Paul (Dundes) Wolfowitz - Early life and education, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency

International relations expert and President of the World Bank (2005– ), born in Brooklyn, New York, USA. He studied at Cornell University (1965) and the University of Chicago (1972), and taught at Yale (1970–3) and Johns Hopkins (1981) universities. He has written widely on the subject of national strategy and foreign policy, and in 1981 was appointed head of the US state department policy planning staff. Further posts include assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs (1983–6), US ambassador to Indonesia (1986–9), under-secretary for defence policy (1989–93), and deputy defence secretary (from 2001). In 2005 President Bush nominated him as head of the World Bank, a post he took up in June that year.

Paul Wolfowitz

President of the World Bank
Incumbent
In office since 1 June 2005
Preceded by	James Wolfensohn
Born	December 22, 1943 Brooklyn, New York
Spouse	Clare Selgin Wolfowitz

Paul Dundes Wolfowitz (b.

A former aide to Democratic Senator "Scoop" Jackson in the 1970s, Wolfowitz also served in the U.S. Defense Department, as Director of Policy Planning and Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the U.S. State Department, as U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia, and as Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Administration of George W.

Early life and education

Paul Wolfowitz was the second child of Jacob Wolfowitz and Lillian Dundes.

Jacob Wolfowitz was a Polish national of Jewish descent whose parents fled to the United States in 1920 to escape persecution. James Mann, in Rise of the Vulcans, says that Jacob Wolfowitz "was a committed Zionist throughout his life and, in later years, was also active in organizing protests against Soviet repression of dissidents and minorities."

Jacob Wolfowitz took his family with him when he taught sabbatical semesters at UCLA and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and in 1957, at the age of fourteen, Paul Wolfowitz spent a year living in Israel while his father was teaching at The Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa; Wolfowitz was excused from military service in the Vietnam War through student deferments in order to pursue his academic studies.

Cornell University

Wolfowitz was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps and, in 1961, he won a full scholarship to Cornell University that, according to Mann, despite his own personal desire to go to Harvard University, his father said was too good a bargain to turn down.

Wolfowitz was a member of the Telluride Association, of which his sister had been the first female member.

In 1963 professor of philosophy Allan Bloom served as a faculty member living in the house and would have a major influence on Wolfowitz's political views with his assertion of the importance of political regimes in shaping peoples’ characters. That same year Wolfowitz joined the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom led by Martin Luther King, Jr.. According to Mann, Jacob Wolfowitz did not take well to his son’s new found passion or his mentor Bloom; Wolfowitz “reflected that his father and Bloom regarded each other with a mixture of wariness and admiration.”

Wolfowitz graduated in 1965 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and chemistry, and got a taste of government work as a management intern at the U.S. Bureau of the Budget. Ignoring his father's advice against pursuing a path in pure politics, suggesting economics as a possible compromise, Wolfowitz decided to go on to graduate school to study politics.

University of Chicago

Wolfowitz chose the University of Chicago over his long-term favorite Harvard, as he wanted the chance to study under Bloom's mentor, Leo Strauss, who was teaching there at the time, and who, according to Mann, he thought "was a unique figure, an irreplaceable asset."

Wolfowitz enrolled in a couple of Strauss' courses, on Plato and Montesquieu, but according to Mann they "did not become especially close," as the aging professor was winding down his career and was to retire before Wolfowitz graduated. Fellow student Peter Wilson confirms that "Wolfowitz didn't talk much about Strauss in those days," but as Mann points out, "in subsequent years colleagues both in government and academia came to view Wolfowitz as one of the heirs to Leo Strauss's intellectual traditions."

Instead Wolfowitz came under the tutelage of Professor Albert Wohlstetter, who had studied mathematics with Wolfowitz's father at Columbia and was, according to Mann, "the sort of scholar of whom the mathematician Jacob Wolfowitz would have approved." He returned from a trip to Israel with a number of Hebrew language documents on the program that he handed over to Wolfowitz, these would form the basis of Wolfowitz's doctoral dissertation.

In the summer of 1969, Wohlstetter arranged for his students Wolfowitz and Wilson, along with an old acquaintance, Richard Perle, to join the Committee to Maintain A Prudent Defense Policy in Washington D.C.

From 1970 to 1972, Wolfowitz taught in the Department of Political Science at Yale University, where one of his students was Lewis Libby, who would become a long-term political associate. In 1972 Wolfowitz earned his doctorate in political science with a thesis on the dangers posed by nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.

Arms Control and Disarmament Agency

Main Article: Team B

In 1972 U.S. President Richard Nixon under pressure from U.S. Senator Henry M. Ikle brought in a completely new team including Wolfowitz, who had been recommended by his old tutor Albert Wohlstetter. Wolfowitz once again set to work writing and distributing research papers and drafting testimony, as he had previously done at the Committee to Maintain A Prudent Defence Policy. Wolfowitz, who was still employed by the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, was assigned to this committee, which came to be known as Team B. Wolfowitz has since claimed, "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 Soviet's observed behavior."

But the Team B conclusions proved to be highly effective in discrediting the policy of détente and the SALT II strategic arms limitations talks and won over U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and future U.S. President Ronald Reagan, giving Wolfowitz two very influential allies.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Regional Programs

In 1977 under U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Wolfowitz made the move to The Pentagon to broaden his experience of military issues as, according to Mann, he believed; “The key to preventing nuclear wars was to stop conventional wars.” Wolfowitz was employed as U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Regional Programs for the U.S. Defense Department under then U.S. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown where he was put to work on the Limited Contingency Study, ordered to examine possible areas of threat to the U.S. in the third world.

One of the first seminars Wolfowitz attended after taking up the post was given by Professor Geoffrey Kemp of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in which it was argued that the U.S. was concentrating too much on defending against the possibility of a Soviet invasion of Europe through the Fulda Gap in Germany and ignoring the far more likely possibility of them turning southward to seize the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. “This warning struck a chord with Wolfowitz,” according to Mann, as it “fit well with the conclusion he had just reached in the Team B intelligence review.” Wolfowitz hired Kemp and Dennis Ross a Soviet specialist from the University of California to work with him on preparing the study. “We and our major industrialized allies have a vital and growing stake in the Persian Gulf region because of our need for Persian Gulf oil and because events in the Persian Gulf affect the Arab-Israeli conflict,” the report stated, going on to conclude that Soviet seizure of the Persian Gulf oil field would “probably destroy NATO and the US-Japanese alliance without recourse to war by the Soviets.”

Wolfowitz then took the study one step further by questioning what would happen if another country in the region were to seize the oil field. He quickly identified that “Iraq has become the militarily pre-eminent in the Persian Gulf,” which was “a worrisome development” because of its:

Radical-Arab stance Anti-Western attitudes Dependence on Soviet arms sales Willingness to foment trouble in other local nations

The study concluded “Iraq’s implicit power will cause currently moderate local powers to accommodate themselves to Iraq” and that “Iraq may in the future use her military forces against such states as Kuwait or Saudi Arabia.” To solve this the US must “be able to defend the interests of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and ourselves against an Iraqi invasion or show of force,” and make manifest its “capabilities and commitments to balance Iraq’s power,” requiring “an increased visibility for U.S. power.” As Mann explains, “Iraq was a subject to which Wolfowitz would return over and over again during his career.”

According to Ross “no one believed that Iraq posed a serious or imminent threat to the Saudis,” but Wolfowitz had told him; “The whole thrust of the study” according to Ross, “was to say that [the U.S.] had a big problem, that it would take us a long time to get any significant military force into the area.” The study’s recommendations laid the groundwork for what would become the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), conceived as Rapid Deployment Forces for the Persian Gulf, it would go on to play a key role in the 1991 Gulf War after the study’s prediction apparently came true and the subsequent 2003 invasion of Iraq for which Wolfowitz was a major driving force.

In late 1979 Jeanne Kirkpatrick began a migration of neoconservatives from their traditional base in the U.S. Democratic Party over to the U.S. Republican Party and its Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan. Wolfowitz joined this exodus after receiving a phone call from his old boss Fred Ikle, then working on the Reagan campaign, in which he said “Paul, you’ve got to get out of there. We want you in the new administration.” A short time later, in early 1980, Wolfowitz resigned from the Pentagon and went to work as a visiting professor at the Paul H.

State Department Director of Policy Planning

In 1981, following the election of U.S. President Ronald Reagan, the newly appointed U.S. National Security Advisor Richard V. In this position Wolfowitz and his newly selected staff, that included Lewis Libby, Francis Fukuyama, Dennis Ross, Alan Keyes, Zalmay Khalilzad, Stephen Sestanovich and James Roche, would be responsible for defining the administrations long-term foreign goals. “Decades, if not centuries, are normally required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits.” This is known as the Kirkpatrick Doctrine

Wolfowitz famously broke from this official line by denouncing Saddam Hussein of Iraq at a time when Donald Rumsfeld, acting as Reagan's official envoy, was offering the dictator support in his conflict with Iran. 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 Palestinian 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." The Chinese were now pushing for the U.S. to end arms sales to Taiwan and Wolfowitz used this as an opportunity to undermine the Kissingerian policy. Wolfowitz advocated a unilateralist policy claiming that the U.S. didn’t need China’s assistance, and in fact that Chinese needed the U.S. to protect them against the far more likely prospect of a Soviet invasion of China. Wolfowitz soon came into conflict with U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig, who had been Kissinger’s assistant at the time of the visits to China. Wolfowitz, the director of policy planning... will be replaced,” reported the March 30, 1982 issue of the New York Times as “Mr. Haig found Mr. Wolfowitz too theoretical.” This report proved to be untrue and on June 25 George Schultz replaced Haig as U.S. Secretary of State and Wolfowitz was promoted.

State Department Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs

In 1982 Wolfowitz was appointed Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs by new U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz who would become an influential mentor. Wolfowitz was able to turn this to his favor by forming a powerful alliance with Weinberger’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asia Richard Armitage and Gaston Sigur of the National Security Council. Wolfowitz took this opportunity to re-orient the administration’s policy, stating in an April 15, 1985 article in The Wall Street Journal that; The best antidote to Communism is democracy. This was already the administration’s policy in Eastern Europe and Wolfowitz has since argued that; “You can’t use democracy, as appropriately you should, as a battle with the Soviet Union, and turn around and be completely hypocritical about it when it’s on your side of the line.”

Wolfowitz claims that this policy did not deviate from that lain out by Kirkpatrick in her 1979 article as the “necessary disciplines and habits” she wrote of were already in place. it was actually to get him to stop dismantling them himself,” Wolfowitz later argued of the specifics of the policy; “Military reform, economic reform, getting rid of crony capitalism, relying on the church, political reform: It was very institutionally oriented.” In pursuance of this policy Wolfowitz and his assistant Lewis Libby made trips to Manila where they called for democratic reforms and met with non-communist opposition leaders but the approach was still very soft. So at the same time Wolfowitz also fought against moves by the U.S. Congress to end military aide to the Marcos regime.

As Mann points out “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 instillations,” but it did eventually pay off when, following massive street protests, Marcos fled the country on a U.S. Air Force plane and Reagan reluctantly recognized the government of Corazón Aquino.

Ambassador to the Republic of Indonesia

From 1986-89 Wolfowitz was the U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Indonesia while General Suharto was still dictator. Of Wolfowitz's time as Ambassador former foreign policy adviser Dewi Fortuna Anwar told ABC News that "he was extremely able and very much admired and well-liked on a personal level, but he never intervened to push human rights or stand up to corruption."

After Suharto stood down in 1998 Wolfowitz himself stated that the General was guilty "of suppressing political dissent, of weakening alternative leaders and of showing favoritism to his children's business deals, frequently at the expense of sound economic policy" while ABC News clarifies that "at the time, thousands of leftists detained after the 1965 U.S.-backed military coup that brought Suharto to power were still languishing in jail without trial." Director of the International NGO Forum on Indonesian Development Binny Buchori told ABC News Wolfowitz " went to East Timor and saw abuses going on, but then kept quiet."

Perhaps most significantly considering Wolfowitz’s current position is ABC News' claim that "during his 32-year reign, Suharto, his family and his military and business cronies transformed Indonesia into one of the most graft-ridden countries in the world, plundering an estimated $30 billion", much of this money is believed to have come from Wolfowitz's new employers, the World Bank. 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." According to The Washington Post Wolfowitz gave a farewell speech to the American Chamber of Commerce in Jakarta in which he stated that "the cost of the high-cost economy remains too high, for the private sector to flourish, special privilege must give way to equal opportunity and equal risk for all." Wolfowitz has since stated in The Wall Street Journal "that he [Suharto] allowed this, and that he amassed such wealth himself, is all the more mysterious since he lived a relatively modest life."

While The Washington Post has "Wolfowitz's colleagues and friends, both Indonesian and American" pointing to the "U.S. envoy's quiet pursuit of political and economic reforms in Indonesia" Binny Buchori denies this stating that "he was an effective diplomat, but he gave no moral support for dissidents." it was still the Cold War and they were only concerned about fighting communism," Jeffrey Winters from Northwestern University goes even further by stating in The Guardian that Wolfowitz "had his chance, and he toed the Reagan hawkish line."

However in Wolfowitz's May 1989 farewell remarks at Jakarta's American Cultural Center he stated that "if greater openness is a key to economic success, I believe there is increasingly a need for openness in the political sphere as well." Wolfowitz has stated in an article he wrote in The Wall Street Journal following the Indonesian 1998 Revolution that Suharto blamed this "plea for greater political openness" as "the cause of the violent incidents that marked Indonesia's largely stage-managed elections in 1997."

In 1997 Wolfowitz was still publicly praising Suharto's "strong and remarkable leadership" in testimony on Indonesia before the U.S. House Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations. In the article for The Wall Street Journal, Wolfowitz wrote that "The tragedy for Mr. Suharto and his country is that he would have been widely admired by his countrymen if he had stepped down 10 years ago." Wolfowitz goes on to explain, as his reasoning for his support, that "achieving peace among a population so diverse requires a strong leader and a unified military."

Undersecretary of Defense for Policy

From 1989-93 under U.S. President George H.W. Bush Wolfowitz served as U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy reporting to the then U.S. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. Wolfowitz was charged with realigning U.S. military strategy in the post-cold war environment.

However on February 25, 1998 Wolfowitz testified before a congressional committee that “I think the best opportunity to overthrow Saddam was, unfortunately, lost in the month right after the war.” He went on to explain 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." He went on to state that “[s]ome 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].”

In the aftermath of the war Wolfowitz and his assistant Scooter Libby wrote the Defense Planning Guidance to "set the nation’s direction for the next century" that many saw as a "blueprint for U.S. hegemony".

Wolfowitz fell out of favor under U.S. President Bill Clinton and left government for a short while.

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" and in 1997 he became one of the charter members, alongside Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush, Richard Perle amongst others, of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) a neo-conservative think-tank founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan with the stated aim of "American global leadership" through military strength.

Wolfowitz drafted the PNAC open letter to President Bill Clinton that began “We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War.” In the letter he criticises Clinton’s policy of “containment”; He concludes that “removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power […] needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.” The letter, signed by Wolfowitz and 17 other members of the PNAC was submitted to Clinton on the eve of his 1998 State of the Union Address.

Later that year Wolfowitz testified before a congressional hearing that the current administration lacked the sense of purpose to “liberate ourselves, our friends and allies in the region, and the Iraqi people themselves from the menace of Saddam Hussein” and lamenting the decision at the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War not to delay the ceasefire until this had been achieved. During the course of his testimony Wolfowitz urged for the administration to support the Iraqi opposition groups, in particular the INC of Ahmed Chalabi with arms, intelligence and financing as a way of overthrowing the current regime without risking American troops.

In 2000 the PNAC produced its magnum opus the 90-page report on Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century that advocated the redeployment of U.S. troops in permanent bases in strategic locations throughout the world where they can be ready to act to protect U.S. interests abroad.

During the 2000 U.S. Presidential election campaign Wolfowitz served as a foreign policy advisor to George W.

Deputy Secretary of Defense

Wolfowitz returned to government from 2001-05 under U.S. President George W. Wolfowitz defused a very tricky situation when he ordered the recall and destruction of 600,000 Chinese-made berets that had been issued to troops stating "U.S. troops shall not wear berets made in China". Apart from this, Wolfowitz was for the most part sidelined in the early months of the administration as Bush seemed to follow the containment policies of his predecessors (although former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill denies this was the policy in Ron Suskind's book The Price of Loyalty) the situation however would soon change drastically.

According to Cobra II, during the initial months of the Bush Administration and prior to the Septemper 11th attacks, "Wolfowitz sought to enlist the Joint Staff's support to develop a strategy for aiding an anti-Saddam resistance. Saddam had drained the southern marshes in Iraq to deprive Shiite rebels of a sanctuary, so Wolfowitz wondered if the dams could be bombed to re-create them. Wolfowitz also wanted to know what it would take to arm and train Iraqi insurgents."

The terrorist attacks of 9-11 proved to be a radical turning point in administration policy as Wolfowitz later explained “9/11 really was a wake up call and that if we take proper advantage of this opportunity to prevent the future terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction that it will have been an extremely valuable wake up call.” Before going on to clarify that “if we say our only problem was to respond to 9/11, and we wait until somebody hits us with nuclear weapons before we take that kind of threat seriously, we will have made a very big mistake.” In the first emergency meeting of the U.S. National Security Council on the day of the attacks Rumsfeld asked “Why shouldn’t we go against Iraq, not just al-Qaeda?” with Wolfowitz adding that Iraq was a “brittle, oppressive regime that might break easily - it was doable” and according to Kampfner “from that moment on, he and Wolfowitz used every available opportunity to press the case”. The idea was initially rejected, mainly at the behest of U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell but according to Kampfner “Undeterred Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz held secret meetings about opening up a second front – against Saddam. Shortly after the start of this conflict Wolfowitz demonstrated his belief in American unilateralism when on October 10 George Robertson went to The Pentagon to offer NATO troops, planes and ships to assist Wolfowitz rebuffed the offer saying “We can do everything we need to.” Wolfowitz would later go on to publicly announce, according to Kampfner, “that ‘allies, coalitions and diplomacy’ were of little immediate concern.” 10 months later, on January 15, 2003, with hostilities still continuing Wolfowitz made a fifteen-hour visit to the Afghan capital Kabul and met with the new president Hamid Karzai. Wolfowitz stated “We’re clearly moving into a different phase, where our priority in Afghanistan is increasingly going to be stability and reconstruction. Wolfowitz was the sole representative of the Bush administration to attend, speaking alongside Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. As reported by the BBC Wolfowitz told the crowd that US President George W. Berger reported for JTA that Wolfowitz continued by saying that "Innocent Palestinians are suffering and dying as well. Wolfowitz epitomised this view.” Setting his sights on Iraq, which he had identified as a key region during his time as U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Regional Programs under U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Wolfowitz “saw a liberated Iraq as both paradigm and lynchpin for future interventions.” As Hersh explains the difficulty was, as Hersh explains, “[a]fter a year of bitter infighting, the Bush Administration remains sharply divided about Iraq.” Wolfowitz had a plan to sell the war to the more skeptical members of the administration as well as the general public as he later clarified “[f]or bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.”

The job of finding these WMD and providing justification for the attack would fall to the intelligence services but according to Kampfner “Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz believed that while the established security services had a role, they were too bureaucratic and too traditional in their thinking.” As a result, borrowing an idea from their old Team B days, “they set up what came to be known as the ‘cabal’, a cell of eight or nine analysts in a new Office of Special Plans (OSP) based in the U.S. Defense Department.” According to a Pentagon source quoted by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker the OSP “was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States.”

Within months of being set-up the OSP “rivalled both the C.I.A.

Kampfner outlines Wolfowitz’s strategy for the invasion of Iraq which “envisaged the use of air support and the occupation of southern Iraq with ground troops, to install a new government run by Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress.” Wolfowitz believed the operation would require minimal troop deployment because, as Hersh clarifies, “any show of force would immediately trigger a revolt against Saddam within Iraq, and that it would quickly expand.” The financial expenditure would be kept low because, as Kampfner explains, “under the plan American troops would seize the oil fields around Basra, in the South, and sell the oil to finance the opposition.” During Wolfowitz's pre-war testimony before Congress, he dismissed General Eric K. Two days after Shinseki testified, Wolfowitz said to the House Budget Committee on February 27, 2003:

Although he may have had considerable influence in the Administration's decision to invade Iraq, Cobra II depicts Wolfowitz as having little influence on the actual implementation of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. For instance: "At the Pentagon, Wolfowitz and his aides had taken the idea of Iraqi assistance a step further. Dusting off his proposal, made during his years out of office, to arm and equip Iraqi insurgents, Wolfowitz's initial goal was to raise an indigenous opposition army. Most of the administration were skeptical, if not opposed, to Wolfowitz's plan...[General Tommy Franks] thought that an Iraqi force would just get in the way and gave no weight to the benefits such a unit might provide in terms of local knowledge and language." Kampfner goes on to say that “Rumsfield, Wolfowitz and Cheney had also invested considerable hopes in Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress” these would also prove to be ill-founded.

Cobra II also states that, "Wolfowitz and his aides suffered another setback when the White House rejected their proposal for the establishment of a provisional Iraqi government." The State department favored "internals" whereas Wolfowitz had proposed exiles.

On October 26, 2003, Wolfowitz was in Baghdad, Iraq, himself, for a brief official tour. Wolfowitz and his DOD staffers escaped unharmed and returned to the United States on October 28.

President of the World Bank

In January 2005 Wolfowitz was nominated to be President of the World Bank.

The Wall Street Journal commented:

He was finally confirmed and took up the position on June 1, 2005.

One of Wolfowitz's first official acts as President was to attend the 31st G8 summit from July 6 to July 8, 2005 at the Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland to discuss issues of global climate change and the economic development in Africa. When this meeting was interrupted by the July 7, 2005 London bombings Wolfowitz was featured with other world leaders at the press conference given by British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Access to Wolfowitz is controlled by Robin Cleveland, an aide with little experience in development whom he imported from the Department of Defense. In the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Annual Meetings in Singapore in 2006, Wolfowitz took the opportunity to accuse Singapore of being an authoritarian state and managed to compel the host government to reverse a policy on barring certain activists into the country.

Personal life

Wolfowitz met anthropologist Clare Selgin Wolfowitz while they were both studying at Cornell University in the mid-60s.

Following his World Bank presidential nomination, Wolfowitz was reported to be in a relationship with World Bank senior gender coordinator Shaha Riza, an Arab feminist who, according to The Times, "shares Wolfowitz’s passion for spreading democracy in the Arab world" and "is said to have reinforced his determination to remove Saddam Hussein’s oppressive regime."

Wolfowitz now lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Political views

Wolfowitz is considered by many political analysts a neoconservative and possibly a Straussian known for his passionate pro-Israel advocacy and staunch support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Pre-emption

Wolfowitz had been a long-term advocate of this policy to strike first to eliminate threats. These civilians were the most vigorous advocates for taking action against Saddam Hussein and for the use of pre-emptive military action to combat terrorism.” Wolfowitz explained his position in a 2002 interview with Robert Collier of the San Francisco Chronicle in which he stated “I think the premise of a policy has to be we can't afford to wait for proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That is a way in which any number of terrorist regimes have, over the last 20 years, gotten away with doing things that I think encourage more behavior of that kind.” He clarifies that “you can't wait until you have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that somebody did something in the past, you know that people are planning to do something against you in the future and that they're developing incredibly destructive weapons to do it with and that's not tolerable.” As Hersh explained “Pre-emption would emerge as the overriding idea behind the Administration’s foreign policy.”

Iran

Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution Wolfowitz has been a notable backer of Iranian dissidents, including the bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi.

Opinions of Wolfowitz

Prior to his nomination to the World Bank, Wolfowitz was described by James Mann in his 2004 book Rise of the Vulcans as "the most influential underling in Washington."

Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda praised Wolfowitz after his nomination for President of the World Bank saying: "He's a great person and he is well-versed in issues regarding development in Asia."

Journalist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens, a friend of Wolfowitz, has stated: "The thing that would most surprise people about Wolfowitz if they met him is that he's a real bleeding heart."

Perhaps the most famous quote regarding Wolfowitz is one attributed by various sources, including The Economist, to a former colleague who is reported to have said "Hawk doesn't do him justice.

When Wolfowitz was appointed to the World Bank, East Timorese Nobel Peace Prize-winner Jose Ramos-Horta has been quoted saying, "Those who have suspicions and reservations should not have them because Wolfowitz is very humane and sensitive," according to the East Timor and Indonesia Action Network. The article continues, "Ramos-Horta said he had met with Wolfowitz several times when the current US deputy defense secretary was Washington's envoy to Indonesia between 1986 and 1989, a time when East Timor was still under occupation by Jakarta."

According to the Washington Post, Abdurrahman Wahid, the Indonesia's first democratically elected President after the fall of Suharto, "was so taken by Wolfowitz's 1989 speech [see above] that he asked to be introduced.

Bloomberg reported in 2005 that Malaysian politician Anwar Ibrahim, a longtime friend, had said in an interview that Wolfowitz "passionately believes in freedom and understands the issues of poverty, environment degradation, living conditions and health issues which (are) very much a World Bank agenda."

Media portrayals of Wolfowitz

The title character of the novel Ravelstein (2000) by Saul Bellow was based on Wolfowitz’s mentor at Cornell University Allan Bloom, while the character of one of his students Philip Gorman whose father is a fellow professor who comes into conflict with Ravelstein and who goes on to work for the U.S. Department of Defense is believed to be based on Wolfowitz. According to James Mann, in Rise of the Vulcans (2004), however “Wolfowitz thought that the novelist’s portrait was simply inaccurate or possibly a composite based in part on some other Bloom students and their fathers.”

Wolfowitz found public prominence through his involvement in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and the subsequent Michael Moore film Fahrenheit 9/11 that criticized it. According to The Guardian “one of the most indelible moments of the film… is when Paul Wolfowitz… puts a generous dollop of spit on his comb before smoothing his hair for a television appearance.” The report, which describes Wolfowitz as the “intellectual high priest of the Bush administration's hawks”, goes on to point out; “Iffy grooming habits are the least of Wolfowitz's worries as he takes on the presidency of the World Bank.”

Wolfowitz was featured in the controversial BBC documentary series The Power of Nightmares which compared the rise of the American neoconservatives and radical Islamists, believing that both are closely connected;

In Canadian author and journalist Paul William Roberts' 2006 novel, Homeland (Key Porter Books, Toronto), which comprises the fictional memoir of a 100-year-old man written in the year 2050 but chiefly concerning his period working on the State Department's Policy Planning Council, Wolfowitz is easily identifiable as the character Caleb Luposki, who is central to the story. The rift between them widens over Wolfowitz's proposals for post-Cold War US foreign policy and the question of his conflict-of-interest in matters concerning Israel. Very little in the novel seems to be pure speculation or fabrication, and much of what Luposki says Wolfowitz is on record somewhere or other as saying. ^ "E Timor welcomes Wolfowitz appointment to World Bank presidency" <a href= "http://www.etan.org/et2005/april/01/06etwecm.htm">ETAN</a>.April 06, 2005. ^ "'Passionate' Wolfowitz backed by Anwar for World Bank post."

Official biographies

Paul Wolfowitz: World Bank President, World Bank biography Paul Wolfowitz: Deputy Secretary of Defense Department of Defense biography Paul Wolfowitz, White House biography

Unofficial biographies

The Guardian Profile: Paul Wolfowitz by Suzanne Goldenberg for The Guardian, April 1, 2005 "Profile: Paul Wolfowitz: Hawk with a lot of loot needs a bit of lady luck" from The Times (London), March 20, 2005 "Man in the News; Paul Dundes Wolfowitz" profile by Eric Schmitt for The New York Times, March 17, 2005 (requires subscription) "Profile: Paul Wolfowitz from BBC News, March 17, 2005 "The Believer" by Peter J. Boyer, The New Yorker, November 1, 2004 "Wolfowitz Profile" from New York Times & Other Sources, September 22, 2002 "Paul Wolfowitz, velociraptor" from The Economist, February 7, 2002 Paul Wolfowitz at Sourcewatch (extensive list of sources) Paul Wolfowitz: Bush's testosterone man at Defense, by David Plotz for The Slate, October 12, 2001 Paul Wolfowitz biography, from The Jewish Virtual Library

Interviews

"I'm Not a Unilateralist": Paul Wolfowitz wants the world to understand him by Lally Weymouth for Newsweek, April 4, 2005 DoD's transcript of the phone conversation that served as the basis for Wolfowitz's famous interview with Vanity Fair magazine, March 9, 2003 Paul Wolfowitz interview by Margaret Warner for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, September 14, 2001

Other reports

A world better off with Wolfowitz at bank helm by John Hughes in the Christian Science Monitor, May 18, 2005 discusses Wolfowitz's personal character "Jakarta Tenure Offers Glimpse of Wolfowitz" Alan Sipress and Ellen Nakashima for The Washington Post, March 28, 2005, on Wolfowitz's tenure as Ambassador to Indonesia "Indonesia Rights Groups Decry Wolfowitz" by Slobodan Lekic for the Associated Press, March 22, 2005 "Will a British divorcee cost 'Wolfie' his job?" Sharon Churcher and Annette Witheridge for The Daily Mail, March 20, 2005, about reaction to Wolfowitz's nomination to head the World Bank "Bush nominates Wolfowitz for World Bank" Suzanne Goldenberg for The Guardian, March 17, 2005 "The World Bank Nominee; Purdum for The New York Times, March 17, 2005 (requires registration) "Giving Wolfowitz His Due" David Brooks op-ed in The New York Times, March 8, 2005 (requires registration) Challenges for Wolfowitz and the World Bank, Center for Global Development "The War Behind Closed Doors" Public Broadcasting Service's Frontline, February 20, 2003 Paul Wolfowitz's political donations at Newsmeat Davis, Jack, "Paul Wolfowitz on Intelligence Policy-Relations", Studies in Intelligence, Vol. England

Preceded by: James Wolfensohn

President of the World Bank 2005 – present

Incumbent