THE BELIEVER
by PETER J. BOYER
Paul Wolfowitz defends his war.
Issue of 2004-11-01
Posted 2004-10-25
On the night of October 5th, a group of Polish students, professors, military
officers, and state officials crowded into a small auditorium at Warsaw University to
hear Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, give a talk on the subject of
the war in Iraq. It was an unusually warm evening for October, and every seat was
filled; the room seemed nearly airless. Wolfowitz began by joking that his father, a
noted mathematician, would have been proud to see him in this academic setting, even
as he was saddened that the younger Wolfowitz had pursued the political, rather than
the "real," sciences. After a few minutes, Wolfowitz's voice, which normally has a
soft tremble, grew even more faint, and his aspect became wan. For an instant, he
seemed actually to wobble.
It had been a tiring day, preceded by an overnight flight from Washington. This was to
have been a routine official trip for Wolfowitz-a visit with soldiers in Germany and
some bucking up of Iraq-war allies in Warsaw and London. The bucking up, however, was
made a bit more complicated by developments within the Administration. The previous
afternoon, as Wolfowitz was preparing to board his plane at Andrews Air Force Base, an
aide had handed him a report containing some vexing news. Wolfowitz's boss, Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, had just delivered a speech in New York and, in a
question-and-answer exchange afterward, had declared that he had not seen any "strong,
hard evidence" linking Al Qaeda with Saddam Hussein's regime. Rumsfeld's unexpected
remark-undercutting one of the Administration's principal arguments for going to
war-had already prompted press inquiries at the Pentagon, suggesting a bad news cycle
ahead. Meanwhile, the Washington Post was preparing to report that L. Paul Bremer, the
former administrator of the American-led occupation of Iraq, had faulted the U.S.
postwar plan for lacking sufficient troops to provide security-affirming a principal
contention of the Administration's critics. In addition, the government's Iraq Survey
Group, headed by Charles Duelfer, was about to release a final report on the search
for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; already the report's substance was being
summed up in headlines as "report discounts iraqi arms threat." And the Times had
learned of a new C.I.A. assessment casting doubt on links between the Jordanian
terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Saddam's regime-undermining yet another of the
Administration's rationales for the war.
Wolfowitz has been a major architect of President Bush's Iraq policy and, within the
Administration, its most passionate and compelling advocate. His long career as a
diplomat, strategist, and policymaker will be measured by this policy, and, more
immediately, the President he serves may not be returned to office because of it. The
Administration had been divided over Iraq from the start, and new fissures seemed to
be appearing. The Poles sitting in the Warsaw audience, "new" Europeans who had cast
their lot with America, might understandably have been concerned. The government in
Poland, where public opinion has shifted against the war, faces elections next year,
and will probably reduce its forces in Iraq in the coming months.
After his faltering start, Wolfowitz, nearing the midpoint of his speech, began to
find his voice. He recounted the events of Poland's darkest days, and the civilized
world's acquiescence to Hitler's ambitions which preceded them. When Hitler began to
rearm Germany, Wolfowitz said, "the world's hollow warnings formed weak defenses."
When Hitler annexed Austria, "the world sat by." When German troops marched into
Czechoslovakia before the war, "the world sat still once again." When Britain and
France warned Hitler to stay out of Poland, the F�hrer had little reason to pay heed.
"Poles understand perhaps better than anyone the consequences of making toothless
warnings to brutal tyrants and terrorist regimes," Wolfowitz said. "And, yes, I do
include Saddam Hussein." He then laid out the case against Saddam, reciting once again
the dictator's numberless crimes against his own people. He spoke of severed hands and
videotaped torture sessions. He told of the time, on a trip to Iraq, he'd been shown a
"torture tree," the bark of which had been worn away by ropes used to bind Saddam's
victims, both men and women. He said that field commanders recently told him that
workers had come across a new mass grave, and had stopped excavation when they
encountered the remains of several dozen women and children, "some still with little
dresses and toys."
Wolfowitz observed that some people-meaning the "realists" in the foreignpolicy
community, including Secretary of State Colin Powell-believed that the Cold War
balance of power had brought a measure of stability to the Persian Gulf. But,
Wolfowitz continued, "Poland had a phrase that correctly characterized that as 'the
stability of the graveyard.' The so-called stability that Saddam Hussein provided was
something even worse."
Finally, Wolfowitz thanked the Poles for joining in a war that much of Europe had
repudiated, and continues to oppose. His message was clear: history, especially
Europe's in the last century, has proved that it is smarter to side with the U.S. than
against it. "We will not forget Poland's commitment," he promised. "Just as you have
stood with us, we will stand with you."
Wolfowitz, who is sixty, has served in the Administrations of six Presidents, yet he
is still regarded by many in Washington with a considerable measure of puzzlement.
This is due partly to the fact that, although his intelligence is conceded by all, and
his quiet bearing and manner suggest the academic that he used to be-at the Johns
Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies-he has consistently argued positions
that place him squarely in the category of war hawk. He began his life in public
policy by marshalling arguments, in 1969, on behalf of a U.S. anti-ballistic-missile
defense system. Like his mentor at the University of Chicago, the late political
strategist Albert Wohlstetter, Wolfowitz was skeptical of a U.S.-Soviet convergence,
embraced a national missile-defense system, and argued for the deployment of tactical
nuclear weapons in Europe.
But most puzzling to some, perhaps, is the communion that Wolfowitz seems to have with
George W. Bush. How can someone so smart, so knowing, speak-and even apparently
think-so much like George Bush? Except for their manner of delivery-Wolfowitz speaks
in coherent paragraphs and Bush employs an idiom that is particular to himself-the
language used by the two men when discussing Iraq is almost indistinguishable. It is
the stark tone of evangelical conviction: evil versus good, the "worship of death" and
"philosophy of despair" versus our "love of life and democracy." Alongside Bush
himself, Wolfowitz is, even now, among the last of the true believers.
Earlier on the day of his speech, Wolfowitz had toured the old city of Warsaw. In
ceremonies attended by a Polish military honor guard, he laid wreaths at a memorial
commemorating the Warsaw uprising and the monument to the Warsaw ghetto heroes. He
laid a wreath, too, at the Umschlagplatz Memorial-the point of departure for some
three hundred thousand Warsaw Jews who were transported to the Nazi death camp at
Treblinka. Wolfowitz had pillaged the Pentagon library for a copy of "Courier from
Warsaw," the memoir of Jan Nowak, a Catholic who was among the first Warsaw-uprising
witnesses to reach the West and testify to the Nazi horrors. In Warsaw, Wolfowitz
asked to meet with Nowak, who is ninety. They spoke about the scale of the Holocaust,
and about "how terrible it was for the Poles during the sixty-three days of the
uprising. Three thousand Poles were killed every day-a World Trade Center every day."
Wolfowitz told me that he had never before visited the memorials, and that, other than
a quick stopover, this was his first trip to Poland, even though his father, Jacob
Wolfowitz, had been born in Warsaw. He managed to emigrate during Poland's brief
interwar independence, unlike many other family members, who did not survive the
Holocaust. It is probable that some of Wolfowitz's relatives made their way through
the Umschlagplatz, although not much is known. Wolfowitz said that he had learned
little about Warsaw life, or the fate of his lost relatives, from his father. "He
hated to talk about his childhood," Wolfowitz said. As a boy, Wolfowitz devoured books
("probably too many") about the Holocaust and Hiroshima-what he calls "the polar
horrors."
After his meeting with Jan Nowak, Wolfowitz's conversation in the following days kept
returning to what he had heard. "He told about how the ghetto was walled off from the
rest of the city, but there was one streetcar that had to cross it," Wolfowitz said.
"And every day he would see bodies laid out, covered with newspaper, because that was
all they had to cover them with, and people who'd starved to death and died of
typhoid." Nowak told Wolfowitz that in secret wartime meetings with Britain's top
officials, including Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, he had reported the plight of the
Warsaw Jews; yet, when he later examined the minutes from these meetings in the
British archives, he found no mention of the Jews. "Nowak said it was wartime
inconvenience." Wolfowitz paused, then added, "There are some parallels to Iraq. One
is that people don't believe these things. First, they don't know it, because the
world doesn't talk about them. It may be for different reasons, although some of it is
'wartime inconvenience.'"
Wolfowitz said that he was astonished by the argument of some war critics that, with
no imminent threat from Iraq, the overturning of Saddam was unwarranted-an argument
that he believes implicitly accepts Saddam's brutality. A corollary phenomenon is the
relative lack of opprobrium directed by the international community and the press
toward the insurgents in Iraq, whom the Administration brands as terrorists. "It's
amazing," he said. "If you said the insurgents were terrible, then you couldn't go on
and on about all the mistakes that Bush has made."
Perhaps, but the other side of that coin is the Administration's shift in rhetorical
emphasis after Baghdad was taken. Given the lack of weapons of mass destruction or
proven ties between Iraq and the terror attacks of September 11th, the liberation
rationale acquired a primary importance that it had not had in the Administration's
public argument for war.
In turn, the developing insurgency, which eclipsed the parades and the cheering
throngs, prompted renewed focus on the Administration's geopolitical strategy-the
transformation of the region-as a war rationale. This grand idea of liberalizing the
Middle East one country at a time, beginning with Iraq, was associated particularly
with Wolfowitz. The State Department was, and is, skeptical, and it is said that
Rumsfeld harbored doubts as well.
Wolfowitz's critics accuse him of na�vet�, of setting out a vision that fails to
consider fully the complex and unpredictable regional dynamics of tribal loyalties,
honor, revenge, and Arab pride in Iraq and in the region generally. They argue that
the invasion and the subsequent insurgency have undermined American authority
throughout the world and have led to more, not fewer, jihad-minded terrorists.
Wolfowitz often responds to critics by drawing an analogy to Asia, where skeptics once
argued that Confucian tradition was a barrier to the development of democracy. He has
said, "This is the same Confucian tradition that more recently has been given a
substantial share of the credit for the success of the Korean economy and many others
in Asia."
En route to Poland, Wolfowitz made a brief stop in Munich, where he met with two men
who had helped to shape his view of Islam. One was Anwar Ibrahim, the former Deputy
Prime Minister of Malaysia, who was in Germany for medical treatment. Ibrahim had been
a nineteen-seventies-era student activist who entered politics and became, in the eyes
of Wolfowitz and other Westerners, the embodiment of the moderate Muslim ideal-at once
devoutly religious and tolerant, and eager to move his country into the modern world.
He was widely expected to succeed his mentor, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir
Mohamad, but in 1998 Mohamad had Ibrahim arrested, on charges of corruption and sodomy
(a crime in Malaysia), and he was sentenced to a nine-year jail term. Three years
later, just after the September 11th attacks, Ibrahim, still in a Malaysian jail,
wrote an impassioned essay condemning the attacks as an abomination and lamenting the
Muslim world's failure to address "the suffering inflicted on the Muslim masses in
Iraq by its dictator as well as by sanctions." He was freed in September.
Wolfowitz also met with Abdurrahman Wahid, the former President of Indonesia. Toward
the end of the second Reagan Administration, Wolfowitz, who was then Assistant
Secretary of State for East Asia, was offered the Ambassadorship to Indonesia.
Wolfowitz had spent more than a dozen years in the policy grind of Washington, and he
and his wife, Clare, were eager to get away. Clare Wolfowitz had a particular interest
in Indonesia-she'd been an exchange student there in high school, spoke the language,
and had made Indonesia her academic specialty; she holds a Ph.D. in social
anthropology. (The couple are now separated.) People who have spent much time with
Wolfowitz eventually notice that Indonesia is the one subject guaranteed to brighten
his mood. "I really didn't expect to fall in love with this place, but I did," he told
me earlier this year. "I mean, I don't think I made the mistake of forgetting which
country I represented, or overlooking their flaws, but there was so much that was just
enormously appealing to me."
Wolfowitz's appointment to Indonesia was not an immediately obvious match. He was a
Jew representing America in the largest Muslim republic in the world, an advocate of
democracy in Suharto's dictatorship. But Wolfowitz's tenure as Ambassador was a
notable success, largely owing to the fact that, in essence, he went native. With
tutoring help from his driver, he learned the language, and hurled himself into the
culture. He attended academic seminars, climbed volcanoes, and toured the
neighborhoods of Jakarta.
At the time, Wahid was the leader of Indonesia's largest Muslim group, which
eventually morphed into a political party and brought Wahid to the Presidency, the
nation's first in a free election. (Not long after, however, he was impeached by the
Indonesian parliament.) Wolfowitz found Wahid to be urbane, witty (his translation of
a book of Soviet black humor became a best-seller in the Suharto era), and
broadminded. Islam arrived late in Indonesia, and is less deeply rooted there than it
is in many Arab states. The constitution protects other religious faiths, and Wahid,
who is deeply devout, took that tolerance a step further, advocating total separation
of mosque and state. "He's a remarkable human being," Wolfowitz said. "I mean, there's
the leader of the largest Muslim organization, and he's an apostle of tolerance. How
can you not admire him?"
Wolfowitz and Wahid became lasting friends, and, inevitably, one of their shared
interests was the subject of Iraq. Wolfowitz told me that Wahid had studied in
Baghdad, and that he was an early witness to the Baath Party's atrocities. Wahid had
described how Saddam's regime "left the bodies hanging so long, the necks stretched,"
Wolfowitz said. "It was in the main square in Baghdad, to send a message, to say,
'This is who you're dealing with from now on.' And he said his teacher was taken away,
the body was brought back in a sealed coffin, and they were told not to open it. They
went ahead and opened it, and they found he'd been horribly tortured."
At the reunion in Munich, Wahid, who is nearly blind and has been enfeebled by
strokes, made his way slowly down a hotel corridor and embraced his old friend. Wahid
is an acquaintance of the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most influential Shiite
cleric, upon whom the future direction of Iraq may largely depend. Sistani, who does
not openly engage with Americans, is believed to oppose the creation of an
Iranian-style theocracy in Iraq, and his influence has been instrumental in reining in
the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Wahid indicated that he might visit Iraq soon,
and, as a Sunni who knows Sistani, he'd like to help improve relations between Sunnis
and Shiites.
Another influence on Wolfowitz's thinking is an Arab feminist named Shaha Ali Riza,
with whom he has become close. Riza, who was born in Tunisia and reared in Saudi
Arabia, studied international relations at Oxford and subsequently became a determined
advocate of democracy and women's rights in the Islamic world. She is now a senior
official at the World Bank, where she works on Middle Eastern and North African
affairs.
Wolfowitz says that his hopes for a democratic Iraq now are modest. He claims that he
never expected a Jefferso-nian democracy, as some of his critics have derisively
asserted. What he wishes to see is something stable, and more liberal than what came
before. "It is something of a test," he told me one day this summer, regarding the
Iraqis. "We can't be sure they'll pass. And they're not going to pass with an A-plus.
I mean, if they do Romanian democracy and the country doesn't break up that'll be
pretty good."
The morning after his speech at Warsaw University, Wolfowitz flew to London, for
meetings at 10 Downing Street and at the Ministry of Defence. That evening, he hosted
a gathering of British writers at Annabel's, in Mayfair, and their questions quickly
turned to the subject of Rumsfeld's remark earlier in the week that he'd seen no hard
evidence of an Al Qaeda-Iraqi connection. This had prompted hurried defensive
strategizing at the Pentagon, and Rumsfeld put out a clarification of his statement.
Still, the issue lingered. The C.I.A.'s latest assessment, based on information
gathered since the end of major combat, cast further doubt on the connection, and was
now in circulation.
Wolfowitz often prefaces his response to questions about this issue, as he did at
Annabel's and at the Aspen Institute earlier this year, by posing a question of his
own. It's a sort of parlor game that he plays. He asks, in a professorial whisper,
"How many people here have heard of Abdul Rahman Yassin, if you'd raise your hand?" In
a room of two dozen people, no more than two or three will raise their hands.
Wolfowitz notes the meagre tally, allows himself a slight smile, and then explains
that Abdul Rahman Yassin was one of the men indicted for the 1993 bombing of the World
Trade Center, which killed six people and injured a thousand others. He remains a
fugitive, the only one of the indicted perpetrators of that attack still at large.
Then Wolfowitz turns to the September 11th attacks. They were planned, he reminds his
audience, by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The mastermind of the first World Trade Center
bombing, Ramzi Yousef, was a nephew and close associate of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
"These are not separate events. They were the same target. They were the same people."
And Abdul Rahman Yassin, the fugitive from the first event? He fled to Iraq. "It would
seem significant that one major figure in that event is still at large," Wolfowitz
says. "It would seem significant that he was harbored in Iraq by Iraqi intelligence
for ten years."
Many intelligence analysts believe that the presence of Yassin in Iraq was not
particularly meaningful. Not long after his arrival there, Yassin, who grew up in
Baghdad, was detained by the Saddam regime, and in 2002 he was even interviewed by "60
Minutes" in an Iraqi holding cell; if he was being "harbored," the argument goes, it
was only as a detainee that Saddam hoped to use as a bargaining chip with the United
States. Furthermore, during the run-up to the war the Administration didn't make
Yassin a major issue.
Neither Wolfowitz nor the other intelligence analysts can say unequivocally what
Yassin was doing in Iraq. Wolfowitz's purpose in raising the issue is to illustrate
the uncertain nature of intelligence analysis. He believes that there is important
unexamined evidence regarding Yassin, yet, he says, when he broaches the matter with
members of Congress his arguments are often met with resistance. "Every time you try
to raise it, people say, 'But there's no proof Saddam was involved in 9/11.'"
The issue illustrates Wolfowitz's own deep and abiding suspicions about the
inviolability of the intelligence community's culture and processes, a skepticism that
dates back to his earliest days in government service. In 1973, Wolfowitz was a young
new hire at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, his first foray into the
national-security side of government. It was the era of the salt talks with the
Soviets, and one of the first reports that Wolfowitz saw was the "big prize"
itself-the National Intelligence Estimate of Soviet capabilities. Wolfowitz read the
estimate, but he was struck, he says, more by a cover letter that accompanied it. The
letter said that it was a credit to the report that, on such an important subject, it
contained hardly any footnotes. In that world, footnotes were the means by which
differing opinions were indicated. Wolfowitz was amazed, and appalled, that the C.I.A.
boasted about not presenting dissenting views.
Some years ago, after Wolfowitz had left Washington for Jakarta, he consented to an
interview with the C.I.A., which was reassessing its analysis processes. "The idea
that somehow you are saving work for the policymaker by eliminating serious debate is
wrong," Wolfowitz told his interviewer. "Why not aim, instead, at a document that
actually says there are two strongly argued positions on the issue? Here are the facts
and evidence supporting one position, and here are the facts and evidence supporting
the other, even though that might leave the poor policymakers to make a judgment as to
which one they think is correct."
Wolfowitz wanted to re�xamine national-security intelligence, and to avoid what he
considered the groupthink inclinations of the intelligence professionals ("the
priesthood," he calls them). Eventually, he came to be known for his ability to
recognize threatening patterns and capabilities that others had been unable to see.
When the common wisdom held that the Soviets would slow the development and deployment
of their intermediate-range missiles, Wolfowitz predicted, correctly, that the Soviets
meant to modernize and enhance them. When the conventional view held that Saddam
Hussein would not invade another Arab nation, Wolfowitz said that we shouldn't rule
out the possibility that he might cross the border into Kuwait-and a decade later
Saddam did just that.
In 2001, the Defense Department set up a small in-house operation called the Counter
Terrorism Evaluation Group, whose purpose, according to its creators, was not, as its
critics have charged, to cherry-pick raw intelligence in order to justify the invasion
of Iraq but to connect the dots between terrorist groups and countries that harbored
them. Wolfowitz had his aides run a software program called Analyst Notebook, which,
like a wiring diagram, could show links between disparate pieces of information. As a
result, all manner of putative links were made, in much the same way that Wolfowitz
connects the dots in his little parlor game. This is one way in which the connection
between terrorism and Iraq became a fixed idea.
After the session at Annabel's, Wolfowitz flew back to Germany. The next morning, he
began the day by visiting Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, near Ramstein Air Base,
which serves as the American military's hub hospital for an area stretching from
Europe to Southwest Asia. As Wolfowitz walked down the facility's long corridors, he
was accompanied by its commander, Colonel Rhonda Cornum. She is a physician, and a
pilot-in the Gulf War, she was captured and briefly held by the Iraqis-and she had an
agenda. The hospital was running at a high capacity, with some sections-orthopedics,
the psych ward-completely full. Since the start of the global war on terror, nineteen
thousand people had been admitted, many of them within twelve hours of being wounded
in Iraq. But because the Administration continues to categorize the war as a
"contingency" operation, she said, she was not able to add permanent staff. This meant
having temporary medical staff who were rotated in and out of the facility from other
military hospitals around the world, and it added stress to an inherently stressful
operation. Wolfowitz accepted her neatly prepared PowerPoint report, and handed it to
an aide.
Then he stepped into the room of a young sergeant named Jeron Johnson, from Bowman,
South Carolina. Johnson was connected to several I.V.s and monitors, but he was awake,
and alert. Wolfowitz walked to his bedside, leaned in, and asked, "What happened?" In
a quiet, raspy voice, Johnson, who had just re�nlisted before being wounded, told him
that he had been on a mission with his unit in Baghdad, when his convoy got hit. "It
was a V.B.I.E.D.," Johnson explained. An I.E.D., or improvised explosive device, is
the military's term for a roadside bomb, a favored weapon of the insurgents. Car bombs
are called vehicle-borne I.E.D.s.
"I saw this big burst," Johnson calmly recounted. "I said, O.K., I got hit. . . . I
called the guys over-I said, 'My leg's broke.'" Johnson suffered two broken legs, and
several lesser injuries.
Another soldier entered the room and approached Johnson's bedside. "I wanted to stop
by," he said. The soldier, slight and wiry, was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. A
long scar zigzagged down the right side of his neck, and much of his left arm was
missing, replaced by a prosthesis that ended in two curved steel hooks. He was Adam
Replogle, a twenty-four-year-old sergeant from Denver. He addressed Johnson directly:
"I got hit with an R.P.G. in the chest. I stopped by here on the way through. I wasn't
conscious like you, but I know what you're going through." Replogle had been a gunner
on an Abrams tank, and his unit came under attack by insurgents in Karbala in May. He
was evacuated to a field hospital, then to Landstuhl, where he was stabilized before
being sent to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in Washington. Wolfowitz, who regularly
visits the hospital, came to know him there. (When Wolfowitz is asked if he ever
wonders about the war's costs, he answers, "Every time I visit Walter Reed.") The Army
flew Replogle back to Germany for a reunion with his unit, which had recently returned
from Iraq, and he wanted to stop by Landstuhl to offer encouragement.
Replogle said, "You hear about Karbala? That's where I got hit. Where were you hit?"
"Baghdad."
"Sadr City?"
"No. Five South."
"We ran into some smack back in Sadr City a while ago," Replogle said. "They got a
lotta radicals out there. Al-Sadr keeps them around."
This aroused Sergeant Johnson. "It's amazing," he said. "You see these kids around
you, 'Mister, mister, give me water! Give me food!' And you dig around, tryin' to give
it to 'em, and you give it to 'em. And then, when you're done, they throw rocks at
you. You think, Hey, you little bastard!"
"They don't know how to act, man," Replogle replied. "They got their freedom, they
don't know how to act. You can't really blame 'em for it. It's frustrating over there.
I'll tell you one thing, man. Just maintain. You can feel a couple of different ways
about Iraq. You can feel bad. But when people ask you questions, man, you just tell
'em. They gotta know about the good things we did. We're not down there smackin'
people around."
Johnson said that he'd sometimes had difficulty convincing his own soldiers of the
utility of their mission. "There's this long street, we clean it up. Couple of weeks
later, it's trashed up again. I get a lotta guys that go, 'What are we doing out
here?' I say to 'em, 'We'll come back here, let 'em see our work.''Sarge, they'll tear
it up again.''Well, that's our job. Get the trash outta the street, clear the street,
make this place a little better.' But they don't understand."
Wolfowitz stood by Johnson's bed, listening. An aide handed him a copy of Time, the
issue that featured the American soldier as Person of the Year. Wolfowitz signed it to
a "true American hero," and then leaned over the hospital bed and looked Johnson in
the eye. "I'll tell you, no matter what people think about the war, ninety-eight per
cent of them love our soldiers," he said. "Period. It's really the truth. So don't
confuse the fight about the policy for the people. I'm sure we're going to win, and
one day people will feel about you guys the way we feel about the guys who won World
War Two. The world didn't look so great in 1945-46. It took a little while to get it
done. You're getting it done.''
And so it went, room by room, unit by unit. In one darkened room, a soldier with the
build of an offensive lineman lay unconscious, his bare feet extending from the sheet
covering his gurney. His wife stood at his side. When Wolfowitz entered the room, she
smiled and reported the latest update from the doctors. Then she began to talk about
her husband's long deployment, growing more emotional as she spoke. "Six months is one
thing," she said, "but a year, which usually becomes thirteen or fourteen months, is
just too much." As she began to cry, an aide closed the door, and Wolfowitz spent
several minutes with her privately.
Later that day, Wolfowitz flew by helicopter to Wiesbaden, for a ceremony marking the
return of the 1st Armored Division. It was a large and clamorous event, attended by,
among others, the American Ambassador to Germany, Daniel Coats; the Army Chief of
Staff, General Peter Schoomaker; and the V Corps commander, Lieutenant General Ricardo
Sanchez. Such homecomings are always cause for celebration, but the return of the 1st
Armored Division bore special significance. Old Ironsides, as the division calls
itself, is perhaps the most put-upon unit in the war. It had rolled into Iraq just
after the end of major combat operations, and was assigned the tough sectors of
Baghdad, among them Sadr City. When the division's yearlong deployment ended, last
spring, some of its units were packed and were waiting at the airfield for the flight
back to Germany. Then the division's commander, Major General Martin E. Dempsey, broke
the bad news: the sudden upsurge in fighting required more force, and the division's
deployment had been extended. Everyone knew what that meant: some of the men who had
made it through a year in Iraq now stood a chance of not returning home whole, or at
all. Adam Replogle was one of those soldiers.
Wolfowitz made one other stop that day. It was in W�rzburg, at the headquarters of the
1st Infantry Division (the Big Red One). The division's commander, Major General John
R. S. Batiste, had been Wolfowitz's military adviser at the Pentagon, and is currently
deployed in Iraq. Wolfowitz had visited Batiste in January, before the division moved
out, and the atmosphere had been pointedly gung ho. Batiste had adopted as the
division's motto a quote from F.D.R., which he felt captured the Big Red One's
attitude toward its coming mission in Iraq: "When you see a rattlesnake poised to
strike, you do not wait until it has struck before you crush him."
"The Secretary will love that quote," Wolfowitz had told Batiste.
Wolfowitz had seen Batiste again in June, this time in Iraq, at the division's forward
post, near Tikrit. The mood was more subdued then, and Batiste had adopted a new
motto, this one, as it happens, from Gerald Ford: "There is no way we can go forward
except together, and no way anybody can win except by serving the people's urgent
needs. We cannot stand still or slip backwards. We must go forward now together.'' The
words reflected the then emerging exit strategy, which was to set up an Iraqi
government and an Iraqi security force to fight the insurgency, allowing the Americans
to pull back and, eventually, to withdraw.
Now, in W�rzburg, the headquarters staff was reduced to a skeletal rear detachment.
Still, at a luncheon given in Wolfowitz's honor, the large ballroom was packed, filled
with the spouses and family members left behind. Following the custom of their tightly
insular culture, the women betrayed no indication of anxiety over their men
"down-range," as they refer to the battlefield of Iraq. They chatted gaily about the
food, catered by a favorite local restaurant, and talked about their children.
Wolfowitz showed them a video recorded by the First Lady, and they reacted with a
standing ovation. Then he took questions. One woman asked whether anything could be
done about the long deployments. The Pentagon is working on it, Wolfowitz assured her.
Finally, someone asked, How will this war be won? What will victory look like?
Wolfowitz responded that in January Iraq will hold elections. The resulting
transitional government will write a permanent constitution. That government will run
Iraq for a year, until elections at the end of 2005 produce a permanent, fully
independent government. By then, he said, American forces will have trained several
Iraqi Army divisions and, equally important, fifty or more battalions of the Iraqi
National Guard, the domestic stability force. Reaching down to the table and knocking
wood, Wolfowitz mentioned recent progress in regard to the National Guard, noting the
Iraqis' participation in the wresting of Samarra from the insurgents' control.
While the retaking of Samarra was indeed a welcome event, it may not be a wholly
accurate measure of the progress being made by Iraqi forces. The key Iraqi unit in
Samarra, the 36th Battalion, was the same one that in August prevailed in Najaf, and
it was the only Iraqi unit that did not flee during the Falluja uprising last spring.
The 36th Battalion, however, is exceptional. It is composed of fighting forces loyal
to various political factions, mostly Kurdish, and it was American policy for much of
the first year of the occupation to discourage the development of such units, for fear
of losing control of them.
Wolfowitz spoke of the September visit to Washington by the interim Iraqi Prime
Minister, Ayad Allawi. He quoted at length from Allawi's optimistic speech to a joint
session of Congress, which Wolfowitz said had been characterized by some members of
Congress as one of the best speeches ever delivered on the floor of the House.
Wolfowitz did not discuss a meeting between Allawi and President Bush during that
visit, in which the Iraqi Prime Minister had been less optimistic. Allawi had spoken
to the President about the conundrum facing him and the coalition: the insurgency
required forceful action, but any forceful action by coalition troops would underline
the negative impression of an occupation, thus fuelling the insurgency. Allawi asked
the President to provide more training of Iraqi troops and more equipment.
The day after Wolfowitz left Washington on this trip, Allawi had sent, via the
American Embassy, a letter to Bush. In it, he again spoke insistently about the
situation in Iraq on the ground. The American training program, he said, was fine, but
it was proceeding too slowly; the bulk of trained and equipped Iraqi forces would not
be ready until well after the January elections, Allawi said, "which is simply too
late." Allawi said that he and the coalition needed an expanded plan for Iraqi forces,
"to be implemented now." He said that Iraq had to make a visible and effective show of
force, and reminded Bush of what he had told him in Washington-that Iraq needed at
least two trained and equipped Iraqi mechanized divisions. It was a huge request.
American commanders have been hesitant to provide Iraqis with tanks, arguing that the
Iraqis are not yet ready for them. Wolfowitz, noting that American forces are glad to
have the armored-tank protection for themselves, has said that he thinks the Iraqis
will get at least a mechanized brigade fairly soon.
In his letter, Allawi asked Bush to convene a summit this month in Baghdad, with an
American delegation headed by Wolfowitz. Such a high-profile meeting just weeks before
the American election was unlikely, and the proposal may simply have been Allawi's way
of prodding the Administration. In any case, he was visited in Baghdad the following
week by Donald Rumsfeld, who was in the region for a meeting with his commanders.
After leaving Iraq, Rumsfeld travelled to Romania for a NATO meeting. Discussing
Allawi's request for tanks, he proposed a characteristically Rumsfeldian solution. The
new members of nato-those countries which Rumsfeld once called the "new Europe"-had
been members of the old Warsaw Pact, which had a surplus of Soviet weapons. One way
they could help, Rumsfeld suggested, was by supplying their Soviet-era tanks to the
fledgling Iraqi Army.
The big miscalculation underlying the American-led intervention in Iraq was that the
enemy would recognize defeat, and submit. When the Administration was faced with an
insurgency, a new calculation-one that was advocated by Wolfowitz-was made: putting an
Iraqi imprimatur on the mission would defuse the insurgency. The first step was the
hastened transfer of sovereignty, last June. Yet the insurgency rages on, and Allawi
worries about appearing to be an American puppet. Although he assured President Bush
in his letter that he had "absolutely no intention" of changing his convictions or
policies, he warned, "I am concerned by the concerted effort by some Iraqis and
foreigners to paint my government as too close to the US and her allies." He went on,
"This is likely to get worse as elections approach, and makes it harder to rebuild
political unity and to isolate the insurgents." Now the Bush war policy depends upon a
final calculation-that an Iraqi security force can be made strong enough, soon enough,
to allow the mostly American multinational force to recede.
Wolfowitz seems more confident about this prospect than Allawi does. Speaking in
Germany to the spouses of the 1st Infantry Division's soldiers, Wolfowitz said, "I
think you're going to see a major change over the course of the next six months or a
year." He said he hoped that progress with the Iraqi force might go even faster than
expected. "At the moment, we're just planning for the worst," he said. Then he added,
"But a lot of good should happen this coming year
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