Friday, December 26, 2003
Paul Wolfowitz, velociraptor extraordinaire
Even at the worse of times, one had to admit that Paul Wolfowitz is an intriguing man. No matter how much I disagree with him, I'd actually go to some trouble to listen to him speak, if for no other reason to find out how the other side thinks and the stream of logic they're using. Clearly brilliant and extraordinarily intellectual, he comes across as being the exact opposite of his boss, GWB. Given his brains, one has to wonder how he managed to misread the Iraq situation so badly. So, I read with great interest the Washington Post feature on him yesterday.
Some observers of Wolfowitz speculate that one lesson he took from the Holocaust is that the American people need to be pushed to do the right thing, because by the time they entered World War II, it was too late for millions of Jews and other victims of the Nazis.
Asked about this, Wolfowitz agrees but expands on the thought -- and connects it to Iraq. "I think the world in general has a tendency to say, if somebody evil like Saddam is killing his own people, 'That's too bad, but that's really not my business.' " That's dangerous, he continued, because Hussein was "in a class with very few others -- Stalin, Hitler, Kim Jong Il. . . . People of that order of evil . . . tend not to keep evil at home, they tend to export it in various ways and eventually it bites us."
Agreed, but where were you when Mobutu, Pinochet, Saddam, Bin Laden etc were being nurtured by your fellow travellers in the name of national security?
To Wolfowitz, there is no contradiction between calculated policies and idealistic goals. Rather, he contends, they can reinforce each other. Indeed, Wolfowitz is most confrontational when he is most idealistic. Nowhere is that more evident than in his advocacy of transforming the politics of the Middle East, a policy that frequently is attacked as unrealistically idealistic.
Pentagon insiders say this vision of a democratic transformation of the troubled region is probably the biggest single area of discrepancy in policy views between Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, who is said to doubt that such a sweeping change is possible.
Some see Wolfowitz's views on the Middle East as dangerously naive. "Wolfowitz doesn't know much about the business he's in," says retired Marine Gen. Joseph Hoar, a former chief of the Central Command, the U.S. military headquarters for the region. "He knows very little about war fighting. And he knows very little about the Middle East, aside from maybe Israel."
Likewise, the latest issue of Parameters, the official journal of the U.S. Army War College, carried some tart commentary aimed at Wolfowitz and his colleagues. Jeffrey Record, a former staffer for the Senate Armed Services Committee, wrote that "the Bush Administration, and more specifically the civilian leadership of the Pentagon, made faulty assumptions about postwar Iraq and failed to plan properly for Iraq's reconstruction." He particularly faulted "the 'liberation' scenario peddled by the Defense Department's neoconservative naifs."
An intriguing man indeed. If only his idealistic adventure didnt cost these many lives. Of course, if the war had been sold on the "Saddam as tyrant" spiel (Wolfowitz's take) rather than on WMD's, it might not have become the marketing disaster it has now become. But then try selling Wolfowitz-style liberal interventionism to the American public.
Some observers of Wolfowitz speculate that one lesson he took from the Holocaust is that the American people need to be pushed to do the right thing, because by the time they entered World War II, it was too late for millions of Jews and other victims of the Nazis.
Asked about this, Wolfowitz agrees but expands on the thought -- and connects it to Iraq. "I think the world in general has a tendency to say, if somebody evil like Saddam is killing his own people, 'That's too bad, but that's really not my business.' " That's dangerous, he continued, because Hussein was "in a class with very few others -- Stalin, Hitler, Kim Jong Il. . . . People of that order of evil . . . tend not to keep evil at home, they tend to export it in various ways and eventually it bites us."
Agreed, but where were you when Mobutu, Pinochet, Saddam, Bin Laden etc were being nurtured by your fellow travellers in the name of national security?
To Wolfowitz, there is no contradiction between calculated policies and idealistic goals. Rather, he contends, they can reinforce each other. Indeed, Wolfowitz is most confrontational when he is most idealistic. Nowhere is that more evident than in his advocacy of transforming the politics of the Middle East, a policy that frequently is attacked as unrealistically idealistic.
Pentagon insiders say this vision of a democratic transformation of the troubled region is probably the biggest single area of discrepancy in policy views between Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, who is said to doubt that such a sweeping change is possible.
Some see Wolfowitz's views on the Middle East as dangerously naive. "Wolfowitz doesn't know much about the business he's in," says retired Marine Gen. Joseph Hoar, a former chief of the Central Command, the U.S. military headquarters for the region. "He knows very little about war fighting. And he knows very little about the Middle East, aside from maybe Israel."
Likewise, the latest issue of Parameters, the official journal of the U.S. Army War College, carried some tart commentary aimed at Wolfowitz and his colleagues. Jeffrey Record, a former staffer for the Senate Armed Services Committee, wrote that "the Bush Administration, and more specifically the civilian leadership of the Pentagon, made faulty assumptions about postwar Iraq and failed to plan properly for Iraq's reconstruction." He particularly faulted "the 'liberation' scenario peddled by the Defense Department's neoconservative naifs."
An intriguing man indeed. If only his idealistic adventure didnt cost these many lives. Of course, if the war had been sold on the "Saddam as tyrant" spiel (Wolfowitz's take) rather than on WMD's, it might not have become the marketing disaster it has now become. But then try selling Wolfowitz-style liberal interventionism to the American public.
