Paul Wolfowitz

Paul Dundes Wolfowitz (born December 22, 1943) is an American political scientist and diplomat who served as the 10th President of the World Bank, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia, and former dean of Johns Hopkins SAIS. He is currently a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.Zachary A. Goldfarb
"Wolfowitz Joins Think Tank as Visiting Scholar"
online posting, ''The New Yorker'', July 3, 2007, accessed July 3, 2007.

He was an early advocate of the Iraq War and has widely been described as an architect of the war.
He testified before the House Appropriations Committee in March 2003: "There is a lot of money to pay for this that doesn't have to be US taxpayer money, and it starts with the assets of the Iraqi people. We are talking about a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon." In the aftermath of the insurgency and civil war that followed the invasion, Wolfowitz denied influencing policy on Iraq and disclaimed responsibility. He is a leading neoconservative.

In 2005, he left the Pentagon to serve as president of the World Bank only to resign after two years over a scandal involving allegations he used his position to help World Bank staffer Shaha Riza to whom he was romantically linked. A Reuters report described it as "a protracted battle over his stewardship, prompted by his involvement in a high-paying promotion for his companion"."Statements of Executive Directors and President Wolfowitz"
''World Bank Group'', May 17, 2007, accessed May 17, 2007.Matthew Jones
"Wolfowitz Exit Seen Clearing Way for Progress"
''Reuters'' (UK), May 18, 2007, accessed May 18, 2007. Wolfowitz is the only World Bank president to have resigned over a scandal.

Early life

The second child of Jacob Wolfowitz (b. Warsaw; 1910–1981) and Lillian Dundes, Paul Wolfowitz was born in Brooklyn, New York, into a Polish Jewish immigrant family, and grew up mainly in Ithaca, New York, where his father was a professor of statistical theory at Cornell University.Suzanne Goldenberg
"Guardian Profile: Paul Wolfowitz"
''The Guardian'', April 1, 2005, accessed May 1, 2007.David Dudley
"Paul's Choice"
''Cornell Alumni Magazine Online'' 107.1 (July/August 2004), accessed May 17, 2007. Strongly influenced by his father, Paul Wolfowitz became "a soft-spoken former aspiring-mathematician-turned-policymaker ... hoseworld views ... were forged by family history and in the halls of academia rather than in the jungles of Vietnam or the corridors of Congress ... is father... left new country Poland after World War I and after 123 years of partitions. The rest of his father's family perished in the Holocaust."Eric Schmitt
"The Busy Life of Being a Lightning Rod for Bush"
''The New York Times'', April 22, 2002, accessed March 24, 2008.

In the mid-1960s, while they were both undergraduate students at Cornell residing at the Cornell Branch of the Telluride Association, he met Clare Selgin, who later became an anthropologist. They married in 1968, had three children and lived in Chevy Chase, Maryland. They separated in 1999, and, according to some sources, became legally separated in 2001 and divorced in 2002. John Cassidy
"The Next Crusade: Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank"
online posting, ''The New Yorker'', April 9, 2007, accessed May 7, 2007.

In late 1999, Wolfowitz began dating Shaha Riza. Their relationship led to controversy later, during his presidency of the World Bank Group.

Wolfowitz speaks five languages in addition to English: Arabic, French, German, Hebrew, and Indonesian. He was reportedly the model for a minor character named Philip Gorman in Saul Bellow's 2001 book '' Ravelstein''.

University education

Cornell University

Wolfowitz entered Cornell University in 1961. He lived in the Telluride House in 1962 and 1963, while philosophy professor Allan Bloom served as a faculty mentor living in the house. In August 1963, he and his mother participated in the civil-rights march on Washington organized by A. Philip Randolph Wolfowitz was a member of the Quill and Dagger society. Wolfowitz graduated in 1965 with a B.A. in mathematics. Against his father's wishes, Wolfowitz decided to go to graduate school to study political science. Wolfowitz would later say that "one of the things that ultimately led me to leave mathematics and go into political science was thinking I could prevent nuclear war."

University of Chicago

In 1972, Wolfowitz received a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago, writing his doctoral dissertation on ''Nuclear Proliferation in the Middle East: The Politics and Economics of Proposals for Nuclear Desalting''. At the University of Chicago, Wolfowitz took two courses with Leo Strauss. He completed his dissertation under Albert Wohlstetter. Wohlstetter became Wolfowitz's "mentor". In the words of Wolfowitz's future colleague Richard Perle: "Paul thinks the way Albert thinks." In the summer of 1969, Wohlstetter arranged for Wolfowitz, Perle and Peter Wilson to join the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy which was set up by Cold War architects Paul Nitze and Dean Acheson.

While finishing his dissertation, Wolfowitz taught in the department of political science at Yale University from 1970 to 1972; one of his students was future colleague Scooter Libby."Profile: Paul Wolfowitz
, ''Right Web'' (International Relations Center), updated April 19, 2007, accessed May 21, 2007.

Career

Arms Control and Disarmament Agency

In the 1970s, Wolfowitz and Perle served as aides to proto- neoconservative Democratic Senator Henry M. Jackson. A Cold War liberal, Jackson supported higher military spending and a hard line against the Soviet Union alongside more traditional Democratic causes, such as social welfare programs, civil rights, and labor unions.Kit Oldham
"Cyberpedia Library: Jackson, Henry M. 'Scoop' (1912–1983): HistoryLink.org Essay 5516"
''historylink.org'' (''The Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History''), August 19, 2003, accessed May 17, 2007.

In 1972, US President Richard Nixon, under pressure from Senator Jackson, dismissed the head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) and replaced him with Fred Ikle. Ikle brought in a new team that included Wolfowitz. While at ACDA, Wolfowitz wrote research papers and drafted testimony, as he had previously done at the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy. He traveled with Ikle to strategic arms limitations talks in Paris and other European cities. He also helped dissuade South Korea from reprocessing plutonium that could be diverted into a clandestine weapons program.

Under President Gerald Ford, the American intelligence agencies came under attack over their annually published National Intelligence Estimate. According to Mann, "The underlying issue was whether the C.I.A. and other agencies were underestimating the threat from the Soviet Union, either by intentionally tailoring intelligence to support Kissinger's policy of détente or by simply failing to give enough weight to darker interpretations of Soviet intentions." Attempting to counter these claims, Director of Central Intelligence George H. W. Bush formed a committee of anti-Communist experts, headed by Richard Pipes, to reassess the raw data. Based on the recommendation of Perle, Pipes picked Wolfowitz for this committee, which was later called Team B.Sam Tanenhaus
"The Hard Liner:
/ref>

The team's 1976 report, which was leaked to the press, stated that "all the evidence points to an undeviating Soviet commitment to what is euphemistically called the 'worldwide triumph of socialism,' but in fact connotes global Soviet hegemony", highlighting a number of key areas where they believed the government's intelligence analysts had failed. According to Jack Davis, Wolfowitz observed later:

The B-Team demonstrated that it was possible to construct a sharply different view of Soviet motivation from the consensus view of the ntelligenceanalysts and one that provided a much closer fit to the Soviets' observed behavior (and also provided a much better forecast of subsequent behavior up to and through the invasion of Afghanistan). The formal presentation of the competing views in a session out at IA headquarters inLangley also made clear that the enormous experience and expertise of the B-Team as a group were formidable.Qtd. by Jack Davis
"The Challenge of Managing Uncertainty:
Paul Wolfowitz on Intelligence-Policy Relations", '' Studies in Intelligence'' 39.5 (1996):35–42, accessed May 21, 2007. ("Jack Davis served in the Directorate of Intelligence.") orrected title./ref>

Team B's conclusions have faced criticism. They have been called "worst-case analysis", ignoring the "political, demographic, and economic rot" already eating away at the Soviet system. Wolfowitz reportedly had a central role in Team B, mostly focused on analyzing the role that medium-range missiles played in Soviet military strategy.

In 1978, Wolfowitz was investiagetd by the FBI for providing intelligence to an Israeli government official while he was still an employee at ACDA. He was accused of handing over a classified document, via an AIPAC intermediary, which detailed the proposed sale of U.S. weapons to an Arab government. An inquiry was launched, but the probe was later dropped and Wolfowtiz was never charged.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Regional Programs

In 1977, during the Carter administration, Wolfowitz moved to the Pentagon. He was US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Regional Programs for the US Defense Department, under US Secretary of Defense Harold Brown.

In 1980, Wolfowitz resigned from the Pentagon and became a visiting professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. Shortly thereafter, he joined the Republican Party. According to ''The Washington Post'': "He said it was not he who changed his political philosophy so much as the Democratic Party, which abandoned the hard-headed internationalism of Harry Truman, Kennedy and Jackson."Michael Dobbs
"For Wolfowitz, a Vision May Be Realized"
''The Washington Post'', April 7, 2003, accessed April 16, 2007.

State Department Director of Policy Planning

Following the 1980 election of President Ronald Reagan, the new National Security Advisor Richard V. Allen formed the administration's foreign policy advisory team. Allen initially rejected Wolfowitz's appointment but following discussions, instigated by former colleague John Lehman, Allen offered Wolfowitz the position of Director of Policy Planning at the Department of State.

President Reagan's foreign policy was heavily influenced by the Kirkpatrick Doctrine, as outlined in a 1979 article in '' Commentary'' by Jeane Kirkpatrick entitled "Dictatorships and Double Standards".

Although most governments in the world are, as they always have been, autocracies of one kind or another, no idea holds greater sway in the mind of educated Americans than the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances ... (But) decades, if not centuries, are normally required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits.

Wolfowitz broke from this official line by denouncing Saddam Hussein of Iraq at a time when Donald Rumsfeld was offering the dictator support in his conflict with Iran. James Mann points out: "quite a few neo-conservatives, like Wolfowitz, believed strongly in democratic ideals; they had taken from the philosopher Leo Strauss the notion that there is a moral duty to oppose a leader who is a 'tyrant. Other areas where Wolfowitz disagreed with the administration was in his opposition to attempts to open up dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and to the sale of Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft to Saudi Arabia. "In both instances," according to Mann, "Wolfowitz demonstrated himself to be one of the strongest supporters of Israel in the Reagan administration."

Mann stresses: "It was on China that Wolfowitz launched his boldest challenge to the established order." After Nixon and Kissinger had gone to China in the early 1970s, US policy was to make concessions to China as an essential Cold War ally. The Chinese were now pushing for the US to end arms sales to Taiwan, and Wolfowitz used the Chinese incentive as an opportunity to undermine Kissinger's foreign policy toward China. Instead, Wolfowitz advocated a unilateralist policy, claiming that the US did not need China's assistance but that the Chinese needed the US to protect them against the far-more-likely prospect of a Soviet invasion of the Chinese mainland. Wolfowitz soon came into conflict with Secretary of State Alexander Haig, who had been Kissinger's assistant at the time of the visits to China. On March 30, 1982, ''The New York Times'' predicted that "Paul D. Wolfowitz, the director of policy planning ... will be replaced", because "Mr. Haig found Mr. Wolfowitz too theoretical." Instead, on June 25, 1982, George P. Shultz replaced Haig as US Secretary of State, and Wolfowitz was promoted.

State Department Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs

In 1982, Secretary of State Shultz appointed Wolfowitz as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

Jeane Kirkpatrick, on a visit to the Philippines, was welcomed by the dictator Ferdinand Marcos who quoted heavily from her 1979 '' Commentary'' article ''Dictatorships and Double Standards'' and although Kirkpatrick had been forced to speak-out in favor of democracy the article continued to influence Reagan's policy toward Marcos. Following the assassination of Philippine opposition leader Benigno Aquino Jr. in 1983 many within the Reagan administration including the President himself began to fear that the Philippines could fall to the communists and the US military would lose its strongholds at Clark Air Force Base and Subic Bay Naval Station. Wolfowitz tried to change the administration's policy, stating in an April 15, 1985, article in ''The Wall Street Journal'' that "The best antidote to Communism is democracy." Wolfowitz and his assistant Lewis Libby made trips to Manila where they called for democratic reforms and met with non-communist opposition leaders.

Mann points out that "the Reagan administration's decision to support democratic government in the Philippines had been hesitant, messy, crisis-driven and skewed by the desire to do what was necessary to protect the American military installations." Following massive street protests, Marcos fled the country on a US Air Force plane and the US recognized the government of Corazón Aquino.

Ambassador to the Republic of Indonesia

From 1986 to 1989, during the military-backed government of President Suharto, Wolfowitz was the US Ambassador to the Republic of Indonesia. AP
"Indonesian Rights Groups Denounce Wolfowitz' World Bank Nomination"
online posting, ''Alliance for Reform and Democracy in Asia'', March 22, 2005, accessed June 20, 2007.

According to Peter J. Boyer,

Wolfowitz's appointment to Indonesia was not an immediately obvious match. He was a Jew representing America in the largest Muslim republic in the world, an advocate of democracy in Suharto's dictatorship. But Wolfowitz's tenure as Ambassador was a notable success, largely owing to the fact that, in essence, he went native. With tutoring help from his driver, he learned the language, and hurled himself into the culture. He attended academic seminars, climbed volcanoes, and toured the neighborhoods of Jakarta.Peter J. Boyer
"The Believer: Paul Wolfowitz Defends His War"
online posting, ''The New Yorker'', November 1, 2004, accessed November 26, 2014 (7 pages).

Sipress and Nakashima report that "Wolfowitz's colleagues and friends, both Indonesian and American" pointed to the "U.S. envoy's quiet pursuit of political and economic reforms in Indonesia." Dewi Fortuna Anwar, a foreign policy adviser to B. J. Habibie, Suharto's successor as head of state (1998–99), stated "that Wolfowitz was a competent and popular envoy." But "he never intervened to push human rights or stand up to corruption."

Officials involved in the AID program during Wolfowitz's tenure told ''The Washington Post'' that he "took a keen personal interest in development, including health care, agriculture and private sector expansion" and that "Wolfowitz canceled food assistance to the Indonesian government out of concern that Suharto's family, which had an ownership interest in the country's only flour mill, was indirectly benefiting."Alan Sipress and Ellen Nakashima
"Jakarta Tenure Offers Glimpse of Wolfowitz"
''The Washington Post'', March 28, 2005, accessed April 16, 2007.

In "The Tragedy of Suharto", published in May 1998, in ''The Wall Street Journal'', Wolfowitz states:

Although it is fashionable to blame all of Asia's present problems on corruption and the failure of Asian values, it is at bottom a case of a bubble bursting, of too many imprudent lenders chasing too many incautious borrowers. But the greed of Mr. Suharto's children ensured that their father would take the lion's share of the blame for Indonesia's financial collapse. The Suharto children's favored position became a major obstacle to the measures needed to restore economic confidence. Worst of all, they ensured that the economic crisis would be a political crisis as well. That he allowed this, and that he amassed such wealth himself, is all the more mysterious since he lived a relatively modest life.Paul Wolfowitz
"The Tragedy of Suharto"
, ''The Wall Street Journal'', May 27, 1998, accessed April 16, 2007.

After the 2002 Bali bombing, on October 18, 2002, then Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz observed that "the reason the terrorists are successful in Indonesia is because the Suharto regime fell and the methods that were used to suppress them are gone."As qtd. in Scott Burchill
"What the West Wants from Indonesia"
, '' Z Magazine'', October 1, 2003, accessed June 7, 2007.

Undersecretary of Defense for Policy

From 1989 to 1993, Wolfowitz served in the administration of George H. W. Bush as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, under then US Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Wolfowitz's team co-ordinated and reviewed military strategy, raising $50 billion in allied financial support for the operation. Wolfowitz was present with Cheney, Colin Powell and others, on February 27, 1991, at the meeting with the President where it was decided that the troops should be demobilised.

On February 25, 1998, Wolfowitz testified before a congressional committee that he thought that "the best opportunity to overthrow Saddam was, unfortunately, lost in the month right after the war."Transcript of hearing, Committee on International Relations
"U.S. Options in Confronting Iraq"
February 25, 1998, accessed April 17, 2007. Wolfowitz added that he was horrified in March as "Saddam Hussein flew helicopters that slaughtered the people in the south and in the north who were rising up against him, while American fighter pilots flew overhead, desperately eager to shoot down those helicopters, and not allowed to do so." During that hearing, he also stated: "Some people might say—and I think I would sympathise with this view—that perhaps if we had delayed the ceasefire by a few more days, we might have got rid of Saddam Hussein."

After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Wolfowitz and his then-assistant Scooter Libby wrote the "Defense Planning Guidance of 1992", which came to be known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine, to "set the nation's direction for the next century." As military strategist Andrew Bacevich described the doctrine:

Before this classified document was fully vetted by the White House, it was leaked to ''The New York Times'', which made it front-page news. The draft DPG announced that it had become the "first objective" of U.S. policy "to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival." With an eye toward "deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role," the United States would maintain unquestioned military superiority and, if necessary, employ force unilaterally. As window dressing, allies might be nice, but the United States no longer considered them necessary.

At that time the official administration line was "containment", and the contents of Wolfowitz's plan calling for "preemption" and "unilateralism" which was opposed by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell and President Bush. Defense Secretary Cheney produced a revised plan released in 1992. Many of the ideas in the Wolfowitz Doctrine later became part of the Bush Doctrine. He left the government after the 1992 election.

Johns Hopkins University

From 1994 to 2001, Wolfowitz served as Professor of International Relations and Dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. Bacevich, Andrew
A Letter to Paul Wolfowitz
'' Harper's'' (March 2013) He was instrumental in adding more than $75 million to the university's endowment, developing an international finance concentration as part of the curriculum, and combining the various Asian studies programs into one department. He also advised Bob Dole on foreign policy during his 1996 US Presidential election campaign, which was managed by Donald Rumsfeld.

According to Kampfner, "Wolfowitz used his perch at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies as a test-bed for a new conservative world vision." Wolfowitz was associated with the Project for the New American Century

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