Wolfowitz's tomb

A lead architect of the Iraq war, he believed shock and awe would transform the Middle East. But his policies failed -- along with his tenure at the World Bank.

By Sidney Blumenthal

Read more: Politics, Sidney Blumenthal, Middle East, Iraq, CIA, World Bank, Opinion, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld

Reuters/Francois Lenoir

World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz at a news conference in Brussels, Belgium, May 2, 2007.

May 24, 2007 | Paul Wolfowitz's doctrines are a summa of numerous failed political dogmas of the 20th century. His notion of politics was essentially Bolshevik, but less democratic in practice than Lenin's. Wolfowitz had no concept of mass politics. Nor did he have an idea of democratic centralism, the core of Leninism, by which the vanguard led the cells of the party. Wolfowitz believed only in the vanguard. The dutiful student of obscurantist authoritarian philosopher Leo Strauss operated as a solitary intellectual at the head of a single cell, the lone Wolfowitz. His view of international political dynamics was a strange concoction of the most heated, impassioned idea of Leon Trotsky -- the permanent revolution -- admixed with the most rigid, Manichaean metaphor of John Foster Dulles -- the domino theory of the Cold War. Dulles' idea, applied to Southeast Asia, was a reaction to his mistaken understanding of Communist expansion as Trotskyist in conception. From this thesis and antithesis came the synthesis of Paul Wolfowitz. Welcome to the dustbin of history.

The squalid ending of Wolfowitz's glittering career, bickering over lies about payments to his girlfriend, submerged his grandiosity. Wheedling with the World Bank board, he appeared as a shadow of his former self, the intellectual field marshal pulverizing the opposition with the artillery of his arguments, reduced to using a Washington lawyer to make fine points. His class enemies -- the CIA and the Baathists, the State Department and the McGovernites -- had retreated under his barrages, but he found himself at last whining of persecution at the hands of the sort of bureaucrats he had brushed aside throughout his long rise.

Wolfowitz's vision promised nothing less than a rupture with the entire world order. By one decisive act of will, all that existed -- all -- would be transformed. After a brief, very brief, interval, collective happiness and universal harmony would be ushered in. With shock and awe, change would roll in mighty waves, pounding all with its unceasing force.

He was a good boy, not a rebel. Unlike some neoconservatives who had begun on the left and swerved right, his path was straight. His mathematician father's only complaint about him was that he had not become a mathematician. Instead, young Wolfowitz fell under the spell of one of his father's friends, Albert Wohlstetter, an old Trotskyist turned Cold War nuclear theologian. Wolfowitz was a pupil in the most exclusive school. (Richard Perle was another acolyte of Wohlstetter's.) Wolfowitz's study of nuclear policy was more than a higher mathematics; it was a kind of mystical Kabbalah. Strauss' influence on him at the University of Chicago was decidedly minor. His connection at the University of Chicago with Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile, and Zalmay Khalilzad, another neocon later to be U.S. ambassador to Iraq, was more significant than having Strauss as a teacher. His true master was Wohlstetter, master of throw-weights. Wolfowitz's doctoral thesis was on why Israeli development of a nuclear weapon threatened Middle Eastern and world stability.

Wolfowitz's recruitment onto the "B Team" in the late 1970s, created under the Ford administration through conservative pressure in order to discredit the CIA's assessments of the Soviet Union's nuclear capabilities, signaled his entrance into the sanctum sanctorum of nuclear theologians and Republican policymaking. The factual rebuttal of the B Team's assertions was not a black mark. Conservatives were on the ascendancy and Wolfowitz was a rare young man among them with a first-class mind and education.

With the end of the Cold War the cold warrior without a mission fastened onto a new id´e fixe. As the undersecretary of defense for policy in the first Gulf War, serving under Secretary Dick Cheney, Wolfowitz had concurred in the decision not to pursue Saddam Hussein to Baghdad after expelling him from Kuwait. He had been present at the Feb. 21, 1991, meeting where that policy was approved and uttered not a skeptical or contrary word. But when the elder Bush was defeated, Wolfowitz in exile became the champion of regime change. He developed an elaborate utopian scheme based on the overthrow of Saddam -- instant democracy in Iraq, inciting democratic revolutions throughout the Middle East, accompanied by the equally sudden quiescence of the Palestinians, creating peace for Israel while doing away with any negotiations involved in a peace process. And he imagined Saddam, a brutal enough tyrant, as an octopus, his tentacles manipulating nearly every horror. Even after every available piece of evidence and trials proved otherwise, he continued to insist that Saddam was behind the Oklahoma City and 1993 World Trade Center bombings.

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