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Wolfowitz, who
served as deputy defense secretary under Bush and also as
president of the World Bank, said he viewed Republican
presidential candidate Donald Trump as a security risk because
of his admiration of Russian President Putin and his views on
China, the magazine reported.
"It's important to make it clear how unacceptable he is," the
magazine quoted Wolfowitz as saying in an interview.
Wolfowitz joins a long list of Republicans who have said they
will not vote for Trump.
"I wish there was a candidate whom I could support
enthusiastically. I will have to vote for Hillary Clinton,
although I have serious reservations about her," he said.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll this week showed that Clinton would win the
key swing states of Florida, Ohio and Virginia, and have a 95
percent chance of beating Trump if the election were held now.
Wolfowitz rejected a common description of him as a key
architect of the 2003 U.S. war against Iraq, saying that if he
had truly been the architect many things would have gone
differently, the magazine reported.
Wolfowitz said the goal had been to free the country, not occupy
it, creating tensions with many Iraqis.
He also defended the decision to invade Iraq, saying it was
based on intelligence that later turned out to be faulty.
"Of course we would have proceeded differently if we had known
that Saddam Hussein was not stockpiling weapons of mass
destruction, but was only planning to do so," he said. "We would
not have invaded."
In an interview with Vanity Fair magazine in May 2003, several
months after the invasion, he suggested there were multiple
reasons for it, but the Bush administration highlighted Iraq’s
supposed WMD as the justification for the war as the most
politically convenient.
“For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of
mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could
agree on,” he said at the time.
(This version of the story has been refiled to correct typo in
second paragraph)
(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; editing by Ralph Boulton)
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