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Paul Wolfowitz, velociraptor
Feb 7th 2002
>From The Economist print edition
Clever, quick and jumping for the throat
MOST deputy secretaries live lives of quiet frustration. They get
stuck with all the grunt work while their bosses swan around in the
limelight. And they have to sit mutely by while their best ideas are
either buried or stolen. Not Paul Wolfowitz, number two at the
Pentagon. Mr Wolfowitz is second-in-command to Washington's biggest
gun, Donald Rumsfeld, in one of the most sensitive areas of
policymaking. Yet his influence seems to grow by the day.
A few days after September 11th Mr Wolfowitz broke two of the cardinal rules of this
control-obsessed administration. He not only created a media firestorm by raising the
idea of “ending states who sponsor terrorism”. He
also found the secretary of state contradicting him, in one of the administration's
worst public rows. Yet last week it was Mr Wolfowitz's fingerprints, not Colin
Powell's, that were all over the state-of-the-union speech
. Its commitment to tackling explosively unpredictable dictatorships, alias “rogue
states”, its unabashed enthusiasm for asserting American power, its insistence that
this involves a desperate race against time: all are c
lassic Wolfowitz themes.
Mr Wolfowitz's shy manner and solemn qualifications suggest just another identikit
member of the global establishment. His career includes spells as head of the Johns
Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a
mbassador to Indonesia. But his views mark him out as a rather more interesting
creature. He believes in building a missile-defence shield, in preventing China from
becoming a regional hegemon, in using human rights as a
weapon in foreign policy; in short, he is every timorous European's worst nightmare.
“Hawk doesn't do him justice,” says one former colleague. “What about velociraptor?”
Mr Wolfowitz is the leader of a small group of foreign-policy neo-conservatives who
have been hanging around Washington since the 1970s. They criticised the realpolitik
approach to foreign affairs championed by Henry Kiss
inger for accepting the cold war's status quo and for implying that there was a moral
equivalence between the Soviet Union and the United States. They argued that America
should be much more willing to champion its values
, insisting that this would advance, not threaten, global security. The biggest
threats to America's security were regimes based on values that America, and other
free countries, deplore; change those regimes by advancing
western values and—hey presto—you strengthen American security.
Mr Wolfowitz's muscular world view was forged in the groves of academia rather than
the paddyfields of Vietnam, a fact that infuriates Mr Powell. After switching from
mathematics to political science, he came under the in
fluence of two remarkable mentors. Allan Bloom (later famous as the author of “The
Closing of the American Mind”) persuaded him that political regimes play a key role in
shaping character. Hence his enthusiasm for changin
g governments. (Mr Wolfowitz appears, lightly disguised, in Saul Bellow's novel about
Mr Bloom, “Ravelstein”.) Albert Wohlstetter educated him in the arcana of cold-war
strategic thinking. The result: a political moralist
, with a policy wonk's appetite for the numerology of missiles.
An intense interest in ideas does not make him the most natural member of an
administration dominated by businessmen and professional politicians (Mr Bellow is not
the writer of choice in the Texan oil industry). But thre
e things have given Mr Wolfowitz a large amount of influence. The most obvious is
personal connections. Mr Wolfowitz was Dick Cheney's right-hand man when the latter
ran the Pentagon. He worked for Mr Rumsfeld twice befor
e moving to his current job—as a foreign-policy strategist when Mr Rumsfeld ran Bob
Dole's 1996 presidential campaign, and as a member of the 1998 Rumsfeld Commission,
which gave warning of America's vulnerability to atta
ck by long-range ballistic missiles. Richard Perle, an old friend, is chairman of a
Pentagon committee. John Bolton, another star warrior, sits in the heart of Powell
territory, the State Department. “Scooter” Libby, Mr C
heney's chief-of-staff, is known as “Wolfowitz's Wolfowitz”. The Weekly Standard
provides an influential megaphone for Mr Wolfowitz's views. (One of the magazine's
former writers, David Frum, coined the phrase “axis of ev
il”.)
The second thing is persistence. Nothing seems to deter Mr Wolfowitz from banging his
favourite drum. A lengthy series of articles in the Washington Post on the
administration's response to September 11th presents him as
a man in the grip of an idée fixe, prepared to turn up to meetings that were reserved
for principals, interrupt his boss, and bring up the subject of Iraq at the drop of a
hat. After one meeting, Mr Bush made it clear tha
t he wanted only one person to speak for the Defence Department.
But the most important reason is that history has moved in his
direction. Mr Wolfowitz has been arguing for years that the world is
a far more dangerous place than most people realise; that America
needs to increase its military expenditure; and that the best form of
defence is offence. September 11th may not have proved him right in
every detail. There may be no connection between Saddam Hussein and
the September 11th atrocities. Rogue states don't form anything so
coherent as an axis. But everybody now understands the premise.
The velociraptor has been right before. In the 1980s Mr Wolfowitz
vigorously supported Ronald Reagan's denunciation of the Soviet Union
as an “evil empire”—a phrase the conventional- minded of the time
regarded as bonkers. His willingness to trust his intellect against
the weight of conventional opinion is admirable. Still, he has to
remember that, in this war especially, realpolitik, diplomacy and
even those carping Europeans have a role. America cannot fight a
multi-pronged war on terrorism without enlisting the support of other
countries; and it is easier to fight a war in support of western
values if you have the support of other western countries. Seeing the
future is only half the battle; you have to persuade other people to
see it too.
Copyright © 2002 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All
rights reserved.
End<{{{
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