Paul Wolfowitz
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Incumbent | |
In office since 1 June 2005 |
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Preceded by | James Wolfensohn |
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Born | December 22, 1943 Brooklyn, New York |
Spouse | Clare Selgin Wolfowitz |
Paul Dundes Wolfowitz (b. December 22, 1943) is an American academic and political figure. He is currently the President of the World Bank, but may be most famous as a prominent architect of the foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration known as the Bush Doctrine, which resulted in the invasion of Iraq. He is Jewish, a Zionist and an avid supporter of the state of Israel.
A former aide to Democratic Senator "Scoop" Jackson in the 1970s, Wolfowitz also served in the U.S. Defense Department, as Director of Policy Planning and Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the U.S. State Department, as U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia, and as Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Administration of George W. Bush.
[edit] Early life and education
Paul Wolfowitz was the second child of Jacob Wolfowitz and Lillian Dundes. He grew up in the university town of Ithaca, New York, where his father was a Professor of Statistics at Cornell University.
Jacob Wolfowitz was a Polish national of Jewish descent whose parents fled to the United States in 1920 to escape persecution. Many of Wolfowitz’s relatives left behind in Poland were to die in The Holocaust. James Mann, in Rise of the Vulcans, says that Jacob Wolfowitz "was a committed Zionist throughout his life and, in later years, was also active in organizing protests against Soviet repression of dissidents and minorities."
Jacob Wolfowitz took his family with him when he taught sabbatical semesters at UCLA and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and in 1957, at the age of fourteen, Paul Wolfowitz spent a year living in Israel while his father was teaching at The Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa; Wolfowitz’s sister would later emigrate permanently to Israel. In 1961, Wolfowitz graduated from Ithaca High School, where he had worked on the Tattler student newspaper. Wolfowitz was excused from military service in the Vietnam War through student deferments in order to pursue his academic studies.
[edit] Cornell University
Wolfowitz was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps and, in 1961, he won a full scholarship to Cornell University that, according to Mann, despite his own personal desire to go to Harvard University, his father said was too good a bargain to turn down.
Wolfowitz was a member of the Telluride Association, of which his sister had been the first female member. The organization, founded in 1910, aims to foster an everyday synthesis of self-governance and intellectual inquiry that enables students to develop their potential for leadership and public service. The students receive free room and board in the Telluride House on the Cornell campus and learn about democracy through the practice of running the house, hiring staff, supervising maintenance, and organizing seminars. During his senior year, Wolfowitz was a member of Quill and Dagger, a prestigious fraternity at Cornell.
In 1963 professor of philosophy Allan Bloom served as a faculty member living in the house and would have a major influence on Wolfowitz's political views with his assertion of the importance of political regimes in shaping peoples’ characters. That same year Wolfowitz joined the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom led by Martin Luther King, Jr.. According to Mann, Jacob Wolfowitz did not take well to his son’s new found passion or his mentor Bloom; Wolfowitz “reflected that his father and Bloom regarded each other with a mixture of wariness and admiration.”
Wolfowitz graduated in 1965 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and chemistry, and got a taste of government work as a management intern at the U.S. Bureau of the Budget. Ignoring his father's advice against pursuing a path in pure politics, suggesting economics as a possible compromise, Wolfowitz decided to go on to graduate school to study politics.
[edit] University of Chicago
Wolfowitz chose the University of Chicago over his long-term favorite Harvard, as he wanted the chance to study under Bloom's mentor, Leo Strauss, who was teaching there at the time, and who, according to Mann, he thought "was a unique figure, an irreplaceable asset."
Wolfowitz enrolled in a couple of Strauss' courses, on Plato and Montesquieu, but according to Mann they "did not become especially close," as the aging professor was winding down his career and was to retire before Wolfowitz graduated. Fellow student Peter Wilson confirms that "Wolfowitz didn't talk much about Strauss in those days," but as Mann points out, "in subsequent years colleagues both in government and academia came to view Wolfowitz as one of the heirs to Leo Strauss's intellectual traditions."
Instead Wolfowitz came under the tutelage of Professor Albert Wohlstetter, who had studied mathematics with Wolfowitz's father at Columbia and was, according to Mann, "the sort of scholar of whom the mathematician Jacob Wolfowitz would have approved." Wohlstetter instilled in his students the importance of maintaining US supremacy through advanced weaponry. Wohlstetter feared that plutonium produced as a by-product of U.S.-sponsored nuclear-powered desalination plants to be built near the Israeli-Egyptian border could be used in a nuclear weapons program. He returned from a trip to Israel with a number of Hebrew language documents on the program that he handed over to Wolfowitz, these would form the basis of Wolfowitz's doctoral dissertation.
In the summer of 1969, Wohlstetter arranged for his students Wolfowitz and Wilson, along with an old acquaintance, Richard Perle, to join the Committee to Maintain A Prudent Defense Policy in Washington D.C. Set up by Cold War architects Paul Nitze and Dean Acheson, the lobbying group was designed to maintain support in the U.S. Congress for the antiballistic missile (ABM) system. The opposition to ABM in Congress had started employing scientific experts to argue against the system, so Nitze and Acheson turned to Wohlstetter and his young protégés to counter these arguments. Together they set to work writing and distributing research papers and drafting testimony for U.S. Senator Henry M. Jackson. Nitze later wrote; “The papers they helped us produce ran rings around the misinformed papers produced by polemical and pompous scientists.” The senate eventually approved the ABM system by 51 votes to 50. U.S. President Richard Nixon would however later sign the ABM Treaty, restricting the construction of such systems.
From 1970 to 1972, Wolfowitz taught in the Department of Political Science at Yale University, where one of his students was Lewis Libby, who would become a long-term political associate. In 1972 Wolfowitz earned his doctorate in political science with a thesis on the dangers posed by nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. In particular he highlighted:
- The inefficiencies of international nuclear inspections.
- The risk of materials being diverted to clandestine weapons programs.
- The dangers of aiding a nation to develop nuclear technologies.
All of these factors would reappear in his later analysis of Iraq.
[edit] Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
Main Article: Team B
In 1972 U.S. President Richard Nixon under pressure from U.S. Senator Henry M. Jackson, who was unhappy with the SALT I strategic arms limitations talks and the policy of détente, dismissed the head of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) and replaced him with Fred Ikle. Ikle brought in a completely new team including Wolfowitz, who had been recommended by his old tutor Albert Wohlstetter. Wolfowitz once again set to work writing and distributing research papers and drafting testimony, as he had previously done at the Committee to Maintain A Prudent Defence Policy. He also traveled with Ikle to strategic arms limitations talks in Paris and other European cities. His greatest success was in dissuading South Korea from reprocessing plutonium that could be diverted into a clandestine weapons program, a situation that would re-occur north of the border during the George W. Bush administration.
Under Gerald Ford, the American intelligence agencies had come under attack from Wohlstetter, among others, over their annually published National Intelligence Estimate. According to Mann: "The underlying issue was whether the C.I.A. and other agencies were underestimating the threat from the Soviet Union, either by intentionally tailoring intelligence to support Kissinger's policy of détente or by simply failing to give enough weight to darker interpretations of Soviet intentions.” In an attempt to counter these claims, the newly appointed Director of Central Intelligence, George H.W. Bush authorized the formation of a committee of anti-Communist experts, headed by Richard Pipes, to reassess the raw data. Wolfowitz, who was still employed by the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, was assigned to this committee, which came to be known as Team B. According to Mann, “Wolfowitz viewed himself as Kissinger's opposite, his adversary in the realm of ideas.”
The team's report delivered in 1976, and quickly leaked to the press, stated that "All the evidence points to an undeviating Soviet commitment to what is euphemistically called the 'worldwide triumph of socialism,' but in fact connotes global Soviet hegemony," before going on to highlight a number of key areas where they believed the 'professional' analysts had got it wrong. Wolfowitz has since claimed, "The B Team demonstrated that it was possible to construct a sharply different view of Soviet motivation from the consensus view of the analysts, and one that provided a much closer fit to the Soviet's observed behavior."[citation needed]
Team B came to the conclusion that the Soviets had developed several terrifying new weapons of mass destruction, featuring a nuclear-armed submarine fleet that used a sonar system that didn't depend on sound and was, thus, undetectable with current U.S. technology. The conclusions of Team B about the Soviet Union's weapons systems have since been proven to be for the most part highly inaccurate worst-case scenarios. According to Dr. Anne Cahn (Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1977-1980) "If you go through most of Team B's specific allegations about weapons systems, and you just examine them one by one, they were all wrong." Its conclusions about the Soviets' strategic aims with regard to nuclear warfare, on the other hand, were proven to be largely true.[1]
But the Team B conclusions proved to be highly effective in discrediting the policy of détente and the SALT II strategic arms limitations talks and won over U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and future U.S. President Ronald Reagan, giving Wolfowitz two very influential allies. Another invaluable ally was Harvard graduate student Francis Fukuyama whom Wolfowitz invited to work for him as an intern over that summer.
[edit] Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Regional Programs
In 1977 under U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Wolfowitz made the move to The Pentagon to broaden his experience of military issues as, according to Mann, he believed; “The key to preventing nuclear wars was to stop conventional wars.” Wolfowitz was employed as U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Regional Programs for the U.S. Defense Department under then U.S. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown where he was put to work on the Limited Contingency Study, ordered to examine possible areas of threat to the U.S. in the third world.
One of the first seminars Wolfowitz attended after taking up the post was given by Professor Geoffrey Kemp of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in which it was argued that the U.S. was concentrating too much on defending against the possibility of a Soviet invasion of Europe through the Fulda Gap in Germany and ignoring the far more likely possibility of them turning southward to seize the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. “This warning struck a chord with Wolfowitz,” according to Mann, as it “fit well with the conclusion he had just reached in the Team B intelligence review.” Wolfowitz hired Kemp and Dennis Ross a Soviet specialist from the University of California to work with him on preparing the study. “We and our major industrialized allies have a vital and growing stake in the Persian Gulf region because of our need for Persian Gulf oil and because events in the Persian Gulf affect the Arab-Israeli conflict,” the report stated, going on to conclude that Soviet seizure of the Persian Gulf oil field would “probably destroy NATO and the US-Japanese alliance without recourse to war by the Soviets.”
Wolfowitz then took the study one step further by questioning what would happen if another country in the region were to seize the oil field. He quickly identified that “Iraq has become the militarily pre-eminent in the Persian Gulf,” which was “a worrisome development” because of its:
- Radical-Arab stance
- Anti-Western attitudes
- Dependence on Soviet arms sales
- Willingness to foment trouble in other local nations
The study concluded “Iraq’s implicit power will cause currently moderate local powers to accommodate themselves to Iraq” and that “Iraq may in the future use her military forces against such states as Kuwait or Saudi Arabia.” To solve this the US must “be able to defend the interests of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and ourselves against an Iraqi invasion or show of force,” and make manifest its “capabilities and commitments to balance Iraq’s power,” requiring “an increased visibility for U.S. power.” As Mann explains, “Iraq was a subject to which Wolfowitz would return over and over again during his career.”
According to Ross “no one believed that Iraq posed a serious or imminent threat to the Saudis,” but Wolfowitz had told him; “When you look at contingencies, you don’t focus only on the likelihood of the contingency but also on the severity of its consequences.” Brown felt differently, worried that if the report leaked it would damage U.S. relations with Iraq and destabilize Saudi Arabia. The study did however have eventual effect. “The whole thrust of the study” according to Ross, “was to say that [the U.S.] had a big problem, that it would take us a long time to get any significant military force into the area.” The study’s recommendations laid the groundwork for what would become the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), conceived as Rapid Deployment Forces for the Persian Gulf, it would go on to play a key role in the 1991 Gulf War after the study’s prediction apparently came true and the subsequent 2003 invasion of Iraq for which Wolfowitz was a major driving force.
In late 1979 Jeanne Kirkpatrick began a migration of neoconservatives from their traditional base in the U.S. Democratic Party over to the U.S. Republican Party and its Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan. Wolfowitz joined this exodus after receiving a phone call from his old boss Fred Ikle, then working on the Reagan campaign, in which he said “Paul, you’ve got to get out of there. We want you in the new administration.” A short time later, in early 1980, Wolfowitz resigned from the Pentagon and went to work as a visiting professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. According to the Washington Post; "He said it was not he who changed his political philosophy so much as the Democratic Party, which abandoned the hard-headed internationalism of Harry Truman, Kennedy and Jackson." [1] The Times claims however that "he has not ceased being a registered Democrat."
[edit] State Department Director of Policy Planning
In 1981, following the election of U.S. President Ronald Reagan, the newly appointed U.S. National Security Advisor Richard V. Allen was put in charge of putting together the administration's foreign policy advisory team. Allen initially rejected Wolfowitz’s appointment; “He had worked for Carter. I thought he was a Carter guy,” Allen later recalled; “He was goner, as far as I was concerned,” but following discussions, instigated by former colleague John Lehman, Allen offered him the position of Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department. In this position Wolfowitz and his newly selected staff, that included Lewis Libby, Francis Fukuyama, Dennis Ross, Alan Keyes, Zalmay Khalilzad, Stephen Sestanovich and James Roche, would be responsible for defining the administrations long-term foreign goals.
Reagan’s foreign policy had been heavily influenced by a 1979 article in Commentary by Jeanne Kirkpatrick titled Dictatorships and Double Standards. In the article, written in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, Kirkpatrick had argued that; “We seem to accept the status quo in Communist nations (in the name of ‘diversity’ and national autonomy) but not in nations ruled by ‘right-wing’ dictators or white oligarchies,” pointing out that the regimes that the Carter administration had pushed for democratic reforms “turn out to be those in which non-Communist autocracies are under pressure from revolutionary guerillas,” such as key Cold War allies Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran and Anastasio Somoza Debayle, dictator of Nicaragua. “Although most governments in the world are, as they always have been, autocracies of one kind or another, no idea hold greater sway in the mind of educated Americans than the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances,” a belief which Kirkpatrick disagreed with as; “Decades, if not centuries, are normally required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits.” This is known as the Kirkpatrick Doctrine
Wolfowitz famously broke from this official line by denouncing Saddam Hussein of Iraq at a time when Donald Rumsfeld, acting as Reagan's official envoy, was offering the dictator support in his conflict with Iran. As James Mann points out "quite a few neo-conservatives, like Wolfowitz, believed strongly in democratic ideals; they had taken from the philosopher Leo Strauss the notion that there is a moral duty to oppose a leader who is a 'tyrant.'" Other areas where Wolfowitz disagreed with the administration was in his opposition to attempts to open up dialogue with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and to the sale of Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft to Saudi Arabia. "In both instances," according to Mann "Wolfowitz demonstrated himself to be one of the strongest supporters of Israel in the Reagan administration."
According to Mann however; "It was on China that Wolfowitz launched his boldest challenge to the established order." Ever since Nixon and Kissinger had gone to China in the early 70s it had been U.S. policy to make concessions to China as an essential Cold War ally. The Chinese were now pushing for the U.S. to end arms sales to Taiwan and Wolfowitz used this as an opportunity to undermine the Kissingerian policy. Wolfowitz advocated a unilateralist policy claiming that the U.S. didn’t need China’s assistance, and in fact that Chinese needed the U.S. to protect them against the far more likely prospect of a Soviet invasion of China. Wolfowitz soon came into conflict with U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig, who had been Kissinger’s assistant at the time of the visits to China. “Paul D. Wolfowitz, the director of policy planning... will be replaced,” reported the March 30, 1982 issue of the New York Times as “Mr. Haig found Mr. Wolfowitz too theoretical.” This report proved to be untrue and on June 25 George Schultz replaced Haig as U.S. Secretary of State and Wolfowitz was promoted.
[edit] State Department Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs
In 1982 Wolfowitz was appointed Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs by new U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz who would become an influential mentor. At the time the Reagan’s foreign policy was beset with difficulties caused by conflict between Schultz and U.S. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Wolfowitz was able to turn this to his favor by forming a powerful alliance with Weinberger’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asia Richard Armitage and Gaston Sigur of the National Security Council. Between them these three men controlled the administration’s policy for Asia.
Jeanne Kirkpatrick, on a visit to the Philippines, had been eagerly welcomed by the dictator Ferdinand Marcos who quoted heavily from her 1979 Commentary article Dictatorships and Double Standards and although Kirkpatrick had been forced to speak-out in favor of democracy the article continued to influence Reagan’s policy toward Marcos. Following the assassination of Philippine opposition leader Benigno Aquino Jr. in 1983 many within the Reagan administration including the President himself began to fear that the Philippines could fall to the communists and the U.S. military would lose its strongholds at Clark Air Force Base and Subic Bay Naval Station. Wolfowitz took this opportunity to re-orient the administration’s policy, stating in an April 15, 1985 article in The Wall Street Journal that; The best antidote to Communism is democracy. This was already the administration’s policy in Eastern Europe and Wolfowitz has since argued that; “You can’t use democracy, as appropriately you should, as a battle with the Soviet Union, and turn around and be completely hypocritical about it when it’s on your side of the line.”
Wolfowitz claims that this policy did not deviate from that lain out by Kirkpatrick in her 1979 article as the “necessary disciplines and habits” she wrote of were already in place. “When we went to work on Marcos, it was not to dismantle the institutions of the Philippines; it was actually to get him to stop dismantling them himself,” Wolfowitz later argued of the specifics of the policy; “Military reform, economic reform, getting rid of crony capitalism, relying on the church, political reform: It was very institutionally oriented.” In pursuance of this policy Wolfowitz and his assistant Lewis Libby made trips to Manila where they called for democratic reforms and met with non-communist opposition leaders but the approach was still very soft. As Wolfowitz later explained; “If we had said, ‘We are enemies of the Marcos regime. We want to see it’s demise rather than reform,’ we would have lost all influence in Manila and would have created a situation highly polarized between a regime that had hunkered down and was prepared to do anything to survive and a population at loose ends,” that would have strengthened the communists. So at the same time Wolfowitz also fought against moves by the U.S. Congress to end military aide to the Marcos regime.
As Mann points out “the Reagan administration’s decision to support democratic government in the Philippines had been hesitant, messy, crisis-driven and skewed by the desire to do what was necessary to protect the American military instillations,” but it did eventually pay off when, following massive street protests, Marcos fled the country on a U.S. Air Force plane and Reagan reluctantly recognized the government of Corazón Aquino. Wolfowitz has since claimed that this demonstrates that democracy “needs the prodding of the U.S.” Wolfowitz’s commitment to democracy would be put to the test in his next posting.
[edit] Ambassador to the Republic of Indonesia
From 1986-89 Wolfowitz was the U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Indonesia while General Suharto was still dictator. Of Wolfowitz's time as Ambassador former foreign policy adviser Dewi Fortuna Anwar told ABC News that "he was extremely able and very much admired and well-liked on a personal level, but he never intervened to push human rights or stand up to corruption."[2]
After Suharto stood down in 1998 Wolfowitz himself stated that the General was guilty "of suppressing political dissent, of weakening alternative leaders and of showing favoritism to his children's business deals, frequently at the expense of sound economic policy" while ABC News clarifies that "at the time, thousands of leftists detained after the 1965 U.S.-backed military coup that brought Suharto to power were still languishing in jail without trial." ABC News goes on to claim that "tens of thousands of people in East Timor, a country Suharto's troops occupied in 1975, died during the 1980s in a series of army anti-insurgency offensives." Director of the International NGO Forum on Indonesian Development Binny Buchori told ABC News Wolfowitz " went to East Timor and saw abuses going on, but then kept quiet."
Perhaps most significantly considering Wolfowitz’s current position is ABC News' claim that "during his 32-year reign, Suharto, his family and his military and business cronies transformed Indonesia into one of the most graft-ridden countries in the world, plundering an estimated $30 billion", much of this money is believed to have come from Wolfowitz's new employers, the World Bank. Binny Buchori says that Wolfowitz "never alluded to any concerns about the level of corruption or the need for more transparency." Officials involved in the AID program during Wolfowitz's tenure told The Washington Post that he "took a keen personal interest in development, including health care, agriculture and private sector expansion"[3] and that "Wolfowitz canceled food assistance to the Indonesian government out of concern that Suharto's family, which had an ownership interest in the country's only flour mill, was indirectly benefiting." According to The Washington Post Wolfowitz gave a farewell speech to the American Chamber of Commerce in Jakarta in which he stated that "the cost of the high-cost economy remains too high, for the private sector to flourish, special privilege must give way to equal opportunity and equal risk for all." Wolfowitz has since stated in The Wall Street Journal "that he [Suharto] allowed this, and that he amassed such wealth himself, is all the more mysterious since he lived a relatively modest life."
While The Washington Post has "Wolfowitz's colleagues and friends, both Indonesian and American" pointing to the "U.S. envoy's quiet pursuit of political and economic reforms in Indonesia" Binny Buchori denies this stating that "he was an effective diplomat, but he gave no moral support for dissidents." ABC News quotes the head of the Indonesian National Human Rights Commission Abdul Hakim Garuda Nusantara as saying "of all former U.S. ambassadors, he was considered closest to and most influential with Suharto and his family, but he never showed interest in issues regarding democratization or respect of human rights. Wolfowitz never once visited our offices. I also never heard him publicly mention corruption, not once." Dewi Fortuna Anwar suggests that "at the time, Washington didn't care too much about human rights and democracy; it was still the Cold War and they were only concerned about fighting communism," Jeffrey Winters from Northwestern University goes even further by stating in The Guardian that Wolfowitz "had his chance, and he toed the Reagan hawkish line."[4]
However in Wolfowitz's May 1989 farewell remarks at Jakarta's American Cultural Center he stated that "if greater openness is a key to economic success, I believe there is increasingly a need for openness in the political sphere as well." As The Washington Post goes on to explain "this single, unexpected sentence stunned some members of Suharto's inner circle." Wolfowitz has stated in an article he wrote in The Wall Street Journal following the Indonesian 1998 Revolution that Suharto blamed this "plea for greater political openness" as "the cause of the violent incidents that marked Indonesia's largely stage-managed elections in 1997."[5] Jeffrey Winters dismisses this saying in The Guardian that "it is really too much to claim that he played any kind of role in leading Indonesia to democracy."
In 1997 Wolfowitz was still publicly praising Suharto's "strong and remarkable leadership" in testimony on Indonesia before the U.S. House Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations. In the article for The Wall Street Journal, Wolfowitz wrote that "The tragedy for Mr. Suharto and his country is that he would have been widely admired by his countrymen if he had stepped down 10 years ago." Wolfowitz goes on to explain, as his reasoning for his support, that "achieving peace among a population so diverse requires a strong leader and a unified military." In the aftermath of the 2002 Bali bombing he stated that "the reason the terrorists are successful in Indonesia is because the Suharto regime fell and the methods that were used to suppress them are gone."
[edit] Undersecretary of Defense for Policy
From 1989-93 under U.S. President George H.W. Bush Wolfowitz served as U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy reporting to the then U.S. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. Wolfowitz was charged with realigning U.S. military strategy in the post-cold war environment.
During the 1991 Persian Gulf War Wolfowitz’s team were charged with the co-ordination and review of military strategy as well as the raising of $50 billion in allied financial support for the operation. Wolfowitz was present, alongside Cheney, Colin Powell and others, on 27 February 1991 at the meeting with the President at which all agreed that the mission had been accomplished and the troops should be demobilised. At that time he did not believe it appropriate for US soldiers to push forward into Iraq to bring about regime change but did support the policy of encouraging Kurdish and Shiite revolutionaries to rise up against their dictator.
However on February 25, 1998 Wolfowitz testified before a congressional committee that “I think the best opportunity to overthrow Saddam was, unfortunately, lost in the month right after the war.”[6] He went on to explain that he was horrified in March as “Saddam Hussein flew helicopters that slaughtered the people in the south and in the north who were rising up against him, while American fighter pilots flew overhead, desperately eager to shoot down those helicopters, and not allowed to do so." He went on to state that “[s]ome people might say – and I think I would sympathise with this view – that perhaps if we had delayed the ceasefire by a few more days, we might have got rid of [Saddam Hussein].”
In the aftermath of the war Wolfowitz and his assistant Scooter Libby wrote the Defense Planning Guidance to "set the nation’s direction for the next century" that many saw as a "blueprint for U.S. hegemony". At the time the official administration line was one of containment and the contents of Wolfowitz’s highly controversial plan that included calls for preemption and unilateralism proved unpalatable to the more moderate members of the administration including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell and the President himself, so Cheney was charged with producing the watered-down version that was finally released in 1992. Although many of the ideas outlined in the initial document have since re-emerged in the Bush Doctrine.
Wolfowitz fell out of favor under U.S. President Bill Clinton and left government for a short while.
[edit] Dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies
From 1993 to 2001 Wofowitz centered himself in academia where he was dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University and was instrumental in adding more than $75 million to the endowment, adding an international finance concentration as part of the curriculum and combining the various Asian studies programs into one department. He also put his years of political and defense experience to good use as a foreign policy advisor to Bob Dole on the 1996 U.S. Presidential election campaign and as a paid consultant for aerospace and defense conglomerate Northrop Grumman.
According to Kampfner "Wolfowitz used his perch at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies as a test-bed for a new conservative world vision" and in 1997 he became one of the charter members, alongside Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush, Richard Perle amongst others, of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) a neo-conservative think-tank founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan with the stated aim of "American global leadership" through military strength. The PNAC advocated preemptive U.S. military intervention against Iraq and other "potential aggressor states" to "protect our vital interests in the Gulf". [7]
Wolfowitz drafted the PNAC open letter to President Bill Clinton that began “We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War.” In the letter he criticises Clinton’s policy of “containment”; rejects the policy of multilateralism stating that “we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition”; and dismisses the effectiveness of inspectors as “it is difficult if not impossible to monitor Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons production”. He states that the policy jeopardizes “the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil”. He dismisses the UN stating that “American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council” and “the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps”. He concludes that “removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power […] needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.” The letter, signed by Wolfowitz and 17 other members of the PNAC was submitted to Clinton on the eve of his 1998 State of the Union Address.
Later that year Wolfowitz testified before a congressional hearing that the current administration lacked the sense of purpose to “liberate ourselves, our friends and allies in the region, and the Iraqi people themselves from the menace of Saddam Hussein”[8] and lamenting the decision at the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War not to delay the ceasefire until this had been achieved. During the course of his testimony Wolfowitz urged for the administration to support the Iraqi opposition groups, in particular the INC of Ahmed Chalabi with arms, intelligence and financing as a way of overthrowing the current regime without risking American troops. The pressure would eventually lead Clinton to signing into law the Iraq Liberation Act (1998) which made regime change official U.S. policy and later to the 1998 bombing of Iraq.
In 2000 the PNAC produced its magnum opus the 90-page report on Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century that advocated the redeployment of U.S. troops in permanent bases in strategic locations throughout the world where they can be ready to act to protect U.S. interests abroad. Many of the ideas outlined here would later re-emerge when Wolfowitz returned to the Pentagon, but first he had to get there.
During the 2000 U.S. Presidential election campaign Wolfowitz served as a foreign policy advisor to George W. Bush as part of a group led by Condoleezza Rice that called itself The Vulcans.
[edit] Deputy Secretary of Defense
Wolfowitz returned to government from 2001-05 under U.S. President George W. Bush serving as U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense reporting to U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Almost immediately upon confirmation he leapt into action in May 2001 during the height of Sino-American tensions that surrounded the U.S.-China Spy Plane Incident. Wolfowitz defused a very tricky situation when he ordered the recall and destruction of 600,000 Chinese-made berets that had been issued to troops stating "U.S. troops shall not wear berets made in China"[9]. Apart from this, Wolfowitz was for the most part sidelined in the early months of the administration as Bush seemed to follow the containment policies of his predecessors (although former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill denies this was the policy in Ron Suskind's book The Price of Loyalty) the situation however would soon change drastically.
According to Cobra II, during the initial months of the Bush Administration and prior to the Septemper 11th attacks, "Wolfowitz sought to enlist the Joint Staff's support to develop a strategy for aiding an anti-Saddam resistance. Saddam had drained the southern marshes in Iraq to deprive Shiite rebels of a sanctuary, so Wolfowitz wondered if the dams could be bombed to re-create them. The Pentagon lawyers challenged whether such a strike would be consistent with the rules of war. Wolfowitz's view was that it would be more humane than leaving the Shiites to Saddam's mercy. Wolfowitz also wanted to know what it would take to arm and train Iraqi insurgents."
The terrorist attacks of 9-11 proved to be a radical turning point in administration policy as Wolfowitz later explained “9/11 really was a wake up call and that if we take proper advantage of this opportunity to prevent the future terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction that it will have been an extremely valuable wake up call.”[10] Before going on to clarify that “if we say our only problem was to respond to 9/11, and we wait until somebody hits us with nuclear weapons before we take that kind of threat seriously, we will have made a very big mistake.” In the first emergency meeting of the U.S. National Security Council on the day of the attacks Rumsfeld asked “Why shouldn’t we go against Iraq, not just al-Qaeda?” with Wolfowitz adding that Iraq was a “brittle, oppressive regime that might break easily - it was doable” and according to Kampfner “from that moment on, he and Wolfowitz used every available opportunity to press the case”. The idea was initially rejected, mainly at the behest of U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell but according to Kampfner “Undeterred Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz held secret meetings about opening up a second front – against Saddam. Powell was excluded.” Out of this came the creation of what would later be dubbed the Bush Doctrine, centering on pre-emption and American unilateralism, as well as the war on Iraq which the PNAC advocated in their earlier letters but first there was Afghanistan to deal with.
The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001 and victory was declared on March 6, 2002. Shortly after the start of this conflict Wolfowitz demonstrated his belief in American unilateralism when on October 10 George Robertson went to The Pentagon to offer NATO troops, planes and ships to assist Wolfowitz rebuffed the offer saying “We can do everything we need to.” Wolfowitz would later go on to publicly announce, according to Kampfner, “that ‘allies, coalitions and diplomacy’ were of little immediate concern.” 10 months later, on January 15, 2003, with hostilities still continuing Wolfowitz made a fifteen-hour visit to the Afghan capital Kabul and met with the new president Hamid Karzai. Wolfowitz stated “We’re clearly moving into a different phase, where our priority in Afghanistan is increasingly going to be stability and reconstruction. There’s no way to go too fast. Faster is better.” Despite the promises, according to Seymour Hersh, “little effort to provide the military and economic resources” necessary for reconstruction was made. This criticism would also re-occur after the U.S. invasion of Iraq later that year.
On April 16, 2002 the National Solidarity Rally for Israel was called in Washington to oppose US pressure on the government of Ariel Sharon. Wolfowitz was the sole representative of the Bush administration to attend, speaking alongside Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Kampfner claims that this was part of a systematic campaign by the neo-cons to undermine Powell while he was away on a peace mission to the Middle East. According to Matthew Engel in The Guardian the administration had exposed itself to being momentarily characterised as anti-Israel, which would have meant losing votes and financial support.[11] As reported by the BBC Wolfowitz told the crowd that US President George W. Bush "wants you to know that he stands in solidarity with you".[12] Sharon Samber and Matthew E. Berger reported for JTA that Wolfowitz continued by saying that "Innocent Palestinians are suffering and dying as well. It is critical that we recognize and acknowledge that fact." Before being booed and drowned out by chants of "No more Arrafat."[13] According to Engel this may have been a turning point that saw a return to a more pro-Israeli position within the administration as Bush feared being outflanked on the right.
Following the declaration of victory in Afghanistan the Bush administration had started to plan for the next stage of the War on Terror. According to Kampfner “Emboldened by their experience in Afghanistan, they saw the opportunity to root out hostile regimes in the Middle East and to implant very American interpretations of democracy and free markets, from Iraq to Iran and Saudi Arabia. Wolfowitz epitomised this view.” Setting his sights on Iraq, which he had identified as a key region during his time as U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Regional Programs under U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Wolfowitz “saw a liberated Iraq as both paradigm and lynchpin for future interventions.” As Hersh explains the difficulty was, as Hersh explains, “[a]fter a year of bitter infighting, the Bush Administration remains sharply divided about Iraq.”[14] Wolfowitz had a plan to sell the war to the more skeptical members of the administration as well as the general public as he later clarified “[f]or bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.”
The job of finding these WMD and providing justification for the attack would fall to the intelligence services but according to Kampfner “Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz believed that while the established security services had a role, they were too bureaucratic and too traditional in their thinking.” As a result, borrowing an idea from their old Team B days, “they set up what came to be known as the ‘cabal’, a cell of eight or nine analysts in a new Office of Special Plans (OSP) based in the U.S. Defense Department.” According to a Pentagon source quoted by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker the OSP “was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States.”[15]
Within months of being set-up the OSP “rivalled both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., as President Bush’s main source of intelligence regarding Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaeda.” Hersh explains that the OSP “relied on data gathered by other intelligence agencies and also on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, or I.N.C., the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi.” According to Kampfner the CIA had ended its funding of the I.N.C. “in the mid-1990s when doubts were cast about Chalabi’s realiability.” However, according to Kampfner, “as the administration geared up for conflict with Saddam, Chalabi was welcomed in the inner sanctum of the Pentagon” under the auspices of the OSP and “Wolfowitz did not see fit to challenge any of Chalabi’s information.” The actions of the OSP have lead to accusation of the Bush administration "fixing intelligence to support policy" with the aim of influencing congress in its use of the War Powers Act. The arguments however did prove effective and the administration continues to focus on the Hussein regime's long history of involvement with international terrorist organizations and the current predominance of Zarqawi's Al Qaeda in Iraq.
Kampfner outlines Wolfowitz’s strategy for the invasion of Iraq which “envisaged the use of air support and the occupation of southern Iraq with ground troops, to install a new government run by Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress.” Wolfowitz believed the operation would require minimal troop deployment because, as Hersh clarifies, “any show of force would immediately trigger a revolt against Saddam within Iraq, and that it would quickly expand.” The financial expenditure would be kept low because, as Kampfner explains, “under the plan American troops would seize the oil fields around Basra, in the South, and sell the oil to finance the opposition.” During Wolfowitz's pre-war testimony before Congress, he dismissed General Eric K. Shinseki's estimates of the size of the post war occupation force as incorrect and estimated that fewer than 100,000 troops would be necessary in the war. Two days after Shinseki testified, Wolfowitz said to the House Budget Committee on February 27, 2003:
- "There has been a good deal of comment - some of it quite outlandish - about what our postwar requirements might be in Iraq. Some of the higher end predictions we have been hearing recently, such as the notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq, are wildly off the mark. It is hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army - hard to imagine."
Although he may have had considerable influence in the Administration's decision to invade Iraq, Cobra II depicts Wolfowitz as having little influence on the actual implementation of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. For instance: "At the Pentagon, Wolfowitz and his aides had taken the idea of Iraqi assistance a step further. Dusting off his proposal, made during his years out of office, to arm and equip Iraqi insurgents, Wolfowitz's initial goal was to raise an indigenous opposition army. As first imagined the plan was bold: there would be thousands of Iraqi freedom fighters who would battle Saddam's forces alongside U.S. and allied troops. Abizaid, who had served on the Joint Staff before moving to CENTCOM as Franks' deputy supported Wolfowitz's concept. Like Wolfowitz, Abizaid wanted to put an Iraqi face on the invasion force. Most of the administration were skeptical, if not opposed, to Wolfowitz's plan...[General Tommy Franks] thought that an Iraqi force would just get in the way and gave no weight to the benefits such a unit might provide in terms of local knowledge and language." According to the authors, money was poured into the idea but it never got the necessary backing or planning: "Franks turned to Feith in a Pentagon corridor, letting him know where he stood: 'I don't have time for this fucking bullshit.'... Rumsfeld was not pushing the idea very hard and Franks was not shy about taking on the defense secretary's subordinates...The Defense official blamed bureaucratic obstacles and lack of enthusiasm on the part of CENTCOM. White House officials and CENTCOM said that the fiasco showed that Feith and his team were better at drafting conservative policy manifestos than instituting programs."
The United States invasion of Iraq began on March 20, 2003 and victory was declared on May 1, 2003 but this was only the beginning of Wolfowitz’s problems. During the reconstruction work that followed “[t]he American planners portrayed a mixture of supreme confidence and woeful lack of preparation.” Kampfner states “[t]hese clean-cut young Americans […] were adherents of the Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld school of ‘revolutionary transformation’. They believed that, with goodwill, they could resurrect Iraq in a matter of months.” This did not prove to be the case. Kampfner goes on to say that “Rumsfield, Wolfowitz and Cheney had also invested considerable hopes in Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress” these would also prove to be ill-founded.
Cobra II also states that, "Wolfowitz and his aides suffered another setback when the White House rejected their proposal for the establishment of a provisional Iraqi government." The State department favored "internals" whereas Wolfowitz had proposed exiles. Rumsfeld was also opposed to the idea because he believed that an Iraqi provisional government would "get in the way". When the US announced that it would be running the country for a year and that Iraqis would only have an advisory role, Iraqi opposition groups futilely objected. Activist and academic Kanan Makiya, who supported regime change and had ties to the Iraqi National Congress, wrote an op-ed piece denouncing the decision. The authors of Cobra II believe one of the crucial mistakes of the administration was initially sidelining Zalmay Khalilzad and bringing in Paul Bremer instead. The move was criticized by Colin Powell and it's unclear if Wolfolwitz supported Rumsfeld's decision to sideline Khalilzad since Khalilzad had in the past been closely associated with Wolfowitz.
On October 26, 2003, Wolfowitz was in Baghdad, Iraq, himself, for a brief official tour. The failures of the reconstruction were brought home to him while he was staying at the Al-Rashid Hotel when it was hit by several rockets fired at the building. Army Lt. Col. Charles H. Buehring [16] was killed and seventeen others wounded. Wolfowitz and his DOD staffers escaped unharmed and returned to the United States on October 28.
[edit] President of the World Bank
In January 2005 Wolfowitz was nominated to be President of the World Bank. The nomination brought praise and criticism from leaders worldwide[17]. Nobel Prize winner and former chief economist for the world bank Joseph Stiglitz said
- "The World Bank will once again become a hate figure. This could bring street protests and violence across the developing world."[18]
In a speech at the U.N. Economic and Social Council Economist Jeffrey Sachs was quite vocal in his opposition to Wolfowitz.
- "It's time for other candidates to come forward that have experience in development. This is a position on which hundreds of millions of people depend for their lives," he said. "Let's have a proper leadership of professionalism."[19]
The Wall Street Journal commented:
- "Mr. Wolfowitz is willing to speak the truth to power. He saw earlier than most, and spoke publicly about, the need for dictators to plan democratic transitions. It is the world's dictators who are the chief causes of world poverty. If anyone can stand up to the Robert Mugabes of the world, it must be the man who stood up to Saddam Hussein."[20]
He was finally confirmed and took up the position on June 1, 2005.
One of Wolfowitz's first official acts as President was to attend the 31st G8 summit from July 6 to July 8, 2005 at the Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland to discuss issues of global climate change and the economic development in Africa. When this meeting was interrupted by the July 7, 2005 London bombings Wolfowitz was featured with other world leaders at the press conference given by British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
He has visited the Bank's major clients including some countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, China, India, and Brazil. Access to Wolfowitz is controlled by Robin Cleveland, an aide with little experience in development whom he imported from the Department of Defense. Many senior staffers have left and have been replaced, in large part, by Republicans and members of the Coalition of the Willing that backed the U.S. war in Iraq. These include Ms. Cleveland, Suzanne Rich Folsom, Kevin Kellems (former spokesperson for Vice President Dick Cheney), Ana Palacio (former Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs) and Juan Jose Daboub (former Salvadoran Minister of Finance).
Many Bank staff believe that major changes, however, are imminent. These could include a shift from loans to grants, administrative budget cuts, and a greater emphasis on democratization. All these are consistent with the Bush administration's agenda for the World Bank. The challenge he faces is to effectively lead an organization where the vast majority of staff intensely dislike his role in the Iraq war.
However, recent developments suggest that furthering a neoconservative agenda might be back on his mind. In the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Annual Meetings in Singapore in 2006, Wolfowitz took the opportunity to accuse Singapore of being an authoritarian state and managed to compel the host government to reverse a policy on barring certain activists into the country.
[edit] Personal life
Wolfowitz met anthropologist Clare Selgin Wolfowitz while they were both studying at Cornell University in the mid-60s. They married in 1968 and had three children. They separated in 2001.
Following his World Bank presidential nomination, Wolfowitz was reported[21] to be in a relationship with World Bank senior gender coordinator Shaha Riza, an Arab feminist who, according to The Times, "shares Wolfowitz’s passion for spreading democracy in the Arab world" and "is said to have reinforced his determination to remove Saddam Hussein’s oppressive regime." [22]
This lent further controversy to Wolfowitz’s nomination to head-up the organisation whose regulations forbid couples to work on the staff if one reports directly to the other. The Daily Mail quotes one World Bank employee as saying that "Unless Riza gives up her job, this will be an impossible conflict of interest" and a Washington insider as saying that; "His womanising has come home to roost, Paul was a foreign policy hawk long before he met Shaha, but it doesn't look good to be accused of being under the thumb of your mistress." Wolfowitz was able to overcome these objections responding that; “If a personal relationship presents a potential conflict of interest, I will comply with bank policies to resolve the issue.”
Ultimately, Ms. Ali Riza was "seconded" to the U.S. State Department and left the Bank with a promotion and a significant raise in salary.
Wolfowitz now lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
[edit] Political views
Wolfowitz is considered by many political analysts a neoconservative and possibly a Straussian known for his passionate pro-Israel advocacy and staunch support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.[citation needed]
[edit] Pre-emption
Wolfowitz had been a long-term advocate of this policy to strike first to eliminate threats. According to Seymour Hersh; "The Pentagon's conservative and highly assertive civilian leadership, assembled by Wolfowitz, gained extraordinary influence, especially after September 11th. These civilians were the most vigorous advocates for taking action against Saddam Hussein and for the use of pre-emptive military action to combat terrorism.” Wolfowitz explained his position in a 2002 interview with Robert Collier of the San Francisco Chronicle in which he stated “I think the premise of a policy has to be we can't afford to wait for proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That is a way in which any number of terrorist regimes have, over the last 20 years, gotten away with doing things that I think encourage more behavior of that kind.” He clarifies that “you can't wait until you have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that somebody did something in the past, you know that people are planning to do something against you in the future and that they're developing incredibly destructive weapons to do it with and that's not tolerable.”[23] As Hersh explained “Pre-emption would emerge as the overriding idea behind the Administration’s foreign policy.”
[edit] Iran
Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution Wolfowitz has been a notable backer of Iranian dissidents, including the bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi.[citation needed]
[edit] Opinions of Wolfowitz
Prior to his nomination to the World Bank, Wolfowitz was described by James Mann in his 2004 book Rise of the Vulcans as "the most influential underling in Washington."
Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda praised Wolfowitz after his nomination for President of the World Bank saying: "He's a great person and he is well-versed in issues regarding development in Asia."
Journalist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens, a friend of Wolfowitz, has stated: "The thing that would most surprise people about Wolfowitz if they met him is that he's a real bleeding heart."[24]
Perhaps the most famous quote regarding Wolfowitz is one attributed by various sources, including The Economist, to a former colleague who is reported to have said "Hawk doesn't do him justice. What about velociraptor?"
Tom Clancy has also been quoted on Deborah Norville Tonight as saying "Is he really on our side?" regarding Paul Wolfowitz. Clancy elaborated "I sat in on—I was in the Pentagon in ‘01 for a red team operation and he came in and briefed us. And after the brief, I just thought, is he really on our side? Sorry."
When Wolfowitz was appointed to the World Bank, East Timorese Nobel Peace Prize-winner Jose Ramos-Horta has been quoted saying, "Those who have suspicions and reservations should not have them because Wolfowitz is very humane and sensitive," according to the East Timor and Indonesia Action Network.[2] The article continues, "Ramos-Horta said he had met with Wolfowitz several times when the current US deputy defense secretary was Washington's envoy to Indonesia between 1986 and 1989, a time when East Timor was still under occupation by Jakarta." The remark was made when Ramos-Horta was the foreign minister of East Timor in 2005, he was appointed Prime Minister in July 2006.
According to the Washington Post, Abdurrahman Wahid, the Indonesia's first democratically elected President after the fall of Suharto, "was so taken by Wolfowitz's 1989 speech [see above] that he asked to be introduced. Wahid, a leader of Indonesia's largest Muslim organization and staunch proponent of political pluralism, said in an interview Friday that they became friends and he remains proud of that relationship today despite differences over the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Wahid was impeached by his political rivals in 2001 but remains highly influential.[3]
Bloomberg reported in 2005 that Malaysian politician Anwar Ibrahim, a longtime friend, had said in an interview that Wolfowitz "passionately believes in freedom and understands the issues of poverty, environment degradation, living conditions and health issues which (are) very much a World Bank agenda." [4]
[edit] Media portrayals of Wolfowitz
The title character of the novel Ravelstein (2000) by Saul Bellow was based on Wolfowitz’s mentor at Cornell University Allan Bloom, while the character of one of his students Philip Gorman whose father is a fellow professor who comes into conflict with Ravelstein and who goes on to work for the U.S. Department of Defense is believed to be based on Wolfowitz. According to James Mann, in Rise of the Vulcans (2004), however “Wolfowitz thought that the novelist’s portrait was simply inaccurate or possibly a composite based in part on some other Bloom students and their fathers.”
Wolfowitz found public prominence through his involvement in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and the subsequent Michael Moore film Fahrenheit 9/11 that criticized it. According to The Guardian “one of the most indelible moments of the film… is when Paul Wolfowitz… puts a generous dollop of spit on his comb before smoothing his hair for a television appearance.” The report, which describes Wolfowitz as the “intellectual high priest of the Bush administration's hawks”, goes on to point out; “Iffy grooming habits are the least of Wolfowitz's worries as he takes on the presidency of the World Bank.”
Wolfowitz was featured in the controversial BBC documentary series The Power of Nightmares which compared the rise of the American neoconservatives and radical Islamists, believing that both are closely connected; that some popular beliefs about these groups are inaccurate; and that both movements have benefited from exaggerating the scale of the terrorist threat. The film looked on his time as part of Team B as well as his roles in various administrations leading up to the 2003 U.S. Invasion of Iraq.
In Canadian author and journalist Paul William Roberts' 2006 novel, Homeland (Key Porter Books, Toronto), which comprises the fictional memoir of a 100-year-old man written in the year 2050 but chiefly concerning his period working on the State Department's Policy Planning Council, Wolfowitz is easily identifiable as the character Caleb Luposki, who is central to the story. The portrait of Luposki-Wolfowitz is initially sympathetic and even flattering, but it grows increasingly damning as the protagonist probes the Straussian philosophy behind neoconservatism and begins to see the totalitarian nature of his colleague's vision for US global domination. The rift between them widens over Wolfowitz's proposals for post-Cold War US foreign policy and the question of his conflict-of-interest in matters concerning Israel. After this the Wolfowitz character plays a less prominant role since the two men rarely meet. Very little in the novel seems to be pure speculation or fabrication, and much of what Luposki says Wolfowitz is on record somewhere or other as saying.
[edit] Notes and references
- ^ Tanenhaus, Sam (November 11, 2003). The Hard Liner. The Boston Globe. Retrieved on June 9, 2006.
- ^ "E Timor welcomes Wolfowitz appointment to World Bank presidency" <a href= "http://www.etan.org/et2005/april/01/06etwecm.htm">ETAN</a>.April 06, 2005.
- ^ "Jakarta Tenure Offers Glimpse of Wolfowitz." <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5475-2005Mar27.html">Washington Post</a>, March 28th, 2005.
- ^ "'Passionate' Wolfowitz backed by Anwar for World Bank post." <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000080&sid=azhW3PtF.elo&refer=asia"> Bloomberg</a>, March 24th, 2005.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
Dictionary definitions from Wiktionary
Textbooks from Wikibooks
Quotations from Wikiquote
Source texts from Wikisource
Images and media from Commons
News stories from Wikinews
- Wolfowitz Watch, Monitoring Paul Wolfowitz's work as President of the World Bank
- Wolfowitz at the World Bank from Dollars & Sense magazine
[edit] Official biographies
- Paul Wolfowitz: World Bank President, World Bank biography
- Paul Wolfowitz: Deputy Secretary of Defense Department of Defense biography
- Paul Wolfowitz, White House biography
[edit] Unofficial biographies
- The Guardian Profile: Paul Wolfowitz by Suzanne Goldenberg for The Guardian, April 1, 2005
- "Profile: Paul Wolfowitz: Hawk with a lot of loot needs a bit of lady luck" from The Times (London), March 20, 2005
- "Man in the News; The World Is His Stage; Paul Dundes Wolfowitz" profile by Eric Schmitt for The New York Times, March 17, 2005 (requires subscription)
- "Profile: Paul Wolfowitz from BBC News, March 17, 2005
- "The Believer" by Peter J. Boyer, The New Yorker, November 1, 2004
- "Wolfowitz Profile" from New York Times & Other Sources, September 22, 2002
- "Paul Wolfowitz, velociraptor" from The Economist, February 7, 2002
- Paul Wolfowitz at Sourcewatch (extensive list of sources)
- Paul Wolfowitz: Bush's testosterone man at Defense, by David Plotz for The Slate, October 12, 2001
- Paul Wolfowitz biography, from The Jewish Virtual Library
[edit] Interviews
- "I'm Not a Unilateralist": Paul Wolfowitz wants the world to understand him by Lally Weymouth for Newsweek, April 4, 2005
- DoD's transcript of the phone conversation that served as the basis for Wolfowitz's famous interview with Vanity Fair magazine, March 9, 2003
- Paul Wolfowitz interview by Margaret Warner for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, September 14, 2001
[edit] Other reports
- A world better off with Wolfowitz at bank helm by John Hughes in the Christian Science Monitor, May 18, 2005 discusses Wolfowitz's personal character
- "Jakarta Tenure Offers Glimpse of Wolfowitz" Alan Sipress and Ellen Nakashima for The Washington Post, March 28, 2005, on Wolfowitz's tenure as Ambassador to Indonesia
- "Indonesia Rights Groups Decry Wolfowitz" by Slobodan Lekic for the Associated Press, March 22, 2005
- "Will a British divorcee cost 'Wolfie' his job?" Sharon Churcher and Annette Witheridge for The Daily Mail, March 20, 2005, about reaction to Wolfowitz's nomination to head the World Bank
- "Bush nominates Wolfowitz for World Bank" Suzanne Goldenberg for The Guardian, March 17, 2005
- "The World Bank Nominee; Bush Makes His Mark" Todd S. Purdum for The New York Times, March 17, 2005 (requires registration)
- "Giving Wolfowitz His Due" David Brooks op-ed in The New York Times, March 8, 2005 (requires registration)
- Challenges for Wolfowitz and the World Bank, Center for Global Development
- "The War Behind Closed Doors" Public Broadcasting Service's Frontline, February 20, 2003
- Paul Wolfowitz's political donations at Newsmeat
- Davis, Jack, "Paul Wolfowitz on Intelligence Policy-Relations", Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 39, No. 5 (1996).
- Dana Millbank, Intelligence Design and the Architecture of War, Washington Post, December 8, 2005
[edit] Directory categories
- Yahoo - Paul Wolfowitz directory category
[edit] Further reading
- Grant Smith. 2006. Deadly Dogma: How Neoconservatives Broke the Law to Deceive America. Washington, DC: Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy. ISBN 0-9764437-4-0.
- Seymour Hersh. 2004. Chain of Command: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. New York: Harper Collins. ISBN 0-06-019591-6.
- James Mann. 2004. Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet New York: Viking. ISBN 0-670-03299-9.
- Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke. 2004. America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-83834-7.
- Daniel Ross. 2004. Violent Democracy, ch. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-60310-2.
- Bob Woodward. 2004. Plan of Attack. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-7432-5547-X.
- Paul William Roberts.2004 A War Against Truth: An Intimate Account of the Invasion of Iraq. Canada: Raincoast Publishing. ISBN 1-55192-819-1.
- John Kampfner. 2003. Blair's Wars. Free Press. ISBN 0-7432-4830-9.
Preceded by: Anthony Lake |
United States Department of State Director of Policy Planning 1981–1982 |
Succeeded by: Stephen W. Bosworth |
Preceded by: John H. Holdridge |
Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs 1982–1986 |
Succeeded by: Gaston J. Sigur, Jr. |
Preceded by: John H. Holdridge |
United States Ambassador to the Republic of Indonesia 1986–1989 |
Succeeded by: John C. Monjo |
Preceded by: Fred Ikle |
United States Department of Defense Undersecretary of Defense for Policy 1989–1993 |
Succeeded by: Walter B. Slocombe |
Preceded by: - |
Dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies 1993–2001 |
Succeeded by: Jessica Einhorn |
Preceded by: John P. White (acting) |
United States Deputy Secretary of Defense 2001–2005 |
Succeeded by: Gordon R. England |
Preceded by: James Wolfensohn |
President of the World Bank 2005 – present |
Incumbent |
President of the World Bank | |
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