On misreading Paul Wolfowitz
Tim Cavanaugh is web editor at Reason magazine (www.reason.com). He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR
Paul Wolfowitz is a mirror in which we see reflected every image except our own. For opponents of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, no character makes quite so handy a villain as the American deputy secretary of defense.
From Wolfowitz’s hotly disputed claims that “bureaucratic reasons” shaped how the administration justified war in Iraq, to his televised press conference after being attacked by rockets at Baghdad’s Al-Rashid Hotel (a conference where Wolfowitz was described as either “spooked” or “shaken” though he was neither), Wolfowitz is the gold standard for neoconservative heavy. He beggars Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, out-Perles former Pentagon official Richard Perle, offends decency more powerfully than both neocon icons Irving and William Kristol put together. There is no mendacity too outrageous for him to utter, no vice that fails to besmirch his character, no sin, venial or mortal, that he has not committed.
Exactly how Wolfowitz came to fill this role as human dartboard is cause for interesting speculation. Certainly, the deputy secretary’s personality plays a part. With his pencil neck and know-it-all air (odd given that acquaintances generally describe him as personally engaging), Wolfowitz is the very model of an infuriating chickenhawk. His being the intellectual architect of the White House’s pre-emptive security strategy makes legitimate policy-based criticism of him inevitable. And while charges of anti-Semitism are lodged promiscuously these days, in Wolfowitz’s case there may be some truth in the claim that his Judaism bothers some. If nothing else, Lebanese politician Walid Jumblatt’s reference to him as a “virus” came straight out of the Cossack playbook.
The paradox in this vituperation is that, of all the Bush administration’s high-level policymakers, Wolfowitz is probably the one who is philosophically closest to his detractors. You could irrigate Mars with the crocodile tears that have been shed for the Iraqi people over the past 18 months, and the hawks have been as lachrymose as the doves. Yet Wolfowitz stands out in this milieu by virtue of his seeming guilelessness. If consistency of message and purpose are any indication, he seems to be guided, at least in part, by a genuine belief in the airiest of Wilsonian ideals that brought about the fall of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. In interviews, in public statements, in his travel itinerary, Wolfowitz consistently personalizes the Iraqis, cites his own experiences in post-Saddam Iraq, and speaks with passion about the brutality of the late Baathist regime.
This side of the deputy secretary came through most starkly during a recent question and answer session at Georgetown University, where a pair of students, cheered on by a large section of the audience, challenged the administration’s policy and vowed to oppose it vehemently. Wolfowitz’s sometimes-testy replies were revealing. He spoke movingly of malnutrition among Iraq’s Marsh Arabs, called the war “not ideological,” and “a moral issue,” and pounded home the need to continue with the rehabilitation of Iraq, even if President George W. Bush loses next year’s election (and Wolfowitz his job). These were characteristic Wolfowitz comments, where everything was framed in terms of humanitarian duty and a belief in democracy for the Arabs.
At the same session, Wolfowitz revealed another area in which he should theoretically be in step with the anti-war left: He is probably the most pro-Palestinian member of the Bush administration. Granted, that’s not difficult given its current makeup, and it would be overstating matters to say Wolfowitz has evolved a coherent critique of the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. However, he frequently extemporizes on Israeli abuses, condemns settlements and the separation wall, and continues, seemingly unbidden, to voice support for grassroots initiatives such as the Geneva Initiative on Israeli-Palestinian peace that Sharon so angrily opposes.
There is one group in the anti-war movement that will be unhappy with such gestures: the “America firsters,” who freely admit to being indifferent to the fate of Iraqis under Saddam or anybody else, and view any expenditure of American blood and treasure for the well-being of foreigners as folly. As one of them, I admit to a sinking feeling when Wolfowitz points proudly to America’s record of humanitarian interventions during the past decade. But the America firsters are a vanishing fringe of the anti-war coalition.
Instead, most Bush opponents frame their arguments in internationalist terms, or with expressions of concern for the Iraqi people. That’s why it’s odd that so few observers have remarked how frequently the stated goals of anti-war progressives and pro-war neocons overlap. Wolfowitz frequently cites (and perhaps overstates) his own positions against the kleptocracy of the former Filipino president, Ferdinand Marcos, and the dictatorship of Indonesia’s Suharto. Even if his opposition to such brutes was not wholly consistent at the time, it is important that he views it as of a piece with his helping overthrow Saddam. The Bush administration’s foreign policy has been credibly tagged with many faults: imperial hubris, mercantilist greed, congenital dishonesty, etc. In this context, Wolfowitz presents a tricky case: He actually seems to believe (and may be alone in believing) that American power is best used to attain liberal goals.
Whether this belief is gaining or losing ground in Washington is an open question. Bush’s recent speeches on democracy in the Middle East notably his talk at Buckingham Palace and his address to the National Endowment for Democracy constitute at least a verbal sea change in US policy, and a striking admission that past support for illiberal regimes was a grave error. At the same time, the administration’s visible haste in seeking an exit from Iraq is sharply at odds with that missionary spirit. It is in this split that Wolfowitz’s relationship with his detractors may prove crucial.
It is an irony of our current situation that the wartime opposition is needed now more vitally than ever before, but that it can’t seem to identify its friends and foes. Liberal opponents of the war frequently claim that they, rather than the Bush team, are the real champions of the Arabs and the honest supporters of progress and democracy. If so, they should be pressing the administration to live up to the ideals it is increasingly using to sell the Iraq war to American voters and the world community. In doing so, they may find that Paul Wolfowitz is the most important friend they have.
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