Posted on 04/18/2004 5:34:38 PM PDT by Valin
IN the middle of the worst month for US forces in Iraq, with the city of Fallujah under siege, with rebel Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr grandly receiving envoys for negotiations, the US position in Iraq looks desperate, perhaps doomed.
But there is a core of faith in the Bush administration - determination more than optimism, though irreducible optimism is a part of it - that the US-led coalition will prevail in Iraq.
And I am sitting in the office of Optimism Central, here in the Pentagon where Paul Wolfowitz, the US Deputy Secretary of Defence, chief intellectual architect of the Iraq invasion and high priest of the neo-conservatives, sits. The nation's leading hawk is bloodied but unbowed, momentarily alone in his vast Pentagon office.
The Pentagon is the most powerful building in the world. It hums 24 hours a day, every day of the year. Its 24,000 staff make it the biggest single government office building anywhere.
It stood, co-equal with New York's World Trade Centre, as the supreme symbol of the US for Osama bin Laden to attack but, unlike the World Trade Centre, it survived the attack and has been hitting back since.
Even more than combative Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz is the engine of Iraq policy. He won't hear of defeat and restates the vision that few share in these dark days: "You can have endless debates about how imminent the [Iraq] threat was and the President never said it was imminent. The whole point was to deal with it before it became imminent," Wolfowitz tells The Weekend Australian.
"That's all important, but it's the past. The future is creating a country in the heart of the Arab world that has an independent judiciary, that respects minority rights, that respects the rights of women, that observes democratic practices.
"That's going to have an influence. It's not a domino effect -- that's an absurd comparison. But it will have a broad influence in the Middle East in the way I believe Japan had a great influence on East Asia, and subsequently Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong had a broad influence on China. It's very important to demonstrate to the Arabs that given the right circumstances, they can achieve what the rest of us have done.
"It's unbelievably condescending to believe that the only way Iraq can be stable is to be ruled by a tyrant like Saddam." As Wolfowitz outlines this, many would say, outlandishly optimistic vision, his voice is soft and somewhat foggy.
To get to his office, I walk down long corridors lined with military paintings, the ones outside Wolfowitz's office painted by Dwight Eisenhower. Though Wolfowitz is an unrepentant hawk, with decades of government service behind him, his manner is that of the owlish professor, studious and erudite.
Some Washington insiders believe Wolfowitz's credibility has been fatally damaged by all the troubles in Iraq. Certainly an outright US failure in Iraq would probably doom George W. Bush's presidency, and no one has been more closely identified with the Iraq policy than Wolfowitz.
But there is a logical upside to this as well for Wolfowitz. If after everything Washington does get a reasonable outcome in Iraq, Bush will be vindicated. So will Wolfowitz.
So what would success in Iraq look like, however distant that seems?
"I think it is basically an Iraq that can fend for itself, with a lot of help from other people. There are multiple parts of that, but the two
most important are governance and security."
Wolfowitz acknowledges that the fighting of the past two weeks represents a crisis for Iraq and especially for US policy there. But each element of the crisis, he believes, can be fixed. "We really have two very different problems," Wolfowitz explains. He believes each of these problems will be solved but, as he outlines them, their gravity becomes apparent.
The first is that posed by rebel Muslim cleric al-Sadr and his murderous militias.
"The Moqtada al-Sadr problem is an ugly but marginal movement within a community [Iraq's majority Shias] that overwhelmingly supports us and, though they are sometimes afraid to say it, really opposes him. It's something that can be dealt with, with care and gradually."
The fighting and subsequent stand-off in Fallujah represent a different order of challenge, in Wolfowitz's estimation: "The Fallujah problem is at the core of the major activity designed to try to destabilise the new Iraq.
"To dignify these people as resistance or insurgents - these are not labels they deserve. These are the former killers and rapists and torturers who kept Saddam in power for 35 years and helped him kill 700,000 Iraqis. He didn't do it single-handedly. They include foreign terrorist collaborators and they include - especially among the foreigners but also among the Iraqis - people who are prepared to fight to the death.
"These groups may have somewhat different strategic objectives in that the Saddamists, I believe, still hope to bring back the Baathist party, and perhaps even Saddam. After all, Saddam has a kind of Dracula-like reputation in this part of the world.
"The al-Qa'ida associates like [Jordanian terrorist Abu Mussab] al-Zakawi would actually prefer not to be labelled Saddamists, but their main goal is to defeat us and prevent a new Iraq from emerging. In that they work very well together.
"We know that this collaboration has obviously grown. Fallujah is a centrepiece of that collaboration. They've almost developed an internal refuge in Fallujah. It is a crisis, but if it is resolved successfully it could be a big victory."
Wolfowitz is a beguiling interlocutor. It is impossible to fault his passionate commitment to democracy and human rights. But surely the events of the past two weeks, the scale of the opposition the US faces in Iraq, must dent his optimism? Are his words the equivalent of the generals' reassuring briefings during the Vietnam War - words that in the end did not prevent the defeat of America's friends in Vietnam?
I put some of this to Wolfowitz and his response is certainly plausible. It boils down to this: it's going to take time. And while all the critics point to the Vietnam analogy, Wolfowitz has plenty of more encouraging comparisons. "I remember, after the fall of [dictator Nicolae] Ceausescu in Romania in 1989, being struck by the statistic that 20 or 25per cent of the Romanian population were on the payroll of the secret police," he says. "I thought: 'Here's a country that has no hope of making it.' Well, they're now about to join NATO. It's not the perfect democracy. A lot of that poison is still in the Romanian system, but it's leaching out. Iraq has an even bigger problem and its poison has to leach out too."
OK, but what about the Iraqi soldiers who refused to fight with the Americans, who refused to confront the insurgents? Doesn't that indicate a fatal lack of support?
Not so, says Wolfowitz, it's just going to take more time: "One of the disappointing pieces of news over the last few weeks has been that the Iraqi security forces weren't ready to take on that role. [US Central Command chief General] John Abizaid has been saying they won't be ready 'til the end of this year."
Also don't forget, Wolfowitz points out, that some of the regular Iraqi forces did perform very well. In particular he singles out the 36th Battalion, which was formed out of the militias of various Iraqi political parties.
Wolfowitz says he welcomes the announcement by the UN special envoy to Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, that the US should hand over sovereignty on June 30 to a caretaker government of Iraqi technocrats, which would rule until elections.
He strongly supports the idea of sticking to the June 30 deadline for handing over sovereignty: "It's not that everything goes over the cliff on June 30. The process itself goes on in stages. You have an interim government from July 1 to the end of the year. You have a transitional government from January until the end of 2005 and then you have a constitutional government in 2006. People say: 'Can you meet the deadline?', but they forget that this is exactly what we did in Afghanistan in December 2001.
"The other big part of success [in Iraq] will be the security side. There the question is not the elimination of terrorists, though the more we can eliminate the better, but rather that it should become an Iraqi fight primarily and the coalition should be in a background, supporting role."
Wolfowitz regards the Afghanistan constitution and Iraq's interim constitution as two great achievements that will become seminal documents in the history of the region. It is easy to scoff at this amid the terror and violence of Iraq today, but it is just plain wrong to claim that anyone really knows how Iraq will unfold.
What is most interesting about the US debate over the past few weeks is not just that the Bush administration has taken a lot of criticism and suffered in the polls. Equally - perhaps more - important, but substantially unremarked-upon outside the US, is that both sides of US politics have committed to finishing the job in Iraq.
This is now not just a Bush administration commitment but a US commitment. The most compelling evidence of this perhaps was Democratic Party presidential candidate John Kerry's opinion piece in The Washington Post calling for more troops to go to Iraq.
The mood in the US is the opposite to one that would favour a cut-and-run option, and you hear this from commentators and politicians across the political spectrum.
Of course, it is unlikely in the extreme that the US will get substantial new troop infusions from foreign nations. It is just barely possible that NATO could stump up some more troops, but you wouldn't bet the house on it.
Nonetheless most US allies are holding firm about keeping their existing deployments in Iraq. In the course of a long interview, Wolfowitz does not mention Mark Latham or refer directly to the Labor Party's policy of withdrawing Australian troops as soon as practical after an election victory.
But he strongly urges Australia to keep its soldiers there: "I think [Australia's continued commitment] is very important. It's very important that everybody do [keep their troops in Iraq], especially after Madrid. It's especially important for countries that have long democratic traditions."
For Canberra to withdraw its troops precipitately, Wolfowitz believes, would send the wrong message to the Iraqis, to the terrorists and to the international community.
"Australia is such a key player in the original coalition - it's one of the few countries that had troops there in the very beginning. None of us are perfect democracies, but those of us who are the older democracies - and you Australians are one of the oldest democracies in the world - have important standards and values to set for the new ones. Since this is very much about political values, I think Australia's commitment matters a lot."
Political trouble for the Bush administration generally, and for Wolfowitz in particular, has been coming from several directions lately. The special commission on the September11 terrorist attacks has heard a raft of evidence that suggests the FBI and the CIA did not co-operate effectively in the fight against terrorism, and that the FBI was internally incompetent.
Worse for the administration has been the suggestion that it did not respond with sufficient vigour to warnings from its agencies that al-Qa'ida was getting ready to launch a big attack.
The most damaging criticism has come from former National Security Council counter-terrorism co-ordinator Richard Clarke, whose testimony was savage in its treatment of the Bush administration he once served, as is his book Against All Enemies. In elite media and specialist circles, Clarke's book has been criticised for its many factual inaccuracies, which have led to a questioning of its overall reliability. Many senior Bush figures who are mentioned in the book deny several of its specific dates, meetings and quotes.
No one in the administration is angrier with Clarke than Wolfowitz. This may be because in his book Clarke portrays Wolfowitz as the chief villain, as being so obsessed by Iraq that he ignored al-Qa'ida. On its face this seems an extremely unlikely charge, given Wolfowitz's long involvement in and concern with the terrorist issue.
"He [Clarke] has an ability to remember things which never took place, like Rumsfeld being at key meetings that he didn't attend, or Rumsfeld being here on a videoconference when the building was hit, when he was somewhere else entirely," Wolfowitz complains. "He [Clarke] puts quotes in my mouth which are the opposite of what I said." He has a long list of facts that Clarke got wrong in his book and he is happy to recite them.
But then he goes on to make the more substantial defence of the administration, which is that it was changing counter-terrorist policy before September 11, 2001, to make it much more ambitious and vigorous.
"The fact is, if you look at what was provided for the President on September4, it was an entire change in US [counter-terrorism] strategy.
"We went from having the goal of eroding al-Qa'ida, which was Clarke's goal, to eliminating al-Qa'ida in Afghanistan. We went from diplomatic pressure on the Taliban [to stop their support of al-Qa'ida] to contemplating the use of force if other means didn't work. We went from a Pakistan policy that was mired in sanctions to a Pakistan policy that was focused on getting rid of the Taliban."
Wolfowitz says that on September10 he and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage met the head of Pakistan's ISI military intelligence agency to tell him there was the prospect of improved relations with the US if Pakistan cut its links to the Taliban.
Wolfowitz also makes the point that all the terrorist pilots involved in the September11 attacks were in the US by the end of 2000. Even military action against Afghanistan in 2001 would not have prevented the attacks. He also recounts that Clarke has testified that if everything he says he recommended had been implemented in full, it would not have stopped the attacks.
Wolfowitz is an example of a particular Washington species - the policy intellectual who holds a series of government positions, alternating with high academic posts when his side is out of government, and wields enormous power over several decades.
He is the government figure most identified with the neo-conservative intellectual movement. But he vigorously rejects the idea that Bush administration policies are impractical or in some way ideological, beyond being motivated by the desire to protect US national interests and promote democracy and prosperity around the world.
The day after our interview he tells a Washington lunch that the old status quo in the Middle East had become unsustainable.
This is a constant theme of the neo-cons today. It is not they who are impractical, they argue, but rather the so-called realists who retreat into isolationism and don't confront the real problems. It is a highly contentious debate and one that the outcome in Iraq will do much to resolve.
As part of this general defence, however, Wolfowitz also stresses the moral and geo-strategic uniqueness of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. This is important as justification for what the US has done and as reassurance that the Iraq experience is unlikely to be repeated frequently, if at all.
"In the last 100 years there were actually very few dictators who cut out people's tongues, who tortured children in order to make their parents talk, who raped women and sent videos of the rapes to the relatives in order to intimidate the relatives. It was an unbelievable regime of terror. You hear people say the world is full of bad guys and Saddam Hussein was just another bad guy. Then you know they really don't know Saddam Hussein at all.
"To paraphrase that famous vice-presidential debate, I knew Ferdinand Marcos and Ferdinand Marcos was no Saddam Hussein. I knew Suharto and Suharto was no Saddam Hussein. If Marcos and Suharto had been prepared to kill people the way Saddam Hussein was, they would have stayed in power a lot longer."
Wolfowitz and the other neo-conservatives certainly bring a passion for democracy and human rights to US foreign policy. In that they are similar to Wilsonian idealists. But they also believe they are acting practically to deal with threats. A big part of their disagreement with much of the foreign policy establishment is their assessment of the threat.
Until this administration, Wolfowitz had always been regarded as intellectually formidable but cautious - a point author James Mann makes in his book Rise of the Vulcans, a group biography of the Bush administration's leading foreign policy heavyweights.
Wolfowitz, 60, stands at the apex of his power and influence. The world has been changed by his ideas already. The ambition to change the course of history and the nature of political culture in the Middle East is characteristically American in its scope and daring. In the end, though, statesmen are judged by practical results. And the practical results in Iraq these past two weeks have been anything but pretty.
Wolfowitz says it's a mistake to take the temperature of a patient halfway through a course of treatment and make a final judgment on that basis. But in the end, the patient gets better, or stays sick, or dies. Judgment is not deferred for very long.
Foreign editor Greg Sheridan is a visiting fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC.
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