During a Congressional budget hearing on Thursday, April 30, Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was asked how many American soldiers
were killed in Iraq. He answered:
"It's approximately 500, of which--I can get the exact numbers--approximately
350 are combat deaths." Actually on that day, the number of fatalities
had reached 722, of which 521 had occurred in combat. Did Wolfowitz,
second in command at the Pentagon, miss the correct number by 33 percent
because he did not care do know it? Or did he try to gloss over it because
he felt too embarrassed about it?
Next to Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz
belongs to the President's most influential foreign and military policy
advisers. Privately, Mr. Bush is said to refer to him as "Wolfie"--and
to Rumsfeld as "Rummy."
In the months before the invasion of Iraq, it was Wolfowitz in particular
who exuded supreme confidence that American soldiers would be welcomed
as liberators and urged to help transform Iraq into a democracy. The
cost of Iraq's reconstruction would be covered by the sale of its oil
resources, not by American taxpayers. When asked how many Iraqis have
been killed since the beginning of the war, Wolfowitz's agency claims
that the Pentagon does not keep statistics of enemy casualties. Most
news organizations agree on an estimate of roughly 10,000 Iraqi fatalities
so far.
For Wolfowitz, the failure of the policies he advocated and helped implement
in Iraq must be a major disappointment. A student of a fervent arms
control opponent, professor Wohlstetter at the University of Chicago,
Wolfowitz nevertheless entered the federal service in 1973 as a senior
staff member of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. During the
Reagan administration, he joined the State Department, first as director
of policy planning, then as assistant secretary for East Asian affairs,
and from 1986 to 1989 as ambassador to Indonesia.
During the first Bush administration, Defense Secretary Cheney brought
Wolfowitz into his department as undersecretary for policy. It did not
hurt Wolfowitz when an investigation into Israel's sale of U.S. Patriot
missiles to China revealed that he also promoted the export of advanced
air-to-air missiles to Israel. Ironically, General Colin Powell intervened
to prevent that sale.
After Clinton became president, some members of the Reagan and Bush
administrations found an ideological home in the American Enterprise
Institute where they developed "The Project for a New American
Century," a design for a more aggressive American foreign policy.
The group became known as "neo-conservatives" because they
moved from ardent anti-Communism toward a new focus: advocacy of unilateral
American intervention in the Middle East, in close alliance with Israel's
right-wing Likud Party.
Wolfowitz turned out to be one of the neo-cons' most prominent spokesmen.
Certain that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, Wolfowitz
called for swift military action to change Iraq's regime and then go
on to "democratize" the neighboring Muslim societies. During
an emergency meeting of the National Security Council on September 12,
2001, both Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld suggested that Saddam may be collaborating
with Al Qaida and should therefore also be eliminated right away.
In the neo-conservative view, former Secretary Kissinger's reliance
on diplomacy, multilateral cooperation, and international organization
failed to accomplish the overthrow of the world's dictatorial regimes
and failed to spread the American model of the free society. Israel
had shown how to deal effectively in the national interest when in 1981
it unilaterally bombed Iraq's Osirak nuclear plant and unilaterally
attacked perceived threats from other neighbors, as in assassinations
of Palestinian resistance leaders.
On April 7, 2003, a Washington Post reporter wrote: "Largely as
a result of his decade-long effort to lay the intellectual groundwork
for Hussein's overthrow, Wolfowitz has become 'probably the best-known
deputy secretary of defense in recent memory.' ... More than any other
senior administration official, his own political fortunes are closely
tied to Hussein's demise."
Well, Hussein is out, but Wolfie badly failed to anticipate how Iraqis
would react to another foreign occupation.