Hawkish Defense Aide Doesn’t Bend on Anti-Terrorism Stance

He is the staunchest hawk in the war room, the Bush administration insider who insists the war on terrorism must target not just Osama bin Laden, but Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

With more U.S. firepower amassed in the Mideast than any time since the Persian Gulf War, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has made no secret of his push to use the military buildup to launch a broader war against the Iraqi leader.

So far, with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other ranking administration officials conveying a more restrained public message, Wolfowitz’s argument seems in the minority. But even as the United States focuses on building a coalition that would include a number of nations opposed to an assault on Iraq, the hard-line stance by the No. 2 man at the Pentagon isn’t necessarily being ignored.

“Rumsfeld has decided not to go after Iraq just now,” one administration official said. “But he hasn’t given up on it.”

Wolfowitz does not like to lose.

Called More Influential Than Most Aides

From his youth as the son of a prominent mathematician and the star student of neoconservative guru Allan Bloom to his current job as what he has called the “alter ego” of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, 57, has shown himself to be savvy, disciplined and eminently capable of making himself heard.

“There is no doubt that today [Wolfowitz] is exceedingly influential on policy matters, much more influential than the second man at the Pentagon normally is,” said Ted Warner, a former assistant secretary of Defense.

Warner added: “At least since the early ‘90s, he’s been the guy arguing for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.”

Such tenacity is a trademark of Wolfowitz. His friends say that once he makes up his mind to pursue something, he rarely gives up.

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Wolfowitz was raised in Ithaca, N.Y., where his father was a professor at Cornell University. Initially he followed in the family footsteps, studying math and chemistry at the school. But in the middle of his senior year, he abruptly concluded that mathematics was too abstract.

He became entranced with the world of politics and policymaking, and enrolled in the master’s program in political science and economics at the University of Chicago.

There, Wolfowitz became a protege of Albert Wohlstetter, one of the pioneers in Cold War strategic thinking, and of Bloom, the critic and political thinker whose conservative, anti-relativist ideas eventually would spark a national controversy with the publication in 1987 of his book, “The Closing of the American Mind.”

In 1970, Wolfowitz landed a prestigious teaching post at Yale. By then, he had attracted the attention of a network of conservative thinkers in Washington who were laying the groundwork for a revolt against Henry A. Kissinger’s then-dominant foreign policy of detente--the pursuit of warmer relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The group, which included Richard N. Perle and Kenneth Adelman, persuaded Wolfowitz to come to Washington. He served first in the government’s Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. He later served as assistant secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs and as ambassador to Indonesia during the Reagan administration, before joining the first Bush administration as undersecretary of Defense for policy.

Over the years, Wolfowitz has become the undisputed leader of a close-knit group of defense intellectuals who have offered an increasingly trenchant critique of liberal, humanitarian-based foreign policy.

“When you talk to him, he always asks why. He always asks for an explanation, he always challenges your assumptions, and his own,” said Fred C. Ikle, a fellow conservative who headed the arms control agency when Wolfowitz worked there.

Wolfowitz has made no secret among friends of his ambition to hold Cabinet rank. Indeed, after advising George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign on national security matters, he was mentioned as a leading candidate for Defense secretary.

Wolfowitz’s ambitions--and his standing in conservative intellectual circles--are indicated in Saul Bellow’s recent novel, “Ravelstein,” whose protagonist is a thinly disguised Bloom. There also is a character inspired by Wolfowitz--a gifted Pentagon official named Philip Gorman who occasionally phones Abe Ravelstein with inside information.

“It’s only a matter of time before Phil Gorman has Cabinet rank, and a damned good thing for the country,” Ravelstein says at one point.

While the job of deputy Defense secretary traditionally is mostly managerial, Wolfowitz concerns himself far more with policy than his predecessors. In the spring, when the Pentagon’s focus was on Rumsfeld’s promise to “transform” the military, Wolfowitz was put in charge of the effort. Since the Sept. 11 attacks put the department on a wartime footing, he has been a constant figure in White House meetings on how to fight the war against terrorists.

“You want to be as close to the secretary’s thinking as you can get and to some extent substitutable” for him, he said recently.

Fulfills Duties to Country, Children

The pace of Wolfowitz’s life these days is unrelenting. Reporting to his cavernous outer-ring office in the Pentagon a few steps from Rumsfeld’s early in the morning, he rarely leaves until late at night. He did not take a single day off following surgery on his leg this summer. He navigated the Pentagon’s long hallways on crutches, his leg encased in a massive cast, or in a motorized cart.

When Wolfowitz was dispatched to Naples, Italy, in September for a meeting of NATO defense ministers, he squeezed the trip into two days, making it back in time to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur with his two children (he is divorced).

“He has a sort of a somber and urgent mien, a gravitas,” Warner said. “You expect to see him in wingtip shoes. You can’t quite imagine him on the beach or in Bermuda shorts. He has always looked like he belonged in a pinstripe suit.”

The level of influence Wolfowitz enjoys derives at least in part from the deep bonds he forged with Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney over the years. In the administration of Bush’s father, he was a key aide and advisor to then-Defense Secretary Cheney during the Gulf War. And he worked twice for Rumsfeld in the last five years--as foreign policy strategist when Rumsfeld took charge of Bob Dole’s presidential campaign in 1996 and as a member of the Rumsfeld Commission, which warned in 1998 that the United States was increasingly vulnerable to attack by long-range ballistic missiles.

Feels He Failed at Mission in ’91

By all accounts, Wolfowitz has never been able to shake the idea that he and the first Bush administration failed in 1991 by not toppling Hussein and his regime. He has said that he was not high enough in the pecking order to overcome those who disagreed, such as Powell. Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and others argued that such a push would fracture the fragile Gulf War coalition.

Since then, Wolfowitz has continued to insist at every opportunity that the United States should finish the job. “Let’s be clear. Toppling Saddam is the only outcome that can satisfy the vital U.S. interest in a stable and secure Gulf region,” Wolfowitz wrote in a Dec. 7, 1998, article in the New Republic.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, Wolfowitz’s stance has only hardened. In one White House meeting after another, he has fought to strike against not only the Bin Laden network in Afghanistan, but also other suspected terrorist bases in Iraq and Lebanon, administration officials said.

As the U.S. response to the terrorist attacks plays out, Wolfowitz will be a key player. But it remains to be seen whether he will prevail in his push for a broader war, or perhaps overplay his hand.

“I think the metaphor of draining the swamp applies,” Wolfowitz told reporters last week. “You can work as hard as you can to find as many snakes as possible, but if you can dry up the place where they live, that’s even more effective than trying to do both.”