WOLFOWITZ BY CONTEMPORARIES

Thomas Ricks tipped me off (p.7) to this article on Paul Wolfowitz by Andrew Bacevich. Bacevich had a full career in the Army and taught at Johns Hopkins school of international affairs when Wolfowitz was its dean.

June 6, 2005 Issue
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative
Trigger Man
In Paul Wolfowitz, messianic vision meets faith in the efficacy of force.
by Andrew J. Bacevich

(excerpts)

...more than any of the other dramatis personae in contemporary Washington, Wolfowitz embodies the central convictions to which the United States in the age of Bush subscribes—in particular, an extraordinary certainty in the righteousness of American actions married to extraordinary confidence in the efficacy of American arms.

During the 1940s, and especially during the ominous early days of the Cold War, a series of influential thinkers—Hans Morgenthau, Walter Lippmann, George Kennan, and above all Reinhold Niebuhr—had each in different ways made the point that if the United States intended to play the part of a responsible great power then it had no alternative but to deal with the devil: the preservation of American freedom demanded that the United States tolerate, accommodate, and in some instances even collaborate with evil.

Niebuhr rendered the definitive judgment: “power cannot be wielded without guilt.”

McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser to John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, once remarked apropos of Vietnam, “Gray is the color of truth.”

Paul Wolfowitz rejected Bundy’s bleak assessment. He bridled against Niebuhr’s judgment. He refused to concede the impossibility of reconciling power and interests with moral purpose.

The advent of weapons of unprecedented accuracy, Wolfowitz once told an interviewer, “translates into a whole transformation of strategy and politics.” ...Wolfowitz did not invent these ideas. The intellectual godfather of precision warfare was Albert Wohlstetter, who had been Wolfowitz’s graduate-school mentor and whose student Wolfowitz very much remained.

As Wolfowitz saw it, the possession of great military power facilitated the merger of these seemingly antipathetic roles. America’s interests and American ideology were becoming indistinguishable.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, using American muscle to advance American values around the world became for Wolfowitz a moral imperative.

...the unspeakable tragedy of 9/11 also signified a unique opportunity, which he quickly seized. Urging that the global war against terror be recast as a global war on behalf of freedom, he placed himself in the vanguard of those calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. A war to liberate Iraq promised to change the face of American grand strategy. By irrevocably committing the United States to a broader and heavily militarized campaign aimed at liberating the entire Islamic world, it would signify the triumph of principles that Wolfowitz had long espoused.

[Bacevich discusses the Shinseki vs. Wolfowitz & Rumsfeld controversy]

In his solitude, General Shinseki can await the final judgment of history with considerable confidence. At the pinnacle of professional success*, Paul Wolfowitz must look forward to a different verdict that will be anything but kind.


The forces that Paul Wolfowitz helped unleash—a dangerous combination of hubris and naïveté—are exacting an ever mounting cost.

*When Bacevich wrote this, Wolfowitz was still president of the World Bank.




Ricks (p.17) quotes Paul Arcangeli, an Army officer who served in Iraq, on Wolfowitz:

"I actually was surprised to find, the first time I met him, that he was pretty likeable, which surprised me, because I hate him," said Paul Arcangeli, who served as an Army officer in Iraq before being medically retired. (His loathing, he explained, is a policy matter: "I blame him for all this shit in Iraq. Even more than Rumsfeld, I blame him." His bottom line on Wolfowitz: "Dangerously idealistic. And crack-smoking stupid.")

And later (p.30-31), Ricks give us an assessment by someone I presume is an insider:

Wolfowitz's advocacy of attacking Iraq in response to 9/11 stemmed from the same views that later led him to underestimate the strength of the Iraqi insurgency, said a person who reviewed those Pentagon briefing materials. "In both cases, you have this know-it-all who won't believe the intelligence community, and won't believe that nonstate actors can do this much damage," he observed. Yet this person came away, as many critics do, finding himself oddly sympathetic to Wolfowitz. "There are two types of villains in Washington, hacks and fools," he concluded. "He isn't a hack. He's deeply misguided, he's impervious to evidence - and he's a serious, thoughtful guy."

I don't know how anyone can be both serious and thoughtful while at the same time being impervious to evidence. Is that a definition of "FOOL"?