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Useful resource http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/neocon/spheresInfluence.html

The American Prospect

JASON VEST, Bush's War Hawk, November 5, 2001

FIRST, THE GOOD NEWS: Stumbling into a foreign broadcaster's Washington bureau last week, Richard Perle -- majordomo to neoconservative hawks and chair of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board -- appeared haggard. "I don't know if it looks to you from the outside like indecisiveness and insanity reigns," he said to another guest before going on air, "but let me tell you, it looks even worse from the inside." This is good news because it's a clear indication that Perle and company are not winning the internecine battle within the Bush administration between Perle's Pentagon apparat and Colin Powell's State Department. The former wants to use September 11 as a pretext to bolster the U.S.-Israeli security alliance and take the fight beyond al-Qaeda and Afghanistan to Iraq and perhaps even Syria and Lebanon. The bad news is that Perle's longtime lieutenant, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, still seems hell-bent on pursuing this notion.

To some, this is simply the stance of a patriot: The United States didn't go far enough 10 years ago when it stopped short of a push to Baghdad, the thinking goes; since Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction are still a threat (despite the fact that the United States and Britain have effectively partitioned Iraq and contained the menace with almost daily bombing), the administration owes it to the American people to rid the world -- or some corner of it -- of this troublesome despot.

Over the past few weeks, Wolfowitz has said that the United States is being forced to play a "different kind of ball game" on the "twenty-first-century battlefield" and that doctrine, strategy, and tactics are changing accordingly. But in fact, Wolfowitz remains a study in the unilateralist, maximum-force mind-set -- one entirely in keeping with his intellectual background. As a doctoral student at the University of Chicago in the late 1960s, Wolfowitz became the protege of Albert Wohlstetter -- a veteran of the RAND think tank, arguably the intellectual godfather to Cold War hawks, and a conservative who viewed any form of detente and disarmament as virtually tantamount to treason. But before Wolfowitz was none other than Perle, another star pupil, who had dated Wohlstetter's daughter back in high school. Later, in 1969, Wohlstetter got Perle a gig in Washington as executive director of the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy, which sprang up to fight the Nixon administration's efforts to craft an antiballistic-missile treaty with the Russians. These were heady times in Washington for the hawks. It wasn't long before young Wolfowitz quit a teaching post at Yale University in order to join them: In 1973 he arrived to work at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. The nexus of the antidisarmament network in those days was the office of Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the hawkish Democratic senator from Washington; Perle quickly amassed tremendous power as Jackson's top aide. Wohlstetter's two prize pupils soon became friends and allies in the crusade against arms control -- and for the eventual ascension of Ronald Reagan. While Perle established himself on Capitol Hill through repeated bureaucratic attacks on disarmament advocates and Pentagon-budget cutters, Wolfowitz served on "Team B" -- a study group drawn largely from the ranks of the Committee on the Present Danger that, once given access to classified CIA data, used a highly politicized methodology to conclude that the Soviet Union was militarily poised to overwhelm the United States.

Somewhat bizarrely, Wolfowitz was still seeing red after the Soviet Union's collapse: In 1992, during his waning days as undersecretary of defense in George H. W. Bush's administration, Wolfowitz penned a secret memo that earnestly depicted the Russia of Boris Yeltsin as the direst threat to American national security and further called for war between the Russians and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization if the former tried to menace the newly liberated Baltic nations. During the Gulf War, Wolfowitz was infuriated with then -- General Colin Powell and others who believed that once the UN mandate of expelling Saddam's forces from Kuwait was fulfilled, the war was effectively over; Wolfowitz wanted to go to Baghdad and destroy Saddam completely. Prior to September 11, he was talking up China as the new threat.

TO THOSE WHO KNEW AND WORKED with Wolfowitz's mentor, Wohlstetter, none of this is surprising. "Albert believed he was put here on earth to be a man who would increase the security of the United States at the expense of those who threatened that security, and he was never going to be satisfied until there was nobody around at all who owned a slingshot that would allow them to be a potential David against the American Goliath," says Jude Wanniski, the father of supply-side economics and a former Wohlstetter acolyte who broke with his fellow hawks after the Cold War. "He basically believed that was the only way for a truly secure peace -- and that America was the only country that could get a secure peace for the world. And part of that means, if you look down the road and see a war with, say, China, 20 years off, go to war now."

For almost 30 years, says Wanniski, Wolfowitz and Perle have complemented each other nicely as Wohlstetterian partisans, with Perle playing the tactician and Wolfowitz the more circumspect scholar. But around the end of the Gulf War, Wolfowitz was anything but circumspect, arguing not only for a final push to Baghdad but, later and more vociferously, for fielding U.S. forces in support of the ill-fated Kurdish and Shia intifadas against Saddam. Since then, he's backed all possible funding and support for the Iraqi National Congress, a hopelessly ineffectual expatriate (and, many say, corrupt) opposition group.

While coalition building was the order of the day when dealing with Saddam in 1990, today Wolfowitz would be happy to dispense with him once and for all, the rest of the world be damned. "On one level, Paul's a conservative moralist who believes we didn't do the right thing during the Kurdish intifada and we have to make up for that," says a Pentagon consultant who has known and worked with Wolfowitz over the years. "But Paul genuinely believes that the United States should use its power unilaterally to achieve its goals. . . . He wants to take out Saddam, and so do I; but the problem with his approach is that he doesn't want to do it in a multilateral way that garnishes multinational support, as opposed to alienating the rest of the world." The consultant continues: "I think some people in the administration realize that unilateralism has been made completely defunct. . . . But I don't know that Paul wants to wait to do this right."

This has been particularly vexing to others in the national-security establishment who have great respect for Wolfowitz's intellectual faculties, regardless of his worldview. "The Iraq thing is a completely different issue," says a senior State Department official. "September 11 is not about Saddam. The smart thing to do is first things first. The international coalition we've been so successful in forging will not withstand such a dramatic expansion of war aims." There's similar sentiment at the CIA. "Paul's a smart guy," an agency official said in a meeting last week. "Why he believes this is the way to go is baffling."

But is it really, given the fact that some within the Pentagon's civilian leadership see little difference between American and Israeli national-security interests? As George W. Bush has cast the battle as a war against terrorism wherever it may be, Wolfowitz and others have reportedly argued that this approach necessitates taking the fight not just to Iraq but to Syria and Lebanon -- which would please the Israelis to no end.

But according to military and intelligence sources, this puts Wolfowitz at odds with much of the military hierarchy, a number of whom dispute the notion of an alliance between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. "Keep in mind that bin Laden wanted a jihad against Saddam for invading Kuwait," says one intelligence analyst. "He hates Saddam." Adds the Pentagon consultant: "It makes no sense to do anything like expand this. But Paul's convinced Saddam played a role here, and Paul wants to use this as an excuse."

JASON VEST is a contributing editor to In These Times, based in Washington, D.C.