Sometimes you interview people to learn things you don’t already know. Other times, it’s to remind yourself of things you somehow forgot to remember. When I showed up at a strip-mall sushi bar in Goleta this Tuesday to interview Ambassador Joe Wilson, the famous bad-boy retired diplomat, it was definitely the latter I had in mind.
Today he looks more the aging rock star — round wire-rim glasses, graying beard, black T-shirt, vest — than a Dirty Harry diplomat. Wilson first came into the news in 1990, just as the first President Bush, George Herbert Walker, was getting ready to launch the first Gulf War. He was working the Baghdad bureau when Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein personally threatened to hang him — and all embassy staff — if he helped shelter any foreigners then in Iraq. Wilson staged a press conference in response, famously wearing a noose around his neck. “If the choice is to allow American citizens to be taken hostage or to be executed,” he declared, “I will bring my own fucking rope.” Nathan Hale, eat your heart out. Ultimately, Wilson would help thousands of foreigners to get out of Iraq alive and sheltered hundreds more.
Wilson is in Santa Barbara to see about a lecturing gig in the global studies program at UCSB, where he graduated in 1972. He’d teach the way the world really works, he laughed, as opposed to how it’s supposed to. With more than three decades of sand-in-the-shoe foreign service, he might know a thing or two. He’s hardly shy about thinking he has something to say.
