Paul Wolfowitz

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Paul Dundes Wolfowitz (born December 22, 1943) is currently a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, working on issues of international economic development, Africa and public-private partnerships. On January 24, 2008, he was named chairman of a high-level advisory panel on arms control and disarmament at the State Department. A former academic, diplomat, political and military strategist and policymaker, and former American government official, most recently, he served as president of the World Bank Group for two years. As U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense during the Presidency of George W. Bush, he was "a major architect of President Bush's Iraq policy and, within the Administration, its most passionate and compelling advocate" (Boyer 1). He resigned as president of the World Bank Group as a result of an investigation by its board of executive directors, "ending a protracted and tumultuous battle over his stewardship, sparked by a promotion he arranged for his companion."

Personal history

The second child of Wayne Gates native Jacob "Jack" Wolfowitz (1910–1981) and Lillian Dundes, Paul Wolfowitz "was born in Brooklyn, New York, into a Polish Jewish immigrant family, and grew up mainly in the university town of Ithaca, New York, where his father was a professor of statistical theory at Cornell University." "In addition to being prolific in research" and "very well read," his father's friend and colleague Shelemyahu Zacks writes in a tribute, Jacob Wolfowitz "fought at the time for the liberation of Soviet Jewry. He was a friend and strong supporter of the state of Israel, AIPAC member and had many friends and admirers there." Strongly influenced by his father, according to Eric Schmitt, Paul Wolfowitz became "A soft-spoken former aspiring-mathematician-turned-policymaker … [whose] world views … were forged by family history and in the halls of academia rather than in the jungles of Vietnam or the corridors of Congress … [His father] … escaped Poland after World War I. The rest of his father's family and their diamonds perished in the Holocaust." Such family trauma led, David Dudley observes, to Jack Wolfowitz "living in a world haunted by atrocities" and deeply affecting his son's personal and intellectual development. According to Peter J. Boyer, "Wolfowitz said that he had learned little about Warsaw life, or the fate of his lost relatives, from his father. 'He hated to talk about his childhood,' Wolfowitz said. As a boy, Wolfowitz devoured books ('probably too many') about the Holocaust and Hiroshima—what he calls 'the polar horrors'" (2). Speaking more specifically of the influence of the Holocaust on his own later views to Eric Schmitt, Wolfowitz said:

"That sense of what happened in Europe in World War II has shaped a lot of my views … It's a very bad thing when people exterminate other people, and people persecute minorities. It doesn't mean you can prevent every such incident in the world, but it's also a mistake to dismiss that sort of concern as merely humanitarian and not related to real interest."

Before first moving to Ithaca, in the fall of academic year 1952–1953 for his father's new post, Wolfowitz told Sam Tanenhaus in their interview, the Wolfowitzes lived in Manhattan: "I was born in Brooklyn but we grew up in Manhattan, one block down on Morningside Drive in a house that no longer exists. One block down from the President of Columbia who for part of that time was Dwight Eisenhower. My sister tells me that she remembers seeing Eisenhower go to his car as we were roller-skating on that block, but it didn't make any impression on me. I was probably three or four." After teaching at Cornell for that first year, his father "immediately had a sabbatical ... and '53–'54 we spent half in Los Angeles," while he was teaching at UCLA, "and half in Urbana, Illinois," while he was teaching at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Paul Wolfowitz's friend and later fellow Tellurider "Fred Baumann [Cornell] '66 remembers a familiar parental refrain in the Jewish community of Ithaca in the 1950s: 'Why can't you be like the Wolfowitzes?' Jacob and Lillian Wolfowitz's two model kids were well known at Temple Beth-El, where Baumann attended Hebrew school and, at ten years old, first met Paul and his older sister, Laura." According to Dudley,

Paul was quick-witted and friendly, and a year older than the quiet and bookish Fred; he proved an irresistible role model. "I was his protégé," says Baumann. "Paul had tremendous charm, along with real goodness. You wanted to follow him." Now a political science professor at Kenyon College in Ohio, Baumann would follow Wolfowitz to Ithaca High School and then to Telluride. "There was a kind of gravity to him. He was more like a grown-up than the rest of us." It's a feeling that resonates with many Ithacans who grew up in Paul's shadow. "When you were with him, you felt a sort of benignness radiating from him," remembers Daniel Fogel '69, now president of the University of Vermont. "A masterly intelligence that had no malevolence."

In 1957, when he was fourteen years old, Paul Wolfowitz also spent a year living in Israel, while his father was a visiting professor at the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion IIT), in Haifa; his elder sister, Laura, a biologist, later emigrated to Israel and married an Israeli.

Wolfowitz began taking classes at Cornell University while still a student at Ithaca High School. In the mid-1960s, while they were both undergraduate students at Cornell, he met Clare Selgin, who later became a well-known anthropologist. They married in 1968, had three children (Sara, David, and Rachel), lived in Chevy Chase, Maryland, separated in 1999, and, according to some sources, became legally separated in 2001 and divorced in 2002, though, according to others, their marital status appears to be uncertain, and it is still not clear whether or not they have been divorced.

After separating from his wife in late 1999, Wolfowitz began dating Shaha Ali Riza, according to "Turkish journalist Cengiz Candar, a friend of the couple" cited by Linton Weeks and Richard Leiby. Their relationship led to controversy later, during his presidency of the World Bank Group..

Wolfowitz speaks five languages in addition to English; according to John Cassidy's New Yorker profile, "Wolfowitz taught himself Arabic in the nineteen-eighties, when he was working at the State Department," and "He also speaks French, German, Hebrew, and Indonesian."

He lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Post-secondary education

Cornell University

Wolfowitz entered Cornell University in 1961, having won a full scholarship.

At Cornell, Wolfowitz was a member of the Telluride Association, a non-profit organization founded in 1910, whose first female member was his elder sister, Laura. "Promot[ing] no particular political or religious viewpoint ... [it] creates and fosters educational communities that rely upon democratic participation ... aim[ing] to foster an everyday synthesis of self-governance and intellectual inquiry that enables students to develop their potential for leadership and public service ... seek[ing] out young people with the desire and the ability to contribute to society, and help[ing] them develop intellectually and as community members." Its members receive free room and board in the Telluride House on the Cornell campus and learn about democracy through the practice of running the house and organizing seminars. Wolfowitz lived in the Telluride House through academic year 1962 to 1963.

That year philosophy professor Allan Bloom served as a Cornell faculty mentor living in the house and had a major influence on Wolfowitz's political views with his assertion of the importance of political regimes in shaping peoples’ characters. Schmitt observes that Wolfowitz first "became a protégé of the political philosopher Allan Bloom, and then of Albert Wohlstetter, the father of hard-line conservative strategic thinking at the University of Chicago." In August 1963, "when he was nineteen, he and his mother attended the civil-rights march on Washington organized by Martin Luther King, Jr. and others" (3). His father, Jacob, an eminent mathematician who taught at Columbia and Cornell, was a fervent Zionist, and Wolfowitz’s elder sister, Laura, lives in Israel.But his father reportedly did not take well to his son’s new interest in politics or his new mentor, Bloom.

According to Schmitt, though he "majored in mathematics and chemistry ... he was profoundly moved by John Hersey's Hiroshima and shifted his focus toward politics. 'One of the things that ultimately led me to leave mathematics and go into political science was thinking I could prevent nuclear war,' he said." His friends found that shift "unexpected," and his father opposed it.

During academic year 1964 to 1965, his senior year at Cornell, having moved from the Telluride House to an apartment, Wolfowitz was a member of Quill and Dagger, a prestigious senior honor society.

Wolfowitz graduated in 1965 with a Bachelor's degree degree in mathematics and chemistry, then worked as a management intern at the U.S. Bureau of the Budget. Against his father's expectations and wishes, Wolfowitz decided to go to graduate school to study politics. Although "Paul's choice" to pursue political science and a career in politics instead of mathematics "defied" his father's original expectations and wishes for him, Dudley concludes that, eventually, "as Paul's career took him from Yale to the Pentagon and the State Department ... Jack Wolfowitz seemed to make peace with his son's choice.

University of Chicago

Following his gradutation from Cornell, Wolfowitz chose to attend the University of Chicago because he wanted to study under Bloom's mentor, Leo Strauss. Wolfowitz enrolled in Strauss' courses, on Plato and Montesquieu. Although he and Strauss did not become especially close, Wolfowitz would later come to be seen as one of the heirs to Strauss's intellectual traditions."

Moreover, in May 2003, when Sam Tanenhaus asked Wolfowitz about "the question of ideas" in their telephone interview for Tanenhaus's article "Bush's Brain Trust" later published in the July 2003 Vanity Fair: "That is, is there anything at all ... to the Straussian Connection?" Wolfowitz replied:

It's a product of fevered minds who seem incapable of understanding that September 11th changed a lot of things and changed the way we need to approach the world. Since they refused to confront that, they looked for some kind of conspiracy theory to explain it.

I mean I took two terrific courses from Leo Strauss as a graduate student. One was on Montesquieu's spirit of the laws, which did help me understand our Constitution better. And one was on Plato's Laws. The idea that this has anything to do with U.S. foreign policy is just laughable.

A few years later, in 2006, in a scholarly article published in the academic journal Comparative American Studies, Richard H. King cites and contextualizes the opinion expressed on March 8, 2005 in his weblog Altercation by Eric Alterman ––who had spoken with Wolfowitz informally during a book launch "cocktail party" hosted by Tina Brown and her husband Harold Evans––that "'Wolfowitz does not consider himself to be a Straussian.'" In developing his own argument, King also cites the views of Clifford Orwin, who states that "'Wolfowitz is no ideologue, and neither 'Straussian' nor 'conservative' begins to describe him.' Ultimately, however, King qualifies the emphases of both Alterman and Orwin and also qualifies the emphases of those who exaggerate the "Straussian" influence on Bush administration foreign and defense policy-makers like Wolfowitz.

Professor Albert Wohlstetter, who had studied mathematics with Wolfowitz's father at Columbia, and who ("Significantly") directed Paul Wolfowitz's research at the University of Chicago, instilled in his students the importance of maintaining the supremacy of the United States 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 (who is fluent in Hebrew); these later became a basis of Wolfowitz's doctoral dissertation on "water desalination in the Middle East".

In the summer of 1969, Wohlstetter arranged for his students Wolfowitz and Wilson, as well as Richard Perle to join the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy which was set up by Cold War architects Paul Nitze and Dean Acheson to maintain support in the U.S. Congress for the Anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system. The opposition to the ABM system in the U.S. Congress employed scientific experts to argue against the ABM system, so Nitze and Acheson turned to Wohlstetter and his young protégés to counter these arguments. Together they wrote research papers and drafted 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 U.S. Senate eventually approved the ABM system by 51 votes to 50, but U.S. President Richard Nixon later signed the ABM Treaty, restricting the extent of deployment of such systems.

Yale University

From 1970 to 1972, Wolfowitz taught in the Department of Political Science at Yale University, where one of his students was I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

University of Chicago

In 1972, Wolfowitz earned a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago, writing his doctoral dissertation on "water desalination in the Middle East".

Career

Arms Control and Disarmament Agency

In the 1970s Wolfowitz served as an aide to Democratic Senator Henry M. Jackson, whose political philosophies and positions have been cited as an influence on a number of key figures associated with neoconservatism, including Wolfowitz and Richard Perle; Jackson "was the quintessential 'Cold War liberal.' He was an outspoken and influential advocate of increased military spending and a hard line against the Soviet Union, while supporting social welfare programs, civil rights, and the labor movement."

In 1972 U.S. President Richard Nixon, under pressure from Senator 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 Defense 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 President 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 (father of Daniel Pipes), to reassess the raw data. Richard Pipes picked Wolfowitz, " brilliant young weapons analyst," who was still employed by the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and about whom he was unfamiliar at the time, to serve on this committee, which came to be known as Team B: "'Richard Perle recommended him,' Pipes says of Wolfowitz today [2003, as quoted by Tanenhaus]. 'I'd never heard of him.'" According to the IRC profile of Pipes, citing an interview with former intelligence officer Anne Hessing Cahn (Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1977–1980), "Pipes said, 'I picked Paul Wolfowitz [who at the time was working as special assistant for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, or SALT] because Richard Perle recommended him so highly'"; Cahn has been highly critical of the report.

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," highlighting a number of key areas where they believed the government's intelligence analysts had got it wrong. According to Jack Davis, Wolfowitz observed later:

The B-Team demonstrated that it was possible to construct a sharply different view of Soviet motivation from the consensus view of the [intelligence] analysts and one that provided a much closer fit to the Soviets' observed behavior (and also provided a much better forecast of subsequent behavior up to and through the invasion of Afghanistan). The formal presentation of the competing views in a session out at [CIA headquarters in] Langley also made clear that the enormous experience and expertise of the B-Team as a group were formidable. Unfortunately, the bureaucratic reaction to the whole experience was largely negative and hostile.

There has been and is still much controversy about the work of Team B, the accuracy of its conclusions, and its effects on U.S. military policies.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Regional Programs

In 1977, during the administration of U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Wolfowitz moved to The Pentagon, aiming to broaden his experience of military issues, because, according to Mann, Wolfowitz believed that "The key to preventing nuclear wars was to stop conventional wars." He 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, charged with examining possible areas of threat to the U.S. in the third world.

After taking up the post, Wolfowitz attended a seminar presented by Professor Geoffrey Kemp of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, in which Kemp 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."

According to Mann [?], Wolfowitz enlarged the purview of the Limited Contingency Study by questioning what would happen if another country in the region were to seize the oil fields. He argued that "Iraq has become the militarily pre-eminent in the Persian Gulf," which was "a worrisome development" because of its "radical-Arab stance, its "anti-Western attitudes," its "dependence on Soviet arms sales," and its "willingness to foment trouble in other local nations.". He concluded that "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 confront these perceived threats, he believed that the United States must "be able to defend the interests of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and ourselves against an Iraqi invasion or show of force" and to 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." In contrast to Wolfowitz, Defense Secretary Brown worried that if the report were leaked, it would damage U.S. relations with Iraq and destabilize Saudi Arabia. "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 played a key role in the 1991 Gulf War, after the Bush administration argued that the study’s predictions had come true, and the subsequent 2003 invasion of Iraq, for which Wolfowitz was a major driving force.

In late 1979 Jeane 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 U.S. Republican Party presidential nominees 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." Nevertheless, the The Times observed in March 2005, in the context of discussing his suitability as president of the World Bank Group, that "he has not ceased being a registered Democrat."

State Department Director of Policy Planning

In 1980, 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, adding: "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, which included Lewis Libby, Francis Fukuyama, Dennis Ross, Alan Keyes, Zalmay Khalilzad, Stephen Sestanovich and James Roche, would be responsible for defining the administration's long-term foreign goals.

President Reagan’s foreign policy had been heavily influenced by a 1979 article in Commentary by Jenne Kirkpatrick entitled "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, the 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 because "Decades, if not centuries, are normally required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits." This is known as the Kirkpatrick Doctrine.

Notably, Wolfowitz 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. 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 Palestine 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."

Mann stresses: "It was on China that Wolfowitz launched his boldest challenge to the established order." After Nixon and Kissinger had gone to China in the early 70s, U.S. policy was 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 the Chinese incentive as an opportunity to undermine Kissinger's foreign policy toward China. Instead, Wolfowitz advocated a unilateralist policy, claiming that the U.S. did not need China’s assistance but that the Chinese needed the U.S. to protect them against the far-more-likely prospect of a Soviet invasion of the Chinese mainland. 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. On March 30, 1982, The New York Times predicted, it turned out falsely, that "Paul D. Wolfowitz, the director of policy planning … will be replaced," because "Mr. Haig found Mr. Wolfowitz too theoretical." Instead, on June 25, 1982, George Schultz replaced Haig as U.S. Secretary of State, and Wolfowitz was promoted.

State Department Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs

In 1982 the new U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz, who would become an influential mentor to Wolfowitz, appointed him as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. At that 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.

Jeane 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.

Mann points out that "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 installations"; but, , that decision 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.

Ambassador to the Republic of Indonesia

From 1986 to 1989, "during the military-backed government of former President Suharto," Wolfowitz was the U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Indonesia. According to Peter J. Boyer, in his New Yorker profile of Wolfowitz,

Wolfowitz’s appointment to Indonesia was not an immediately obvious match. He was a Jew representing America in the largest Muslim republic in the world, an advocate of democracy in Suharto's dictatorship. But Wolfowitz’s tenure as Ambassador was a notable success, largely owing to the fact that, in essence, he went native. With tutoring help from his driver, he learned the language, and hurled himself into the culture. He attended academic seminars, climbed volcanoes, and toured the neighborhoods of Jakarta. (3)

Sipress and Nakashima report that "Wolfowitz's colleagues and friends, both Indonesian and American" pointed to the "U.S. envoy's quiet pursuit of political and economic reforms in Indonesia." According to the Associated Press, however, in their opposition to Wolfowitz's later appointment to the presidency of the World Bank, "Analysts in Indonesia ... say the candidate has a poor track record in other areas crucial to the World Bank, such as fighting graft and respect for human rights." While Dewi Fortuna Anwar, "a former foreign policy adviser to B J Habibie, Suharto's successor as head of state" (1998–1999), agreed with others "that Wolfowitz was a competent and popular envoy," saying, "'He was extremely able and very much admired and well-liked on a personal level,'" Anwar qualified that, adding: "'but he never intervened to push human rights or stand up to corruption.'" The head of the Indonesian National Human Rights Commission, Abdul Hakim Garuda Nusantara, "who at the time headed the Legal Aid Institute Lembaga Bantuan Hukum (LBHI)] that defended dissidents and sought to free political prisoners" elaborated: "'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.'" Anwar generalized further about Wolfowitz's tenure: "'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.'" As Suzanne Goldenberg observes,

some who acknowledge his popularity also discount the argument that Wolfowitz used his influence as an envoy to press for change. ... "It is really too much to claim that he played any kind of role in leading Indonesia to democracy," says Jeffrey Winters, an expert on Indonesia at Chicago's Northwestern University, who was in the country at the time. ... "The real record when you dig into it is that he was very slow to respond to Indonesia's movement for democracy. Indonesia's citizens across the spectrum had been struggling against authoritarian rule. They had been tortured. They had been jailed. They had been ruined in various ways, and the Wolfowitz embassy didn't speak up for them - not once. ... He adds: "He had his chance, and he toed the Reagan hawkish line." The World Bank will be watching for far more than that from Wolfowitz.

After Suharto was "ousted in 1998 by pro-democracy protests," according to the AP, Wolfowitz himself stated that the former president 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'"; yet, "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 ... [and] 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." Opposing Wolfowitz's World Bank appointment, Binny Buchori, Director of the International NGO Forum on Indonesian Development ("a coalition of 100 agencies promoting democracy in Indonesia"), told the AP that Wolfowitz "'went to East Timor and saw abuses going on, but then kept quiet.'" While, "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 ... Wolfowitz [Buchori said] '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 Alan Sipress and Ellen Nakashima of The Washington Post that he "took a keen personal interest in development, including health care, agriculture and private sector expansion" 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 Sipress and Nakashima, 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." Yet, in "The Tragedy of Suharto", published earlier, in May 1998, in The Wall Street Journal, Wolfowitz states:

Although it is fashionable to blame all of Asia's present problems on corruption and the failure of Asian values, it is at bottom a case of a bubble bursting, of too many imprudent lenders chasing too many incautious borrowers. But the greed of Mr. Suharto's children ensured that their father would take the lion's share of the blame for Indonesia's financial collapse. The Suharto children's favored position became a major obstacle to the measures needed to restore economic confidence. Worst of all, they ensured that the economic crisis would be a political crisis as well. That he allowed this, and that he amassed such wealth himself, is all the more mysterious since he lived a relatively modest life.

In "The Tragedy of Suharto", Wolfowitz also asserts that, following the Indonesian 1998 Revolution, 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." In his May 1989 farewell remarks at Jakarta's American Cultural Center, Wolfowitz stated, as quoted by Sipress and Nakashima, 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.'" Sipress and Nakashima observe that "this single, unexpected sentence stunned some members of Suharto's inner circle."

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 Tragedy of Suharto", Wolfowitz writes: "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," adding that "achieving peace among a population so diverse requires a strong leader and a unified military." After the 2002 Bali bombing, on October 18, 2002, according to Scott Burchill, a Lecturer in International Relations, at the School of Social and International Studies, Deakin University, then Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz observed 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.'"

Undersecretary of Defense for Policy

From 1989 to 1993, serving in the administration of George H.W. Bush, Wolfowitz was U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, under then U.S. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, and was responsible for realigning U.S. military strategy in the post-cold war environment.

During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Wolfowitz’s team co-ordinated and reviewed military strategy, raising $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.

On February 25, 1998, Wolfowitz testified before a congressional committee that he thought that "the best opportunity to overthrow Saddam was, unfortunately, lost in the month right after the war." Wolfowitz added 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." During that hearing, he also stated: "Some 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]."

After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Wolfowitz and his then-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 that time the official administration line was one of "containment", and the contents of Wolfowitz’s plan calling 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 President Bush. Defense Secretary Cheney produced a revised plan released in 1992. After the election of U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1992, Wolfowitz fell out of favor and left government until the restoration to power of the U.S. Republican Party in 2000. During the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, from 2000 to 2007, many of the ideas outlined in Wolfowitz's initial plan re-emerged as what is called the Bush Doctrine.

Dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies

From 1994 to 2001, Wolfowitz served as Professor of International Relations and Dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. He was instrumental in adding more than $75 million to the university's endowment, developing an international finance concentration as part of the curriculum, and combining the various Asian studies programs into one department. Drawing upon his political and defense experience, he also served 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." Wolfowitz was associated with the Project for the New American Century (PNAC); he signed both the PNAC's June 3, 1997 "Statement of Principles", which begins by stating:

American foreign and defense policy is adrift. Conservatives have criticized the incoherent policies of the Clinton Administration. They have also resisted isolationist impulses from within their own ranks. But conservatives have not confidently advanced a strategic vision of America's role in the world. They have not set forth guiding principles for American foreign policy. They have allowed differences over tactics to obscure potential agreement on strategic objectives. And they have not fought for a defense budget that would maintain American security and advance American interests in the new century. ... We aim to change this. We aim to make the case and rally support for American global leadership.

and its January 26, 1998 "open letter to President Bill Clinton", which begins by stating: "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 February 1998 Wolfowitz testified before a Congressional hearing, stating 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. In his testimony, he lamented the decision at the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War to call for a ceasefire before attempting to achieve those goals. Wolfowitz urged the administration to support 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.

In September 2000 the PNAC produced a 90-page report entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century, advocating 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. During the 2000 U.S. Presidential election campaign, Wolfowitz served as a foreign policy advisor to George W. Bush as part of the group led by Condoleezza Rice calling itself The Vulcans.

Deputy Secretary of Defense

From 2001 to 2005, during the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, Wolfowitz returned to government, serving as U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense reporting to U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In May 2001, during the height of Sino-American tensions that surrounded the U.S.-China Spy Plane Incident, 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. Following that action, in the early months of the administration, Wolfowitz was sidelined, as President Bush seemed to follow his predecessors' policies of "containment", although, in The Price of Loyalty, Ron Suskind quotes former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill as denying that "containment" was U.S. defense policy ..

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," adding: "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 John 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." In such meetings they created a policy that would later be dubbed the Bush Doctrine, centering on "pre-emption", American unilateralism, and the war on Iraq, which, as Seymour M. Hersh explains, in his New Yorker article on the invasion and the early phases of the Iraq War, the PNAC had advocated in their earlier letters.

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, the U.S. had to deal immediately with the threat of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001. Victory was declared on March 6, 2002. Just under a month later, on October 10, 2001, George Robertson, then Secretary-General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, 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 later announced publicly, according to Kampfner, "that 'allies, coalitions and diplomacy' were of little immediate concern."

Ten 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 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. 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". Sharon Samber and Matthew E. Berger reported for Jewish Telegraphic Agency (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 Arafat. 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 John 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 linchpin for future interventions."

The invasion of Iraq began on March 19, 2003 and lasted until President Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" on May 1, 2003. As Hersh explains, in his article published in The New Yorker eleven days after President Bush declared the "end of major combat operations", however: "After a year of bitter infighting, the Bush Administration remains sharply divided about Iraq."

Prior to the invasion, 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: "For 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 an unnamed Pentagon source quoted by Hersh, 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."

Within months of being set-up, the OSP "rivaled 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 further 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 reliability." Also according to Kampfner, however, "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 led 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; the administration continued [and 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 outlined Wolfowitz’s strategy for the 2003 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" and which began on March 19, 2003. Wolfowitz believed that the operation would require minimal troop deployment, Hersh explains, because "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, Kampfner observes, if "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.

On October 26, 2003, while in Baghdad, Iraq, staying at the Al-Rashid Hotel Wolfowitz narrowly escaped an attack when six rockets slammed into the floors below his room blowing out the windows and frames. Army Lt. Col. Charles H. Buehring was killed and seventeen others soldiers were wounded. Wolfowitz and his DOD staffers escaped unharmed and returned to the United States on October 28, 2003.

President of the World Bank

In March 2005, Wolfowitz was nominated to be president of the World Bank. Criticism of his nomination appeared in European media. Nobel Laureate in Economics and former chief economist for the World Bank Joseph Stiglitz reportedly said: "'The World Bank will once again become a hate figure. This could bring street protests and violence across the developing world.' In a speech at the U.N. Economic and Social Council, Economist Jeffrey Sachs was also 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 … Let's have a proper leadership of professionalism."

In the United States, however, there was some praise for the nomination. For example, an editorial in The Wall Street Journal states: "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.

He was confirmed and took up the position on June 1, 2005.One of Wolfowitz's first official acts was to attend the 31st G8 summit 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 present with other world leaders at the press conference given by British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Several of Wolfowitz's initial appointments at the Bank proved controversial, including two US nationals (Robin Cleveland and Kevin Kellems) formerly with the Bush administration, whom he appointed as close advisors with $250,000 tax-free contracts. Another appointee, Juan José Daboub has been criticized by his colleagues and others for attempts to change policies on family planning and climate change towards a conservative line."

In his public presentations, Wolfowitz sought to give special emphasis to two particular issues. Identifying Sub-Saharan Africa as the region most challenged to improve living standards, he traveled widely in the region. He also made clear his intention to heighten further his predecessor's focus on fighting corruption. However, several aspects of the latter program raised controversy. Overturning the names produced by a formal search process, he appointed a figure linked to the US Republican party to head the Bank's internal watchdog. In addition, member countries worried that Wolfowitz's willingness to suspend lending to countries on grounds of corruption was vulnerable to selective application—possibly in line with US foreign policy interests. In a heated debate on the proposed Governance and Anti-Corruption Strategy at the Bank's 2006 Annual Meetings, shareholders directed Wolfowitz to undertake extensive consultations and revise the strategy, inter alia to show how objective measures of corruption would be incorporated into decisions and how the shareholders' representatives on the Bank's Board would play a key role. Following the consultations and revisions, the Board approved a revised strategy in spring 2007.

Political views and military policies

Neoconservatism

Political analysts consider Wolfowitz a neoconservative whose political views were influenced by his Cornell University mentor Allan Bloom and Bloom's University of Chicago mentors Albert Wohlstetter and Leo Strauss, with whom Wolfowitz also later studied; some classify Wolfowitz's perspectives as "Straussian", whereas others question that label and regard it as pigeon-holing him.

Pre-emption

Wolfowitz is a long-term advocate of "preemption"––a military policy to strike first to eliminate presumed 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, stating: "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 added, apparently as clarification: "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."

As Hersh explains: "Pre-emption would emerge as the overriding idea behind the Administration’s foreign policy." According to Kampfner, who discusses Wolfowitz in relation to the "The alliance of Blairites and Bushites" in his article "The British Neoconservatives", published in The New Statesman on May 12, 2003, less than a fortnight after the end of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the British government's own policy of "Liberal interventionism", an "originally leftish view of military action[,] found a harder edge and a willing match in the primacy and pre-emption doctrine of the Bush administration and its leading thinker, Paul Wolfowitz. Both groups have united around their abhorrence of the centre-right and centre-left mainstream of the early 1990s - the likes of John Major, Douglas Hurd and the early Bill Clinton - citing inaction over Bosnia as their main crime."

Hersh, Kampfner, and others have argued that the policy of pre-emption (and the United States's subsequent conduct of the Iraq War) contradict treaty requirements found in the United Nations Charter, to which the United States is a signatory, as it is to the Geneva Conventions. Article 51 of the Charter, for example, refers a member state's "individual" and "collective" right to engage in "self-defense" in response to an "armed attack" against it; while offering a basis for the attacks against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan by the United States and its coalition allies after the September 11, 2001 attacks, critics of the Bush administration argue that it does not provide a similar basis for such "pre-emptive" attacks as the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.

Iranian dissidents and Iran

Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution Wolfowitz has been a notable advocate for Iranian dissidents, including Azar Nafisi, the bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran. Larry Franklin, who was both a member of his staff and an associate of the American Israel Political Affair Committee (AIPAC), investigated for alleged espionage for Israel on U.S. soil, including leaking information to Israel in order to damage Iranian-US relations, pled guilty to some of those charges, pursuant to a plea agreement in which he would "cooperate in the larger federal investigation" involving "two former employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman.

Some perspectives on Wolfowitz in the media and pop culture

In his 2002 profile of Wolfowitz in The New York Times, Eric Schmitt describes Wolfowitz as a "lightning rod" for President George W. Bush:

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz got a call 10 days ago from Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser, dispatching him to a big rally here in support of Israel. The White House was stung by criticism from conservative Republicans over its policies toward Israel.

So last Monday Mr. Wolfowitz, who is one of Israel's staunchest allies in the administration, also found himself in front of the Capitol as Mr. Bush's emissary, drowned out by chants of Down with Arafat!

Mr. Wolfowitz, who is Jewish, was booed repeatedly when he spoke—in his largely pro-Israel speech—of the innocent Palestinians who were suffering, along with Israelis, from the bloodshed.

Mr. Wolfowitz has had his share of lightning-rod days as one of the administration's leading hawks. He is a strong advocate for building missile defenses and expanding the global campaign against terrorism, to include toppling President Saddam Hussein of Iraq. But Mr. Wolfowitz, the Pentagon's second in command, did not volunteer for political spear-catching duty…

Prior to Wolfowitz's nomination to the World Bank, as cited in media profiles of him, in Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), James Mann described him as "the most influential underling in Washington." According to Goldenberg, as well as various other sources, "A former colleague says[,] "Hawk doesn't do him justice. What about velociraptor?"

In his book review of Rise of the Vulcans, Martin Sieff views Mann's portrayal of Wolfowitz as disappointing in its uncritical omissions and departures from reality:

Wolfowitz on Iraq as described by Mann is Wolfowitz as he wishes to be seen -- and perhaps even sees himself. Here is a dignified, cautious, responsible intellectual heavyweight, a moderate centrist who comes late in the day and reluctantly, but only after soberly weighing all things in the balance, to the profound conclusion that Iraq must be conquered for the Good of the Republic and to end its very real threat of weapons of mass destruction. It has about as much connection to reality as describing Saddam Hussein as a social democrat.

For Rosh Hashana 2003 (5764), The Jerusalem Post named Paul Wolfowitz its inaugural "Man of the Year": "In this year when anti-Semitism is once again a fact of life, the name 'Wolfowitz' has become its lightning rod … Surely this is one distinction he does not relish. Yet it remains a part of what makes this, uniquely, Wolfowitz's year."

In June 2004, as reported on the MSNBC television program Deborah Norville Tonight, Tom Clancy asked about Paul Wolfowitz: "Is he really on our side?", narrating the context: "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.

Journalist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens stated in an interview with Johann Hari published on September 23, 2004: "The thing that would most surprise people about Wolfowitz if they met him is that he's a real bleeding heart. In a piece that Hitchens contributed later to Slate, he elaborates:

I can't exactly say that I know the man, but on the occasions that I have met him I have been very struck by the difference between his manner and the amazing volleys of obloquy and abuse that have been flung at him. (This is made easier, for savants such as Maureen Dowd, by the fact that the first four letters of his surname spell an animal that is known in nursery rhymes to be big and bad. How satirical can one possibly get?) The truth is, he's a bit bleeding heart for my taste, even though I know some very tough Kurdish and Iraqi and Iranian and Lebanese antifascist militants who would welcome him as a blood-brother. No shame in that, I think.

Bloomberg News reported on March 24, 2005 that Malaysian politician Anwar Ibrahim, Wolfowitz's 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.

According to Sipress and Nakashima, reporting in the The Washington Post several days later, Abdurrahman Wahid, 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 … 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."

On April 6, 2005, after Wolfowitz was appointed to the World Bank, the East Timor Action Network (ETAN) quoted East Timorese Nobel Peace Prize-winner José Ramos-Horta's comment that "Those who have suspicions and reservations should not have them because Wolfowitz is very humane and sensitive," adding: "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.

In his article about Wolfowitz's problems as president of the World Bank Group, published in The New Statesman on May 15, 2006, for which he interviewed Bank "insiders", Robert Calderisi, who "worked at the World Bank from 1979 to 2002," wonders whether Wolfowitz is "The Worst Man in the World?", concluding, in retrospect it seems in part rather prophetically: "most insiders believe the bank is becoming the very caricature of a US-dominated, ideological agency that they have always denied it was. Its critics may feel vindicated, but friends of international development will worry that the Europeans - who are the largest providers of aid to poor countries - will lose confidence in using the bank as an objective channel. Or they may bide their time and decide that Paul Wolfowitz will be the last US-appointed president of the World Bank."

A year later, in mid-May 2007, as a result of the more-current controversy in the media about his leadership of the World Bank Group, according to Washington Post op-ed columnist Sebastian Mallaby, Wolfowitz became involved in an "endgame" both for his career and for the institution of the World Bank itself.

Immortal Technique talks about Wolfowitz in his song One Remix where he says "Paul Wolfowitz motherfucker I'll see you in hell."

Some cultural 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 (New York: Vintage, 2004), "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, criticized in Fahrenheit 9/11, the film by Michael Moore. According to Suzanne Goldenberg's profile of Wolfowitz published in 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." She describes Wolfowitz as the "intellectual high priest of the Bush administration's hawks," observing prophetically: "Iffy grooming habits are the least of Wolfowitz's worries as he takes on the presidency of the World Bank."

Wolfowitz is featured in the Autumn 2004 BBC Two television documentary film series The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear, directed by Adam Curtis, which compares the rise of the American neoconservatives and radical Islamists, arguing that there are close connections between them, that some popular beliefs about these groups are inaccurate, and that both movements have benefited from exaggerating the scale of the terrorist threat, inflating a myth of a dangerous enemy in order to draw people to support them. Curtis' documentary series examines Wolfowitz's work with Team B and his various other roles in various administrations leading up to the 2003 U.S. Invasion of Iraq: "According to Curtis' BBC documentary, Wolfowitz's group, known as "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 our current technology."

On 30 January 2007, after his visit to Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, Turkey, news media released photographs of Paul Wolfowitz's socks, which had holes in them. A few days later, Today's Zaman announced that the Turkish Hosiery Manufacturers' Association sent him twelve pairs of socks.

Recent controversies

Wolfowitz's economic arguments pertaining to the Iraq War

On March 27, 2003, Wolfowitz told a Congressional panel that oil revenue earned by Iraq alone would pay for Iraq's reconstruction after the Iraq war; he testified: "The oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years. Now, there are a lot of claims on that money, but … We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.” By March 2005, two years later, oil revenues were not paying for the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq, Wolfowitz's estimation of 50 to 100 billion US dollars had not materialized, and, in light of his miscalculation, detractors criticized his appointment to head of the World Bank.

Wolfowitz's relationship with Shaha Riza

After President George W. Bush's nomination of Wolfowitz as president of the World Bank, journalists reported that Wolfowitz had become involved in a relationship with World Bank Senior Communications Officer (and Acting Manager of External Affairs) for the Middle East and North Africa Regional Office Shaha Ali Riza. According to Richard Leiby, of The Washington Post, Riza is "an Oxford-educated British citizen, was born in Tunisia and grew up in Saudi Arabia. She's known for her expertise on women's rights and has been listed on the bank's Web site as a media contact for Iraq reconstruction issues." According to Leiby and Leiby and Linton Weeks, in their more recent essay "In the Shadow of a Scandal", Riza's employment at the World Bank predated Wolfowitz's nomination as Bank president: "Riza started at the World Bank as a consultant in July 1997 and became a full-time employee in 1999"; and the relationship between Riza and Wolfowitz pre-dated it as well:

In the early 1990s, Riza joined the National Endowment for Democracy and is credited there with development of the organization's Middle East program. Wolfowitz was on the endowment's board—which is how Riza first met him, according to Turkish journalist Cengiz Candar, a friend of the couple. "Shaha was married at the time and Paul was married," Candar recalled, and it wasn't until late 1999—after Riza divorced and Wolfowitz had separated from his wife of 30 years, Clare Selgin Wolfowitz—that the couple began dating."

According to several sources, when Wolfowitz was being considered for head of the CIA immediately after the 2000 election, Clare Wolfowitz wrote President-elect George Bush a letter telling him that her husband's relationship with a foreign national--Riza--posed a national security risk. It has been reported it was Scooter Libby who intercepted the letter. Sidney Blumenthal also reported on the letter Clare Wolfowitz wrote:

This embittered letter remained a closely guarded secret, although a former high official of the CIA told me about it. Chris Nelson also reported it on April 16 in his widely respected, nonpartisan foreign policy newsletter: "A certain Ms. Riza was even then Wolfowitz's true love. The problem for the CIA wasn't just that she was a foreign national, although that was and is today an issue for anyone interested in CIA employment. The problem was that Wolfowitz was married to someone else, and that someone was really angry about it, and she found a way to bring her complaint directly to the President. So when we, with our characteristic innocence, put Wolfowitz on our short-list for CIA, we were instantly told, by a very, very, very senior Republican foreign policy operative, 'I don't think so.' It was then gently explained why, purely on background, of course. Why Wolfowitz's personal issues weren't also a disqualification for DOD we've never heard." The Daily Mail of London also reported on his wife's letter at the time that Wolfowitz was appointed president of the World Bank in 2005. Asked about it by the newspaper, Clare Wolfowitz did not deny it, saying, "That's very interesting but not something I can tell you about.

According to the profile of Wolfowitz published in the London Sunday Times on March 20, 2005, cited earlier, despite their cultural differences, "Riza, an Arab feminist who confounds portrayals of Wolfowitz as a leader of a 'Zionist conspiracy' of Jewish neoconservatives in Washington … [and who] works as the bank’s senior gender co-ordinator for the Middle East and north Africa … not only shares Wolfowitz’s passion for spreading democracy in the Arab world, but is said to have reinforced his determination to remove Saddam Hussein’s oppressive regime."

The reported relationship created further controversy concerning Wolfowitz’s nomination to head the World Bank, because the organization's own ethics rules preclude sexual relationships between a manager and a staff member serving under that manager, even if one reports to the other only indirectly through a chain of supervision. Sharon Churcher and Annette Witheridge, in The Daily Mail, quote one World Bank employee's statement that "Unless Riza gives up her job, this will be an impossible conflict of interest"; the