April 22, 2005
Supply-Side
Goes Global
Wolfowitz
on Top of the World
By
MICHAEL FLYNN
The
controversial decision to nominate Paul Wolfowitz, widely regarded
as one of the key proponents for the war in Iraq, to head the
World Bank has placed the spotlight on the inner workings of the
second Bush administration. Are the neoconservatives on the wane,
now that the man purported to be their main standard bearer in
the administration is being moved out? Do the departures of Wolfowitz
and other ideologues like Douglas Feith augur a return to a more
traditional conservative foreign policy? Or will Condoleezza Rice
and the other Vulcans continue the aggressive interventionist
agenda pushed by the neocons?
Wolfowitz’s
move to the Bank has also spurred a new round of hand-wringing
among some pundits about the undue influence of the neoconservatives,
who now seem poised to take their agenda to a whole new playing
field. Other observers, however, aren’t so sure about where
Wolfowitz falls on the ideological sliding scale, and it seems
clear that World Bank board members are not worried that its decision
making will be held hostage to U.S. geopolitical interests—this
despite some neocons’ hope that Wolfowitz will be able to
turn the Bank into a “useful tool of American statecraft,”
as one American Enterprise Institute scholar said.
It’s
odd that a global capitalist institution will be taking on as
its new leader a person whose political trajectory has had so
little to do with global capital. Nor does Wolfowitz have much
experience—apart from his brief stint as ambassador to Indonesia
in the 1980s—with the Bank’s core mission, which includes
poverty alleviation and development issues. In general, what little
neoconservatism or its followers have said about economics can
be summed up in two words: supply side.
Wolfowitz
is not your average neoconservative. Although a longstanding hawk
who seamlessly made the transition from anti-Soviet crusader to
neo-imperialist true believer after the end of the Cold War, Wolfowitz
nonetheless has expressed several contrarian views within the
neoconservative camp. In particular, he has been much more flexible
when it comes to Middle East peace, shying away from the extreme
Likudnik line espoused by many neocons and showing concern for
the plight of the Palestinians, including opposition to the Jewish
settler movement.
Wolfowitz
is also considered to be more of a thoughtful idealist than a
pure neocon ideologue. But some fault this very idealism as being
at the root of U.S. problems in Iraq. After accompanying Wolfowitz
on a visit to Iraq in late 2003, the Washington Post’s
David Ignatius wrote that he asked Wolfowitz if his “passion
for the noble goals of the Iraq war might overwhelm the prudence
and pragmatism that normally guide war planners. Wolfowitz didn’t
answer directly, except to say that it was a good question.”
Similarly,
in an interview conducted shortly after Wolfowitz’s nomination
to the World Bank post, Tom Malinowksi of Human Rights Watch said
of Wolfowitz: “He is a serious and thoughtful person who
is genuinely interested in the promotion of democracy and human
rights around the world and someone who understands that very
few interests can be advanced without paying attention to the
way people are being governed.”
Wolfowitz
has a long track record of producing influential—and controversial—policy
proposals on key aspects of U.S. defense policy: In the late 1970s,
he participated on the Team B Strategic Objectives Panel, a notorious
effort to reinterpret CIA intelligence on the Soviet threat that
helped put the country on a confrontational path with the Soviet
Union and set the stage for the Reagan arms build up; as Dick
Cheney’s undersecretary of defense for policy in the Bush
Sr. administration, he drafted—with I. Lewis Libby—a
controversial “defense policy guidance” report that
is widely regarded as an early blueprint for the George W. Bush
administration’s preemptive defense posture and interventionist
foreign policies; and he collaborated with the Project for the
New American Century’s advocacy campaign calling for war
in Iraq. He has also been associated, along with Doug Feith, with
the work of the Office of Special Plans, the Pentagon outfit that
George Tenet and others blamed for twisting the intelligence on
Iraq.
Before
joining the Bush administration, Wolfowitz was the dean of the
Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, the DC-based
graduate school that has been home to a number of key neocon figures,
including Gary Schmitt of the Project for the New American Century
and the Defense Policy Board’s Eliot Cohen.
In
1992, while he was Cheney’s undersecretary of defense for
policy, Wolfowitz was charged with producing a policy guidance
report aimed at formulating a post-Cold War defense posture. Upset
by President George H.W. Bush’s decision to leave Saddam
Hussein’s regime in place after the 1991 Gulf War, Wolfowitz—along
with “Scooter” Libby—argued in a draft version
of the Defense Policy Guidance that the U.S. should actively deter
nations from “aspiring to a larger regional or global role,”
use preemptive force to prevent countries from developing weapons
of mass destruction, and act alone if necessary.
Although
the draft guidance was quashed soon after it was leaked to the
New York Times, many of its ideas—in particular,
the doctrine of preemption—later found their way into President
George W. Bush’s national security strategy. The document
also seems to have served as a template for the founding statement
of principles of the Project for a New American Century, which
was signed by a who’s who list of hawks and neocons who
have served in the current administration, including Cheney, Libby,
Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Elliott Abrams, Peter Rodman and Zalmay
Khalilzad.
Michael
Flynn is a research associate with the Right Web program
of the International Relations Center (IRC), online at www.irc-online.org.