Dr Wolfowitz interviewed by Margaret Warner

US military assisting in Aceh, Indonesia: I was ambassador there for three years and these are proud people, properly so. And they're people who are very suspicious of foreign militaries from any country, and yet they really open their arms to us. They've taken away all the restrictions that might have applied. They recognize that no country could have handled a task like this -- challenge like this on their own. And there was a little -- an indicator, I think, of Indonesian opinion when one politician came out and said our forces had to leave by March 26. The president himself, when he met with him and with many ministers, partly because it was the right thing to do, but I think also because they were reading. The Indonesian public was saying "Wait a minute. Don't ask the Americans to leave until we're ready to take over." They said "This is a timeline, it's not a deadline," and I think that's the attitude we've encountered.

US restrictions on the Indonesian military: Those restrictions are there because of a real concern about abuses by the Indonesian military. And it's a concern now that -- not only our concern, but the newly elected democratic government of Indonesia shares that concern. And that's part of the context of my remarks is last September they had a remarkably successful free, fair presidential election ... This is a country that's moving in an impressive way, given the challenges they face, toward democracy, and they have a government committed to it. So I think it's important to help that government manage its own military. And now it's even more important to help that government manage this huge challenge of the humanitarian assistance. So I also said -- and I mean it -- this is something we want to consult with the Congress on because the views of the Congress on this are strongly felt, and for good reason.

Iraq and weapons of mass destruction: Nobody was misleading the American public. If we were wrong, it was in no small measure because Saddam was misleading the whole world. This is a consensus. The view that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was the consensus of the Clinton administration, it was the consensus of this administration; it was the consensus of many other countries in the world, including a number that opposed the war ... Look, the same report that they say has no stockpiles says that the Iraqi intelligence service was testing biological and chemical agents on live human beings. They didn't declare that to the United Nations. It's a clear violation and a serious violation of Resolution 1441. And from my point of view, it's more ominous in terms of Iraqi intelligence service working with terrorists than whether there were large stockpiles of chemical weapons.

Read on. (PBS News Hour, 19 January 2005)