Paul Wolfowitz
Paul Dundes Wolfowitz 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 dean of Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Having proposed a plan to invade Iraq in 2001, Wolfowitz was an early advocate of the Iraq War and has widely been described as an "architect" of the war. 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 his tenure there as "a protracted battle over his stewardship, prompted by his involvement in a high-paying promotion for his companion". Wolfowitz is the only World Bank president to have resigned over a scandal.
Early life
The second child of Jacob Wolfowitz and Lillian Dundes, Paul Wolfowitz was born in Brownsville, 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. While Jacob Wolfowitz fled Poland after World War I, the rest of his family perished in the Holocaust.In the mid-1960s, while Paul was an undergraduate student 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.
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 2000 book Ravelstein.
Education
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."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.
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.In 1972, US President Richard Nixon, under pressure from Senator Jackson, dismissed the head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency 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 James 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.
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 analysts and one that provided a much closer fit to the Soviets' observed behavior. The formal presentation of the competing views in a session out at Langley also made clear that the enormous experience and expertise of the B-Team as a group were formidable."
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 investigated 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 Wolfowitz 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 at Johns Hopkins University. Shortly after, 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."
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... 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 and to the sale of Airborne Warning and Control System 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, Haig was replaced by George Shultz as US Secretary of State, and Wolfowitz was promoted.