An Architect of War Draws Blueprint for Peace

When Baghdad fell, Paul D. Wolfowitz was looking ahead, already well into executing a plan for postwar Iraq.

Credited as one of the chief intellectual architects -- a term he dislikes -- of removing the Iraqi regime, Wolfowitz had much at stake in the war, but more in peace.

By toppling Saddam Hussein, the Pentagon’s No. 2 official said in a series of interviews with The Times before and during the war, the United States was not seeking to create a “domino effect” that would topple the kings of the Arab nations on the Persian Gulf, but a “demonstration effect” -- even an “inspirational effect” -- that would be felt by citizens as far away as Morocco.

Wolfowitz sees the military conquest of Iraq as a lesson to regimes that threaten U.S. interests and envisions democratizing Iraq as a model for an undemocratic Arab world.

Although he insists that the U.S. is not interested in a long-term occupation of Iraq, Wolfowitz sees the possibility of putting U.S. bases in what he is convinced will be a newly friendly Persian Gulf nation. He argues that would allow the number of troops to shrink to fewer than before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

“The real point is that removing this regime will be so liberating for the United States in the Persian Gulf,” he said. “Our whole footprint can be much lighter without an Iraqi threat.”

The audacity of the vision has provoked criticism at home and abroad, and debate even within the administration.

“Iraq is an underdeveloped country with severe ethnic tensions and contested borders,” said Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va., public policy group. “So Wolfowitz’s aspiration for Iraq is much to be desired, but far from assured.”

Administration officials are looking north for a model for postwar Iraq, to an autonomous Kurdish territory that Wolfowitz describes as the best example of a transition from a military occupation in 15 years. The establishment of Kurdistan was overseen by U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the man now in charge of creating an interim government in post-Hussein Iraq. Garner and his team established the Kurdish enclave in six months after the Gulf War, backed by less than one division of U.S. Army light infantry.

Wolfowitz insists that his vision of a postwar Iraq, a postwar Middle East and his world view have been widely misunderstood by critics who cast him as one of the administration’s leading hawks.

“The problems in Iraq are huge, and I’m sometimes perceived as being this wild-eyed optimist. It’s only in comparison to people who say it’s a hopeless basket case and nothing good could ever happen,” Wolfowitz, 59, said over coffee at the Georgetown Four Seasons before the war.

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Romania Cited

Outside, sign-toting protesters passed by the window after an antiwar rally that drew 10,000 to the National Mall. “I don’t see why the Iraqis can’t do as well as the Romanians have done. That’s not wild-eyed optimism,” Wolfowitz said.

Wolfowitz often cites Romania because it was a home-grown dictatorship under Nicolae Ceausescu. Unlike in Iraq, the Romanian dictator was overthrown by his own people. With its oil wealth and a comparatively well-educated citizenry, Iraq may offer more promise than Romania, he added.

Wolfowitz has consulted with the Czech foreign minister and others in “New Europe” on destroying the organs of party dictatorship -- what would be “de-Baathification” -- in Iraq.

Those nations, he said, know how to turn a Stalinist economy into a free-market system, how to destroy the apparatus of the state secret police, and how to decide what level of complicity in the preceding repressive regime should disqualify officials from serving in the new government. Americans with no experience in such matters, by contrast, “can get played for suckers sometimes,” Wolfowitz said.

There is a symmetry to Wolfowitz looking to Eastern Europe for a model. His father, statistician Jacob Wolfowitz, fled Poland in 1920 at the age of 10 to escape anti-Semitism and repression, an experience that instilled in his son an abhorrence for “how horrible repressive regimes can be,” said a close relative, who asked not to be named.

The makeup of the interim government remains an open question. A planeload of Iraqi exiles -- “free Iraqis” in Pentagon parlance -- has landed in Iraq, a group dominated by Shiite Muslims opposed to Hussein’s Sunni regime. Leading the group is Ahmad Chalabi, head of the London-based Iraqi National Congress. Wolfowitz, who disputes the widely held view that he is one of Chalabi’s staunchest supporters in the administration, said the controversial businessman will not be given the same presumptive leadership status U.S. officials accorded to Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan.

“Personally, I think that Chalabi is a talented guy who seems to share our objectives about Iraq, which is an important thing. But our objectives are democracy, which means you don’t go around anointing the next leader of Iraq,” Wolfowitz said. “The Afghan model does not apply in Iraq.”

Critics note that rebuilding Iraq, with its ethnic, religious and tribal divisions, will be far more dangerous and complex than rebuilding the homogenous, industrialized German and Japanese nations that the U.S. defeated in World War II. Wolfowitz and his fellow postwar government planners agree that Iraq is not like Germany or Japan, but neither is it like Kosovo, a non-state; Afghanistan, a failed state; or East Timor, a new state.

“There’s nothing that’s happening now that wasn’t known to us, because we had worked over these papers, and we killed a lot of trees discussing these,” Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of State who has been both Wolfowitz’s political ally and bureaucratic rival, said in an interview.

Administration officials describe Wolfowitz as an unusually influential deputy secretary. At a Camp David summit immediately after Sept. 11, Wolfowitz, in an informal conversation, was making the case for taking the war on terrorism to Iraq when President Bush overheard and chided Wolfowitz to speak up.

The president emerged from that Camp David retreat ordering up military options for Iraq, as suggested by Wolfowitz and others. Despite reports that Wolfowitz was isolated in his view, he and another official at the summit insist that the only disagreement was whether to strike Afghanistan or Iraq first.

“He gets a very good hearing because he speaks in such reasonable and informed tones,” Armitage said.

As the war unfolded, Wolfowitz became a highly visible spokesman for the administration, assessing allied war gains. He generally joins Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in daily visits to Bush’s Oval Office, and is in frequent phone contact with Garner. When Rumsfeld cannot preside over meetings of Pentagon brass in the conference room that bridges their offices, Wolfowitz takes his seat.

Colleagues and Pentagon officials describe Wolfowitz as an intellectual who offers the philosophical underpinnings for administration policy. A senior White House official described Wolfowitz’s partnership with Rumsfeld as unprecedented in its division of power.

Rebutting critics of the war who have warned that it may trigger a new wave of terrorist attacks on Americans and destabilize the region, Wolfowitz has focused on what he calls the costs of not acting.

He argues that there is a direct line between the decade-long effort to contain Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by Al Qaeda.

The effort to contain Hussein after the Gulf War left thousands of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. Their presence, Wolfowitz said, is “one of Osama bin Laden’s principal recruiting devices.” Bin Laden’s 1998 fatwa, or religious decree, calling for the killing of Americans, Wolfowitz notes, cites the presence of “crusader forces” -- U.S. troops -- in the Muslim holy land of Saudi Arabia, and U.S. bombing runs on Iraq, as reasons for jihad -- or holy war -- against the United States.

“I don’t think it’s an extreme argument .... We’re bombing an Arab country on a weekly basis. We’re accused of killing Iraqi children with the sanctions. And we have troops occupying the holiest land of the Muslim world,” Wolfowitz said. Without Hussein, “none of that would be necessary.”

If Iraq cannot stand as a beacon for a new wave of Arab democracies, it can pose a lesson to other nations, such as neighboring Syria, which Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz have accused of smuggling military equipment to Iraq, as well as Iran and North Korea.

“I would like Iraq to be a model of success,” he said. Hussein “can also be a wonderful model of failure. If Saddam pays the price he deserves to for his behavior, believe me, it will have an effect throughout the world. The fall of the Taliban had an effect you could almost measure” in other countries.

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Nuance on Israel

Although he is seen as a pro-Israel hawk, Wolfowitz insists that his position is more nuanced because he has supported Israel relinquishing some Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In his youth, he stood in the crowd on the National Mall when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech. Later, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s historic overture to Israel inspired Wolfowitz to spend three years studying Arabic language tapes during his daily commute to the Pentagon. He wanted to understand Sadat’s speech in its original language.

Iraq, Wolfowitz said, , was not redeemable by peaceful means. As with Hitler in World War II, Hussein could not be contained for long, he said, and the options were running out.

In North Korea, by contrast, Wolfowitz envisions economic pressure to choke the regime’s ability to cash in on its missiles and other weaponry. In Iran, where a newly elected reformist government has not been seated, he sees the United States exerting political pressure.

“I think with Iraq, we have clear military options,” he said a few days before the war began. “We don’t have economic ones because the country floats on a sea of oil. And we don’t have real political ones because the repression is so absolute.”