Paul Wolfowitz: A realist — really

JWR ^ | 5-13-05 | George Will

[FlyLow]

"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.

Those include pressures for human rights and on economies. In the early 1980s, Wolfowitz was part of the successful resistance to abolishing the State Department's Bureau of Human Rights. This was more than a decade after he worked with Sen. Henry Jackson, the Washington Democrat, in preparing for Jackson's extraordinary debate with Stuart Symington, the Missouri Democrat, about ballistic-missile defenses.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

BTTT.