[A-List] US imperialism: Paul Wolfowitz

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Wolfowitz lost the UN battle - the war is another matter

This most awesome of hawks has sheathed his talons for the time being

Hugo Young
Tuesday December 3, 2002
The Guardian

In Washington, as well as Europe, Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary at the
Pentagon, is regarded as the most awesome of hawks in his appetite for a war
to overthrow Saddam Hussein. A Republican senator I interviewed on a recent
visit saw him as a weirdo whose views were so dogmatic as to put him outside
the realms of normal debate. In Bob Woodward's new book, Bush at War, an
essential revelatory text, Wolfowitz is reported as arguing from the start
that the right response to 9/11 would be an attack on Iraq - "a brittle,
oppressive regime that might break easily" - rather than an invasion of
Afghanistan risking 100,000 US troops in unwinnable mountain combat.

I asked him about hawkishness in a conversation yesterday in London, and
notably his well-known opposition to sending UN inspectors on a futile
mission to search out Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. "I'm well known
for lots of things," he said drily. He comes over just now as a hawk on his
best behaviour. But he doesn't think inspection has a chance of success
without a fundamental change of Iraqi attitude. There was no way every
computer hard-disc and every home-stored piece of poison could be simply
unearthed. "This isn't a country where we've had lots of human intelligence
tunnelling like crazy for years and years," he said.

Nor is the Pentagon working to the same time limit as the inspectors have
declared. Last week, their spokesman said it would take at least a year
before inspection had a chance of calling itself complete. It would take
much less time, said Wolfowitz, "to decide if we look like going down one
track or the other". As to what the test might be, as between peace and war,
he resists any request to specify one. He thinks journalists are too eager
to ask about trigger-events, when in fact, according to him, there is no
blueprint for a war decision.

The leaders, he says, will have to make the choice. "They're not going to
make it on the basis of a predetermined line that's been crossed, and
somehow says the hour has come. They will have to make a judgment, balancing
the positive and negative evidence." This was Wolfowitz in soothing mode,
ceaselessly deferential to the president whose September decision to go to
the UN was a defeat for the hawks. The question is: when will they be back?

The secretary was here to give a lecture, whose main substance changed the
subject from Iraq to Washington's urgent request to the Europeans to bring
Turkey into the EU. Turkey is a key ally in any war coalition against
Saddam, but the American purpose is wider, namely to secure the absorption
of a moderate Muslim state into the political organisation of western
Christendom, which is one reason why France, Germany and Spain, to name but
three, are unenthusiastic, though Britain, as ever, is taking the American
view. Wolfowitz's argument is important, and the case was well made - but
this wasn't what the audience assembled by the International Institute for
Strategic Studies had come to hear.

On Iraq, he didn't say enough for them. And Iraq presents an unusual British
problem. The war proposition is one on which our prime minister is well
ahead not only of his own party but also of the network of defence
intellectuals, politicos and mandarins assembled by the IISS. Here was a
group of non-Labourish, often rather conservative figures waiting to be
persuaded out of their scepticism by a famous prince of darkness. But I
think he failed to satisfy them, because he was talking with unnatural
reticence.

He did make a vivid case for pre-emptive strikes against the possessor of so
many weapons of mass destruction who has a record of putting them to
criminally hideous use against his own people. Taking the 3,000 victims of
9/11 as a benchmark, were we to "wait until 30,000 Americans, or 300,000 or
perhaps three million had been killed by WMD before we felt free to act
against them"? John F Kennedy's conduct of the Cuban missile crisis, facing
down such threats, was Wolfowitz's model. Forty years on, in a world without
state-based enemies, "imminent" threats were so indecipherable, it seemed,
that any hypothetical threat now justified pre-emption.

The issue he did not address in detail was how the Iraqi threat connected
with the war on existing terrorism as experienced in New York, Bali and
Mombasa. Here was the hawkish disappointment of the day. After all,
Wolfowitz is leader of the school that says the link between Saddam and
al-Qaida justifies a war if and when the inspection process fails, yet he
produced no evidence of a connection even after 15 months to find it. Even
at this time, in front of this audience, he did no more than insist that the
US military could fight on many fronts, disregarding the argument that
bothers Europeans, including many well-informed Brits. To them the issue
isn't whether both wars can be fought simultaneously, but whether fighting
Iraq won't enhance rather than defeat the forces available to al-Qaida.

>From these encounters, the lecture and the conversation, I draw two
conclusions. One is that the US has no doubt about the virtue of its cause,
as seen not only at home but also in Iraq. This confirmed what I kept
hearing in Washington. Many important people there have a clear belief that
the Iraqi street, not to mention the Iraqi middle class, is simply waiting
the signal to rise up and welcome their liberators. Officials at the
National Security Council are counting the civil servants they're quite sure
will turn in a trice to run the country the American way.

The official American line is, in a way, simplistic. Perhaps it has to be.
Americans understand the war may be hard to win, especially if it reduces to
an urban battle for every street in Baghdad. But they cannot believe they
might be less popular than the regime they will replace. The sense of a
democratic future for Iraq, its 23 million educated citizens cohering round
a new prosperity and being transformed from the pariah to the role model in
the Middle East, reveals the power of optimistic fantasy to sweep aside all
difficulties.

My second conclusion is darker. When I asked Paul Wolfowitz whether we
should be preparing for a war the UN did not bless, he avoided the question.
He said, as per routine, that there was an outside chance Saddam would see
the light, and let inspection lead to the peaceful dismembering of his
weaponry. But he doesn't believe it is going to happen. Nor does any
American I've met anywhere near the administration. They are going through
the necessary motions of peace. They might even believe what they used to
reject, that regime-change could occur that way. The hawk yesterday talked a
subtle game, submissive to politicians "above my pay grade". But in
September at the UN, he only lost a battle. The war is another matter.