positive things...
...For Michigan, the chief educational benefit is supposed to be a transformation of the attitudes of all students, especially those in the majority...
...Race-Neutral Alternatives" doesn't critique that idea of diversity—which is vigorously disputed in the Michigan litigation...
...A court {the federal appeals court for the 5th Circuit) told Texas to quit using racial preferences...
...But distorting an on-the-record interview with a Bush administration official in order to create a quasi-conspiratorial narrative of deceit and deception at the highest levels of the U.S...
...Here's the relevant section of the conversation: TANENHAUS: Was that one of the arguments that was raised early on by you and others that Iraq actually does connect, not to connect the dots too much, but the relationship between Saudi Arabia, our troops being there, and bin Laden's rage about that, which he's built on so many years, also connects the World Trade Center attacks, that there's a logic of motive or something like that...
...Everyone meaning, presumably, Powell and the Joint Chiefs of Staff...
...As "Race-Neutral Alternatives" points out, taking AP courses helps high school students in at least three ways: They may learn more because they are in more demanding courses...
...Unfortunately, many inner-city and rural high schools, if they offer AP courses at all, offer fewer than other high schools do...
...Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly govern-ment...
...Or does that read too much into— WOLFOWITZ: No, I think it happens to be correct...
...William Knstol Color Us Neutral While the nation awaits the Supreme Court's rulings in the Michigan affirmative action cases, the Bush administration has launched an effort designed to stimulate interest in race-neutral means of enhancing educational opportunities for racial and ethnic minorities...
...The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S...
...But wherever one comes down on that issue, the class-rank plans at least have the merit of not treating individuals differently on account of their race...
...Tanenhaus has taken a straightforward and conventional observation about strategic arrangements in a post-Saddam Middle East and juiced it up into a vaguely sinister "admission" about America's motives for going to war in the first place...
...Furthermore, people of good will are entitled to disagree, even in retrospect, about the wisdom and probable effects of Saddam's forcible removal...
...The nation will be able to spend a lot more time on race-neutral alternatives if the Court renders—as it should—an unambiguous judgment against racial preferences...
...In short, Wolfowitz made the perfectly sensible observation that more than just WMD was of concern, but that among several serious reasons for war, WMD was the issue about which there was widest domestic (and international) agreement...
...Prior to publication of the Vanity Fair piece, they made that transcript available to its author...
...It began in March when the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights issued "Race-Neutral Alternatives in Postsecondary Education: Innovative Approaches to Diversity...
...Another developmental approach involves the expansion of Advanced Placement courses...
...Why can't we spend time on this...
...Lazy reporters have been following the lead of the press release Vanity Fair publicists circulated about their "scoop...
...The third one by itself, as I think I said earlier, is a reason to help the Iraqis but it's not a reason to put American kids' lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it...
...and the Saudi government we can now remove almost all of our forces from Saudi Arabia...
...In Texas, student participation in AP courses has climbed by 57 percent since 1999, with most of the increase coming from schools that had never before offered such courses...
...The publication provides information on the various race-neutral programs that are being implemented around the country, without endorsing any particular one, the point being to make them more widely known and to encourage educators to consider them seriously, even to come up with new ones of their own...
...Both Justice and Education have shied away from the issue, no doubt because President Bush has at times seemed to support diversity as a tool of social engineering...
...The failure so far to discover "stocks" of WMD material in post-Saddam Iraq raises legitimate questions about the quality of U.S...
...Texas and Florida have undertaken to change that, and the results so far are impressive...
...The partnerships take various forms, depending on the need...
...It begins as follows: Contradicting the Bush administration, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz tells Vanity Fair that weapons of mass destruction had never been the most compelling justification for invading Iraq...
...Race-Neutral Alternatives" correctly notes that "any race-neutral program is unlikely to produce racial diversity with the precision that using race will"—meaning the precision achieved by a critical-mass quota...
...Al Gore, for example, in his much-hyped antiwar speech last September, acknowledged that "Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to completely deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power...
...presentation...
...The Office for Civil Rights thus parts company with Michigan and other schools using race-based policies that require a "critical mass" of under-represented students in a class if the educational benefits of diversity are to be secured...
...Let's be clear: Though Paul Wolfowitz has friends and admirers at The Weekly Standard, we would be surprised and more than a little distressed had he actually said what he's supposed to have said in this instance...
...Those policies—and their results so far—are spelled out in "Race-Neutral Alternatives in Postsecondary Education," and representatives of the three states discussed them in Miami...
...And in Florida, the number of students in low-performing schools who are taking AP courses has increased from 4,000 to 7,000 in the past two years...
...At issue in those cases are the undergraduate and law schools' race-based admissions policies...
...The notion that the Bush administration's prewar reiteration of this view was a cynical ploy is crackpot...
...Then Wolfowitz said this: There are a lot of things that are different now, and one that has gone by almost unnoticed—but it's huge—is that by complete mutual agreement between the U.S...
...It's hard not to notice that most of the race-neutral alternatives the Department of Education is publicizing are found in Texas, California, and Florida...
...In some cases, the universities tutor and mentor students, and advise them about the courses they need to take to prepare for college...
...Terry Eastland, for the Editors...
...There is a reason for that: Those states were forced to abandon racial preferences—which meant, if they were to pursue diversity, they had to do so by race-neutral means...
...They use race-neutral criteria, goes the argument, yet those criteria were chosen in order to favor certain groups—and disfavor others...
...inspectors were failing to find weapons of mass destruction, Wolfowitz admitted that from the outset, contrary to so many claims from the White House, Iraq's supposed cache of WMD had never been the most important casus belli...
...In late April, the Office for Civil Rights followed up with a two-day conference in Miami attended by representatives of more than 100 colleges and universities, including Brown, Penn, Notre Dame, Baylor, Virginia Tech, Brigham Young, and Southern Methodist...
...Tanen-haus's assertion that Wolfowitz "admitted" that "Iraq's WMD had never been the most important casus belli" turns out to be, not to put too fine a point on it, false...
...But the Office for Civil Rights is also publicizing socioeconomic affirmative action, which Texas, California, and Florida are using on a limited basis...
...Yet it is widely recognized that many students need help much earlier in their schooling if they are to have the skills, resources, and abilities actually to compete for places in good colleges—and then succeed...
...One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people...
...and they may earn college credits...
...there have always been three fundamental concerns...
...The department doesn't contend, however, that this integration must be defined numerically...
Vol. 8 • June 2003 • No. 38
