A man who has mattered - (superb George Will piece, praising Paul Wolfowitz)

TOWNHALL.COM ^ | MAY 12, 2005 | GEORGE WILL

[CHARLITE]

``I can't tell you,'' Paul Wolfowitz says with justifiable asperity, ``how much I resent being called a Wilsonian.'' As he retires as deputy secretary of defense and becomes head of the World Bank, the man most responsible for the doctrinal justification of the Iraq War, and who has been characterized as representing Woodrow Wilson's utopian, rather than the realist, strain in American foreign policy, begs to differ. The question, he says, is who has been realistic for almost four decades.

The sprouting of freedom through the fissures in the concrete of dictatorships began, he recalls, in Greece, Spain and Portugal in the mid-1970s. This, he believes, disturbed Soviet leaders, and should have: It called into question the realism of ``realists'' who, he says, ``were factually wrong'' in dismissing the possibility of undermining the Soviet regime with pressures short of force.

[Wolfowitz] stresses that ``the foundations of liberal democracy are about a helluva lot more than elections.''

They are also about private property as a bulwark of the individual's zone of sovereignty, and about the hopefulness that depends on the reality of material progress. Therefore leading the World Bank will tidily close the circle of a remarkable Washington career that began in the summer of 1966, when as a 22-year-old graduate student he was an intern in the Bureau of the Budget, precursor of the Office of Management and Budget, working on problems of economic development. He has never been elected to office or served in a president's Cabinet, but he has mattered much more than most who have.

[Valin]

Although Wolfowitz has been accused of being irrationally preoccupied with Saddam Hussein, he says he actually consistently underestimated Hussein's malevolence. ``I did not think he would invade Kuwait; or that when he did he would take all of it; or that when driven out he would not say enough is enough; or that he would try to kill President (George H.W.) Bush.'' But, he says, it is an unusual man who tortures children to intimidate parents.


I really thought that he was a deadman after the first Gulf war.