[A-List] Assessing Wolfowitz

[Michael Keaney]

The puppet who cleared the way for Iraq's destruction

Paul Wolfowitz must bear a large part of the responsibility that is
usually laid at the door of his superior alone

Andrew Cockburn
Thursday April 26, 2007
The Guardian

Among those relishing the exposure of World Bank president Paul
Wolfowitz's manoeuvres on behalf of his girlfriend, Shaha Riza, in
recent weeks was almost certainly the former US defence secretary,
Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld was driven from public life thanks to the
catastrophe of Iraq, and for the moment at least lurks in obscurity.
Wolfowitz, his deputy until 2005, contributed in almost equal measure to
the debacle, yet managed to slide from the Pentagon into the presidency
of a leading international institution with every chance to redeem
himself. Blame for torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, bungling over
troop levels, chaos in Iraq's reconstruction, and the general meltdown
in Pentagon management has all too often been laid at Rumsfeld's door
alone. However, Wolfowitz was an energetic enabler of these outrages and
many other notorious initiatives.

To cite just one example: among the most infamous documentary testaments
to Rumsfeld's place in the hierarchy of torture is the First Special
Interrogation Plan for use at Guantánamo that received his approval in
December 2002. It cleared the way for prolonged sleep deprivation,
20-hour interrogations, and sexual and religious humiliation, along with
other favoured techniques. But as the document signed by Rumsfeld notes,
the plan had earlier been reviewed and approved by "the deputy", ie
Wolfowitz.

There are indications that Wolfowitz was even more hands on when it came
to Abu Ghraib. At the May 2006 court martial of Sergeant Santos Cardona,
who was one of the low-ranking personnel called to atone for the
collective sins of the military establishment, testimony from one of the
interrogators alleged that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were in direct contact
with the prison and received "nightly briefings" on the intelligence
being extracted under torture.

Just as Rumsfeld will forever be uniquely associated with the torture
policy, the hapless former US viceroy in Iraq, Paul Bremer, is credited
with the disastrous decision to disband the Iraqi army. Yet numerous
sources in Baghdad and the Pentagon at the time were insistent the
disbandment decree had been drafted with Wolfowitz's assent, probably as
a means of removing a potential pool of support for a rival to the
neoconservatives' favourite Iraqi, Ahmed Chalabi.

Earlier Wolfowitz had manoeuvred to have himself appointed as viceroy in
Iraq. That effort failed. But a newly revealed inquiry by the Pentagon's
inspector general found that, in a foretaste of things to come, he did
his best to secure a high-level position in the administration of the
conquered country for Riza. Seemingly, he was in awe of her expertise on
Iraqi matters. Participants in high level meetings to discuss
intelligence on Iraq told me they were startled to hear the deputy
secretary of defence invoke his girlfriend: "Shaha says ..." Other
Pentagon officials were less impressed by her knowledge of the country,
not to mention the enormous salary she demanded for her services, and
successfully blocked the appointment. Instead, a huge Pentagon
contractor, Saic, was directed to hire Riza for a temporary Iraq
mission.

Before we conclude that Wolfowitz was the original author of the
policies that destroyed Iraq, we should note that his entire career, at
least up through his Pentagon service, has been in the service and at
the direction of others. His early work in Washington promoting the
dubious merits of an anti-ballistic missile programme, for example, was
sponsored by Paul Nitze, a powerful insider who devoted a lifetime of
intrigue to boosting east-west tensions and US defence spending. Nitze
served as godfather to the neoconservative movement in the 70s,
correctly calculating that a fusion of the pro-Israel lobby with the
military-industrial lobby would create an alliance of unstoppable power.
Among the early and most potent recruits was an old friend of
Wolfowitz's, Richard Perle, known and feared in Washington as "the
Prince of Darkness" for his ruthless bureaucratic skills and commanding
position in the neoconservative forces.

The relationship flourished into Wolfowitz's sojourn in the Pentagon.
Officials who worked closely with him remarked to me on the amount of
time Perle, then a close associate of Conrad Black, spent closeted with
the deputy secretary. They remained in constant touch, as Wolfowitz's
phone logs attest. Other regular recipients of Wolfowitz calls included
Lewis "Scooter" Libby, then chief of staff to Vice-President Cheney and
now a convicted felon, and Robin Cleveland. Cleveland was in charge of
national security programmes at the White House office of management and
budget. From that powerful position, according to a former close
colleague of Wolfowitz's, she "was one of the most important people in
the group that gave us the Iraq war".

Late last year Perle and other leading neoconservatives lashed out
publicly at Rumsfeld, deriding his mismanagement of the Iraqi enterprise
they had worked so hard to set in train. "Interesting they are not going
after the puppet," the former colleague emailed me in reference to
Wolfowitz's absence from his old friends' denunciations.

Given recent sordid revelations, his role in shredding the reputation of
the World Bank and the morale of its employees may be harder to obscure.


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