Paul Wolfowitz
Deputy Secretary of Defense…sponsored by Northrop Grumman.

A chief architect of US Central Command, this former US Ambassador/Chief Apologist in Indonesia serves on the board of weapons giant Northrop Grumman and toy giant Hasbro. Get 'em while they're young, Wolfie.

An academic who moved to the more lucrative world of Washington as such a fierce war hawk he has been called a "velociraptor", Paul Wolfowitz was Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs from 1982 to 1986. For the next three years he was US ambassador to Jakarta, and from 1989 to 1993 he was the "principal civilian responsible for strategy, plans, and policy under Defense Secretary Dick Cheney", according to his official biography. In that time he perfected apologetics for the brutal dictatorships of Suharto in Indonesia, Chun Doo-hwan in South Korea, and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. Not coincidentally, Wolfowitz sits on the Board of Hasbro Inc, a major investor in Asian toy factories, and the extremely lucrative war contractor Northrop Grumman.

In 1992, Wolfowitz supervised preparation of an internal Pentagon policy statement which outlined how the U.S. could maintain global dominance through unilateral action and military superiority. The classified document prioritized defending "access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil." It also stressed the need for "preemptive strikes" (Harper's Magazine, October 2002).

Wolfowitz backed U.S. abandonment of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia in favor of the military contractor's gravy train, missile defense. Wolfowitz also supported the Administration's snubbing of an international nuclear-test ban pact and its refusal to become a party to an International Criminal Court (New York Times Magazine, September 22, 2002).

Within days after the September 11 attacks, Wolfowitz began calling for unilateral military action against Iraq, claiming that Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network could not have pulled off the assaults without Saddam Hussein's assistance. But there is still no credible evidence that the Iraqi regime has any links with Al Qaeda. None of the September 11 hijackers were Iraqi, no major figure in Al Qaeda is Iraqi, nor has any part of Al Qaeda's money trail been traced to Iraq. FBI, CIA and Czech intelligence investigations found no substance to rumors of a meeting between one of the September 11 hijackers and an Iraqi intelligence operative in Prague. This is not surprising, as bin Laden is a sworn enemy of Saddam; in 1990 the Al Quaeda leader offered to raise an army of thousands to fight Saddam, a secular dictator who has savagely suppressed Islamists within Iraq.

While the Saddam Hussein regime was certainly cruel and repressive, its mass killing of Kurdish peoples occurred when Iraq was receiving military and economic support from Washington in the late 1980s. Iraq has not engaged in aggression against another country since its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The State Department's own annual study could not identify any serious act of international terrorism connected to the Iraqi government (Stephen Zunes, The Case Against War, Nation Magazine, 9/30/02).

While as a far-right supporter of brutal Israeli military crackdowns on Palestinian civilians Wolfowitz hugely exaggerated Iraq's threat to Israel, before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, Israeli defense officials dismissed Iraq's military capabilities. Israel now has the world's most advanced anti-missile system, Arrow, with two batteries operational, and numerous batteries of the latest U.S. Patriot missiles in place (Toronto Sun, 11/10/02). It also possesses significant numbers of nuclear weapons (Israel Shahak, Open Secrets: Israeli Nuclear and Foreign Policies, 1997).

If "preemptive" action truly resulted in peace Israel would be the safest country on earth. Though long identified as a "strong supporter of Israel", Wolfowitz' backing of the Israeli military's torture, bombing and killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the West Bank actually makes Israel less safe by increasing the desperation and fanaticism that leads to suicide bombings (Israeli Defense Forces also help limit the possibilities for peaceful resistance to Israel's occupation by targeting secular, non-violent organizers). But such "support" does help military and political leaders in the U.S. and Israel whose careers rely on the perpetuation of war.

Wolfowitz idealizes a "Pax Americana' "[in which] your enemies will be punished and … those who refuse to support you will live to regret having done so."

A senior U.S. government official observed that Wolfowitz and President Bush reinforce each other's faith in ''a strategic transformation of the whole region''.

But a Middle East scholar recently observed that ''this is a very risky operation at best. And the expectation that we will then be splendidly situated to resolve all the region's problems is wildly optimistic'' (New York Times Magazine, September 22, 2002).

Iraqi people hold the U.S. responsible for stripping them of economic and social rights -- the right to sufficient food, clean water, education, medical care - by imposing the harshest sanctions ever enacted against a sovereign country. Economic sanctions have devastated Iraqi society; according to two former directors of the UN Humanitarian Aid program in Iraq, sanctions have killed more than one million Iraqi civilians (see Phyllis Bennis, Testimony Prepared for Hearings on Iraq Policy Senate Foreign Relations Committee, July 31, 2002).

Yet Wolfowitz accepted the "intelligence" fed to him by convicted embezzler and notorious Iraqi war profiteer (several million dollars he received from the CIA are still unaccounted for) Ahmed Chalabi. The war hawk that many are now calling "Wolfowitz of Arabia" seems to have fallen for his own lies about the irresistible appeal of the U.S. corporate version of freedom and democracy, but, as in Afghanistan, that rosy vision isn't going according to plan. Funny how terrorizing innocent civilians, driving them from their homes and killing their loved ones does not endear a population to an occupying military force.

In February 2002 Newsweek magazine profiled five leaders said to be on the Wolfowitz cabal's short list of candidates to replace Saddam Hussein. All five were former high-ranking Iraqi military officials who had been linked to the use of chemical weapons. Wolfowitz claims he supports "the voices struggling to rise above the din of extremism" in the Middle East; unfortunately, the truth seems to be that he supports the pawns of extremists like himself.

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