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Man whose aim was
regime change
ALEX MASSIE IN
WASHINGTON
PAUL Wolfowitz has demonstrated a
commitment to regime change in Iraq for more than a decade.
He was
one of the very few administration officials to argue during the first
Gulf War that the United States and its allies should move on Baghdad in
1991 following the crushing success of Operation Desert Storm.
At
the time, Wolfowitz was serving as the under-secretary of defence for
policy, a position he held from 1989 to January 1993.
However,
neither President George Bush Snr nor Wolfowitz's boss, Dick Cheney or
Colin Powell, the Defence Secretary, then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, agreed with Wolfowitz's analysis.
Now, 12 years later,
the most persistently idealistic of the current Bush administration hawks
has seen his vision made real.
While others such as Cheney and
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly stressed the dangers of
Saddam's supposed arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, they were
latecomers to the regime-change bandwagon. The bookish, even intellectual,
Wolfowitz repeatedly couched his arguments in the run-up to this year's
reprise of the Gulf War in more idealistic terms.
For Wolfowitz,
previously the Dean of the School of International Affairs at Johns
Hopkins University before accepting his present post as Deputy Secretary
of Defence, regime change in Baghdad was an important element in not just
bolstering the United States' security in the short term, but as part of a
longer-term project of reforming and reordering the entire Middle East.
In his years at Johns Hopkins, Wolfowitz, who first served in the
Pentagon from 1977-80 before becoming head of policy planning at the State
Department from 1981-82, was close to the coterie of neo-conservatives
clustered at the influential magazine the Weekly Standard and the think
tank, The Project For A New American Century, both of whom urged the
administration of President Bill Clinton to pursue regime change in Iraq.
When President Bush summoned his war cabinet to Camp David on 15
September, 2001, just four days after the destruction of the World Trade
Centre, Wolfowitz forcefully put the case for action against Iraq in
addition to, or instead of, Afghanistan.
A good deal of the
morning session was spent discussing this. By the afternoon, however, Iraq
was off the agenda. At least for the time being.
Wolfowitz, who
previously served as US ambassador to Indonesia for three years in the
1980s, continued to press the case, however, using a briefing to call for
"ending states who sponsor terrorism".
According to Bob Woodward's
book Bush At War, this prompted Colin Powell to ask Hugh Shelton, the
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, "What the hell, what are these guys [at the
Pentagon] thinking about ... Can't you get these guys back in the box?"
It would not be long before regime change became official US
policy, giving the 59-year-old Wolfowitz a victory in his decade-long
battle.
This article:
http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/international.cfm?id=1185382003
Rebuilding Iraq:
http://www.news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=404
Websites:
Iraq Today
http://www.iraq-today.com/
Iraq Daily (World News Network)
http://www.iraqdaily.com/
Red Cross / Red Crescent
http://www.ifrc.org/
UN
- Office of the Iraq Programme
http://www.un.org/Depts/oip/
Christian Aid report - The missing
billions
http://www.christianaid.org.uk/indepth/310iraqoil/index.htm
The World Bank
http://www.worldbank.org/
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