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JANINE ZACHARIA:
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Invasive treatment

In 1979 he warned that Iraq would invade Kuwait. In 2001, he told the president to train his sights on Baghdad, not Kabul. Now Paul Wolfowitz is getting his way. Will he be proven right?

On a brilliant September evening at Phillips Flagship Restaurant, an eatery known for its seafood buffets down on the Washington waterfront, a few dozen former and current Pentagon personnel and academics wait eagerly for their dinner speaker, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, to arrive.

The topic of their two-day conference has been celebrating 30 years of an all-volunteer military force. An earlier panel, "From the Home Front to the Front Lines — US Reserve Forces Answering the Call," could not be more timely, given the recent Pentagon decision to extend tours of duty for reservists and national guardsmen for months, or perhaps even years, in Iraq.

Wolfowitz slips out of his dark-green four-wheel drive vehicle — he doesn’t travel with a motorcade — and makes a quiet entrance. Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness David Chu opens his introduction with a well-known Washington anecdote about the keynote speaker — how as a young Pentagon analyst in the 1970s Wolfowitz fired off repeated memos to then secretary of defense Harold Brown, warning of Iraq’s potential plans to invade Kuwait. Brown, after a while, "gave orders not to receive any more Wolfowitz memos."

Wolfowitz was of course prescient by over a decade. And his predictions, Chu said, showed his talent"to look beyond the horizon and"to take risks in terms of thought."It is that thinking out-of-the-box post-September 11 that has made Wolfowitz one of the most influential men of the past year. His fans and foes alike credit him with almost single-handedly persuading his bosses, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, and ultimately US President George W. Bush — who he advised during the 2000 campaign — of the need to mobilize a massive US force to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and ensure Iraq becomes a stable, democratic Middle Eastern ally.

It was Wolfowitz who led a small group of neo-conservative thinkers in developing a rationale for the war, at the core of which was the intolerable possibility that Saddam Hussein could develop weapons of mass destruction and share them with terrorists, and that regime change in Iraq could help pave the way for Middle East peace.

AND IT is now Wolfowitz who is facing some of the most intense questioning about the war and these very rationales — the depth of Saddam’s alleged connections to al-Qaida (President Bush himself said recently there was no evidence Saddam was involved in September 11) and his weapons programs, described chillingly by Wolfowitz and others pre-war, but for which evidence has yet to be found.

Wolfowitz personally, has been accused — both in the press and by legislators — of ipso-facto altering the rationales for the war, focusing now more on Iraq as a fresh battlefront in the war on terrorism and ignoring the weapons of mass destruction conundrum.

And perhaps most significantly, Wolfowitz, like the rest of the administration, has found himself under fire for what critics say was inadequate planning for the day after, including predictions about the costs, the expected casualties, and the ease with which order, reconstruction-funding, and oil-production could be restored.

"In your almost hour-long testimony there this morning only once did you mention weapons of mass destruction and that was an ad lib… we’re seeing shifting justifications, I think, for what we’re doing there," Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island told Wolfowitz at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in July.

At a September 9 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Democratic Senator Carl Levin of Michigan said,"And Mr. Wolfowitz you told Congress in March that, quote, ’We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon,"close quote. Talk about rosy scenarios!"

All this criticism and questioning led one Democratic aide in the Senate to say of Wolfowitz that "his stock has plummeted." Perhaps on Capitol Hill. But with rumors swarming that Wolfowitz could be tapped as secretary of state if Bush wins a second term, it’s hardly evident that that is the case in the White House.

WOLFOWITZ HAS not flinched under the criticisms.

At the Phillips Flagship Restaurant, he became most animated when he deviated from his speech on military transformation and spoke extemporaneously about his recent five-day visit to Iraq.

"I think it’s still the superficial impression of most newspaper readers in American that the bombing reflects great instability," Wolfowitz said, referring to the car-bombing of the holy Imam Ali mosque and the killing of an influential American Shia partner, Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr al-Hakim along with scores of others who gathered for prayer.

Rather, he said, the fact that the Shia have remained calm shows the "extreme calm and maturity‘ of the community. He then rattled off a list of calamities that ’should" have taken place with a US invasion but never did and enumerated the positives, including the training of 55,000 Iraqis to take over for security.

Since the end of the first Gulf War, during which, as undersecretary of defense for policy, he was instrumental in persuading Israel not to respond to the firing of Iraqi Scud missiles at Tel Aviv, Wolfowitz has been a lead proponent of regime change in Iraq. He deeply disapproved of president George H. W. Bush’s decision to wrap up the war early and to abandon its assistance to Iraqi insurgents bent on ousting Saddam. After the war, he threw his intellectual support behind the idea of arming Iraqis to oust Saddam on their own.

It was only after September 11 that he began to think that America, for its own national security, would have to do it itself.

Despite that deep conviction, his friends say, this soft-spoken, intellectual and former dean and professor of International Relations at the Paul A. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, was a surprising trailblazer.

"The irony of Paul’s fame — or notoriety — is that he was an admirable public servant and government official for almost two decades, but I’d say quite a cautious one," says William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, and co-author with Lawrence Kaplan of The War Over Iraq, Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission.

"He had strong ideas, but he worked them within the system. He was effective at doing so. And it’s a little ironic to see him way out on the parapets, allegedly at least the architect of an entire world view and the primary defender of a very controversial foreign policy initiative. He’s a very good friend of mine and I admire him very much but he wouldn’t have been my first pick to be in that role. I wouldn’t have expected it," Kristol says.

THAT ROLE emerged at the Camp David presidential retreat, when President Bush assembled his war cabinet the Saturday after September 11. As Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward recounted in a December 2001 series and later in his book Bush at War, it was Wolfowitz who pushed the idea of attacking Iraq — an idea, met by "eye-rolling" by Secretary of State Colin Powell and General Hugh Shelton, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

At one point in Woodward’s account, Wolfowitz interrupts Rumsfeld to expand on a point about Iraq. After the meeting, Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, rebukes the two, saying only one person should speak for the Department of Defense. Wolfowitz has since denied in interviews that the rebuke took place.

What’s notable about all of this now, says Kristol, is that at the time, "it was generally agreed that Wolfowitz was going to lose this fight. People forget how much of a surprise the ’axis of evil’ speech was."

By the January 2002 State of the Union speech, Bush had grouped Iraq, Iran and North Korea in an "axis of evil." It was the first step in a campaign to build support for a war against Iraq. The theoretical idea of pursuing regime change in Iraq as a response to September 11 had started to become policy.

"Paul showed real courage in advancing this agenda that he thought was so important for the country,‘ says Kristol. ’The truth is there weren’t many of us. You know, this ’great powerful neo-conservative conspiracy.’ There were about eight people. Half of them were not well-liked by the Bush administration, like me. It’s a very impressive thing that he did."

Opponents of the administration’s Iraq policy, who know Wolfowitz, are reluctant to criticize him personally.

"One cannot accuse Wolfowitz of any bad intentions or malice. He is an extremely nice person, and very decent, and open,‘ says Judith Kipper, director of the Middle East forum at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. While Kipper believes that the neo-conservative advocates of war with Iraq were ’misguided,‘ she has ’high regard" for Wolfowitz.

"I disagree with him,‘ she says, ’but he’s somebody you can engage."

DENNIS ROSS, the former Middle East envoy, who worked under Wolfowitz twice, once at the Pentagon and again at the State Department, says that contrary to some accounts that have tried to portray him as dogmatic, Wolfowitz is open to debating ideas.

"Paul is one of the most thoughtful people you will ever be around. He is an intellectual. He has strong views. But he is an ideas person. He is interested in having people around him who are ideas people. The notion that he is this kind of an ideologue, who is dogmatic, who excludes other points of view, doesn’t reflect the Paul Wolfowitz that I know," says Ross.

"If you want to understand Paul, you understand that he is very smart, he’s very thoughtful, and he cares very deeply about… what he’s doing. He’s someone who believes you can change things for the better. Someone always open to those who can make a credible case," he adds.

Michael Ledeen, a Middle East analyst at the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute, believes Wolfowitz has been "stereotyped as a very hawkish kind of person.‘ He says his hawkish views are specifically directed ’against tyrants. They’re not hawkish in terms of wanting to expand American power just for its own sake."

In a chapter he wrote for Present Dangers, a 2000 bible of sorts of neo-conservative thought on foreign policy and security issues, Wolfowitz reflected on the challenges faced by the US in the post-Cold War era. He warned against isolationism, given the US has "so great a capacity to influence events" and argued that most people now generally support Pax Americana. His belief that building democracies can help strengthen US national security is clear.

"Democratic change is not only a way to weaken our enemies, it is also a way to strengthen our friends.‘ His ideas emulate in many ways those of the late Senator Henry ’Scoop" Jackson, who believed in using American force to bolster democracies.

Given the current US unilateral efforts to create a democracy in Iraq, it is interesting to note something else Wolfowitz wrote about the limitations of US power in this arena.

"Both because of what the United States is, and because of what is possible, we cannot engage either in promoting democracy or in nation-building as an exercise of will. We must proceed by interaction and interdiction, not imposition."

How that thought will influence the US-led democratic reconstruction of Iraq remains to be seen.

WHEN IT comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Wolfowitz is often erroneously grouped with peace process critics in his neo-conservative bunch including Richard Perle, a former informal Pentagon adviser, and Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy. While he is certainly devoutly pro-Israel, his politics on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are decidedly centrist.

Wolfowitz, a non-observant Jew who has a sister living in Jerusalem, is "a two-state-solution guy who believes that the US-Israeli relationship is in both our interests and also believes that peace is in Israel’s interest," says Ross.

At the April 15, 2002, Israel solidarity rally on the National Mall in Washington, Wolfowitz was heckled and booed for saying: "Israelis are not the only victims of violence in the Middle East. Innocent Palestinians are suffering and dying in great numbers as well.‘ Wolfowitz was interrupted by shouts and jeers when he tried to talk about a future ’independent Palestine."

One former student at SAIS remembers Wolfowitz criticizing, during an informal forum, Israel’s settlement policy and lauding Yossi Beilin, the former Labor Party peace negotiator.

In his writings, Wolfowitz has argued that American power should not be taken for granted. Perhaps this belief originated in his home in upstate New York. His father, a mathematics professor at Cornell University, was a Polish Jew who emigrated from Warsaw in 1920. He reportedly regularly reminded his children that they were lucky to have escaped totalitarianism in Europe.

At Cornell, Wolfowitz studied math and chemistry. And under the influence of the political philosopher Allan Bloom, went on to earn a doctorate in political science at the University of Chicago. There he studied under Albert Wohlstetter who preached against détente during the Cold War.

Wolfowitz taught political science for three years at Yale before moving to Washington to take up a series of jobs, beginning in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, where he worked on the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks. At the end of the Ford administration, Wolfowitz was part of "Team B," a group that questioned CIA reports on the Soviet Union’s intentions. He held numerous high-ranking jobs at Pentagon and Defense. During the Reagan administration, he served for three years as US ambassador to Indonesia. For seven years before being named deputy secretary of defense by President Bush, Wolfowitz was dean of SAIS.

Now, Wolfowitz, who is divorced, seems to spend most of his time working on the post-Saddam era, and perhaps, some Washington insiders say, angling for that job of secretary of state.

That, of course, could depend a lot on the state of the Iraqi arena a year from now, on the eve of the next election. For now, despite declining American support for President Bush’s handling of Iraq, Wolfowitz remains optimistic.

"Terrorists,‘ Wolfowitz wrote in the Wall Street Journal, September 2, ’recognize that Iraq is on a course towards self-government that is irreversible and, once achieved, will be an example to all in the Muslim world who desire freedom, pointing a way out of hopelessness that the extremists feed on."