Mon, Apr 04, 2005 page9

• There is a neo-conservative wolf at the World Bank's door

  • By Suzanne Goldenberg / THE GUARDIAN
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  For opponents of the US' war on Iraq and fans of Michael Moore, one of the most indelible moments of the film Fahrenheit 9/11 is when Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defense secretary and the intellectual high priest of the Bush administration's hawks, puts a generous dollop of spit on his comb before smoothing his hair for a television appearance.

  Iffy grooming habits are the least of Wolfowitz's worries as he takes on the presidency of the World Bank. His coronation on Thursday was never seriously in doubt -- the US is the bank's largest shareholder. But it remains to be seen whether Wolfowitz can overcome the derision and anger that have been heaped on him as the architect of the Iraq war. And, after a lifetime spent trying to expand America's power, is he capable of functioning in a multilateral environment where the focus will not be Washington's strategic interest, but global poverty?

  Since his nomination, Wolfowitz has worked strenuously to try to temper his reputation as a raging neo-conservative, deploying his not inconsiderable charm to persuade critics in Europe and the Middle East that he does indeed have experience in finance and development, and that he will be able to divorce Washington's interests from the bank's.

  Many will prove impossible to convince, seeing in Wolfowitz's appointment evidence of the White House's intent to use the World Bank to advance US global interests.

  "It's a slap in the face, it's a poke in the eye. It's bad for the international community in general, and particularly for people already pushed to the brink in poor and marginalized communities," says Emira Woods, a fellow at the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies.

  "What this means is that the person who was the architect of the corporate-driven plan for Iraq that failed now gets a chance to do that in the rest of the world," she said.

  Others believe that Wolfowitz, seen as the intellectual force among the administration's neo-conservatives, was always an uneasy fit at the Pentagon.

  "When he was named deputy secretary of defense I thought of a number of positions where he would be even more in tune with what was going on," says Thomas Keaney, a defense expert who worked with Wolfowitz during one of his brief spells out of government at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

  "I thought he was even more in tune with international development and globalization. This is a good fit," Keaney said.

  It is also a welcome escape for Wolfowitz, who has spent much of the past two years trying to defend his policies to Congress. The academic high priest of the Vulcans, as the president's coterie of security advisers called themselves, Wolfowitz is associated inextricably with the greatest disasters of the Iraq war: The rosy predictions on the eve of the conflict that US soldiers would be welcomed with open arms as liberators, and his insistence that reconstruction could be financed from Iraqi oil revenues.

  "I think he and the Bush White House have slightly different agendas. The Bush White House wanted to promote and reward a guy without going through -- though they would never say this -- a bruising confirmation battle for some other US government job," says James Mann, the author of a history of the Bush war Cabinet called Rise of the Vulcans.

  "He sees it as a chance to launch into an entirely new area, and to get away from being stuck on defense and military issues," Mann said.

  Now 61, Wolfowitz was born into a Polish Jewish immigrant family, and grew up mainly in the university town of Ithaca, New York, where his father was a professor of statistical theory at Cornell University. At 14 he spent a year in Israel while his father was a visiting professor in Haifa, and his sister emigrated to the country.

  But he is one of the few neo-conservatives in the Bush administration to endorse the creation of a Palestinian state, and was heckled at a pro-Israeli rally in 2002 for acknowledging Palestinian suffering.

  To please his father, the younger Wolfowitz enrolled at Cornell, too, where he studied maths and was offered a full scholarship, but went on to pursue his own interests in political science, doing graduate studies at the University of Chicago.

  There he encountered such leading conservative figures as Leo Strauss and Albert Wohlstetter, under whom he wrote his doctorate on the dangers of a nuclearized Middle East. Significantly for a neo-conservative, that included the threat posed by a nuclear Israel.

  Since coming to Washington to work as an intern in the arms control and disarmament agency in 1973, Wolfowitz has worked almost exclusively in government, apart from a period of exile during the Clinton years, when he headed the School of Advanced International Studies.

  Even colleagues who disagree violently with his view of the world concede that Wolfowitz was far more congenial than the usual Washington apparatchik.

  But despite sharp intelligence, willingness to put in 18-hour work days, and a genial, low-key manner, Wolfowitz has never before held a leadership position. Instead, he became "the most influential underling in Washington," as Mann writes in his book.

  Over the years he worked under six presidents, including the Democrat, Jimmy Carter. But Wolfowitz's preoccupations have not radically changed since his days as a graduate student: A belief in the importance of military power and that the US is a force for good in the world, a distrust of the Soviet Union and of the US' intelligence agencies, and a disdain for the Kissinger doctrines of detente and containment.

  Since 2001 Wolfowitz has added another pillar to his ideology: A belief that the Sept. 11 terror attacks changed the world forever. Clues to the way in which Wolfowitz would respond to that change as deputy Pentagon chief were evident from his first days in Washington.

  As a junior official at the Pentagon in 1977 he presided over a project which looked at the possibility of a Soviet seizure of Gulf oilfields. He also explored the consequences of an Iraqi attack on Saudi Arabia or Kuwait.

  To Mann, that was typical. "He stands out for me from many other neo-conservatives for the frequency with which he takes core beliefs and then asks the next question," he says.

  During the 1980s, Wolfowitz's interests shifted from the Middle East to Asia, when he moved to the state department as assistant secretary for east Asia, then ambassador to Indonesia. Supporters say those years convinced him of the importance of using the US' might to promote democratic change.

  He was, by all accounts, a successful ambassador. But some who acknowledge his popularity also discount the argument that Wolfowitz used his influence as an envoy to press for change.

  "It is really too much to claim that he played any kind of role in leading Indonesia to democracy," says Jeffrey Winters, an expert on Indonesia at Chicago's Northwestern University.

  "The real record when you dig into it is that he was very slow to respond to Indonesia's movement for democracy," Winters said.

  "They had been tortured. They had been jailed. They had been ruined in various ways, and the Wolfowitz embassy didn't speak up for them -- not once," he said.

  "He had his chance, and he toed the Reagan hawkish line," Winters said.

  The World Bank will be watching for far more than that from Wolfowitz.
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