However, it seems the neoconservative architect of the Iraq war does have a beating heart — for a girlfriend who is causing ructions at the World Bank, Wolfowitz’s next posting if President George W Bush’s nomination prevails over European howls of distress.
She is Shaha Ali Riza, an Arab feminist who confounds portrayals of Wolfowitz as a leader of a “Zionist conspiracy” of Jewish neoconservatives in Washington. More to the point, she works at the World Bank, where staff are muttering mutinously at the ethical implications of their next president conducting a romantic relationship with an employee.
The man Bush calls “Wolfie”, a former academic better known for his cerebral skills than his amorous adventures, has discreetly been walking out with Riza, an Oxford-educated British citizen who was born in Tunisia, grew up in Saudi Arabia and works as the bank’s senior gender co-ordinator for the Middle East and north Africa. She not only shares Wolfowitz’s passion for spreading democracy in the Arab world, but is said to have reinforced his determination to remove Saddam Hussein’s oppressive regime.
Both are divorced (Wolfowitz has three grown-up children and Riza has an 18-year-old son), but World Bank regulations forbid couples to work on the staff if one reports directly to the other — an unlikely eventuality in their case. Through a spokesman, Wolfowitz stated enigmatically: “If a personal relationship presents a potential conflict of interest, I will comply with bank policies to resolve the issue.”
To Wolfowitz’s critics, Riza is a perplexing counterweight to his sister Laura, a biologist who lives in Israel and is married to an Israeli, lending weight to suspicions that Wolfowitz is pursuing an agenda hostile to Arab regimes. In fact, she is reported to be a moderate with little enthusiasm for hardline Israeli policies. To confuse matters further, her hawkish brother serves a fiercely Republican administration but is a registered Democrat.
The Riza question may not arise if Europeans have their way. With 30% of votes on the World Bank’s board, they could try to scupper Wolfowitz’s nomination, even if America traditionally selects the president. It is the second time this month that Bush has risked a rift with allies over an important appointment, having named John Bolton, a prominent State Department toughie, as ambassador to the United Nations.
France digested Wolfowitz’s nomination like a bad oyster. Germany’s development minister said the “enthusiasm in old Europe is not exactly overwhelming”. Nobody denies that Wolfowitz is a clever man with a record of shaking up fusty institutions, which is what the World Bank needs. He has spent 24 years in government service under six presidents. He is credited with improving relations with China and supporting the peaceful transition to democracy in the Philippines before being posted as US ambassador to Indonesia, where he worked for political reform. He said last week that his recent post-tsunami visit to Indonesia played a significant role in attracting him to the World Bank job.
As an academic he taught political science at Yale and more recently served as dean and professor of international studies at Johns Hopkins University.
One of the immediate concerns is that a World Bank headed by the intellectual high priest of “the Vulcans”, Bush’s security advisers, would tarnish aid with US political goals. Addressing such fears, Wolfowitz has promised to focus on economics, not politics.
His softly spoken and engaging manner can disarm sceptics. A journalist who attended one of his recent briefings recalls: “Unlike other neocons, who are rough and raucous, he’s not abrasive. In person he’s a charming figure who exudes a tortured intellectual sincerity.”
Calm and sophisticated, he is an intensely private man. Yet on one wall of his Pentagon office is a painting of an apparently idyllic rural scene. Closer scrutiny reveals bodies strewn on the grass. It is Antietam, a civil war battlefield where more Americans lost their lives than on any other day in history. “It’s to remind me what we’re trying to prevent,” he once remarked.
But for some, Wolfowitz will always wear the horns and forked tail of the zealot who has urged America to use its ultimate weapons to deter aggressors. Believing that toppling Saddam would set off a domino effect of democracy across the Middle East, he is blamed for ignoring military warnings that the US needed more troops on the ground in Iraq and naively believing they would be hailed as liberators.
In 1992 he wrote a blueprint to “set the nation’s direction for the next century” that was so controversial that Dick Cheney, then defence secretary under President George Bush Sr, was ordered to rewrite it. However, it still informs the present administration’s policy. Entitled Defence Planning Guidance, it charged the Pentagon with establishing and protecting “a new order” under supreme American authority.
The US, Wolfowitz prescribed, should be sure of “deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role”, including Japan and Germany. He envisaged the use of nuclear, biological and chemical weaponry pre-emptively, “even in conflicts that do not directly engage US interests”.
In 1997 Wolfowitz and colleagues including Cheney, now vice-president, and Richard Perle, dubbed “the Prince of Darkness” when he was Ronald Reagan’s assistant secretary of defence, founded a think tank called Project for a New American Century. In a 2000 document, the group speculated that “some catastrophic and catalysing event, like a new Pearl Harbor” was needed to assure US global power.
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, Wolfowitz urged the targeting of Saddam’s regime as the first stage of a new conflict. He was overruled when Bush decided to focus on Afghanistan. Iraq had been in Wolfowitz’s sights since Jimmy Carter’s presidency, when he wrote a paper warning of the country’s pernicious influence. He also urged Bill Clinton to get rid of Saddam.
He owes much of his political creed to his childhood. His father Jacob, an eminent Polish mathematician, emigrated from Warsaw to New York in 1920. The loss of relatives in the Holocaust taught Wolfowitz, born in December 1943, that appeasement was not an option.
At school he assumed he would emulate his father’s career but, after gaining a maths degree from Cornell University, he decided he preferred the world of international affairs and pursed a PhD in political science at the University of Chicago.
There he fell under the spell of Albert Wohlstetter, a military thinker who instilled in Wolfowitz the belief that sophisticated arms technology was the key to American supremacy. Wohlstetter and his nuclear theories became the supposed model for Dr Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s film, while Wolfowitz himself inspired a character in Saul Bellow’s novel Ravelstein.
At Cornell Wolfowitz had met Clare Selgin, who later became a renowned scholar on Indonesian anthropology. They married in 1968 and divorced in 2002.
While he is highly regarded in the US, even there questions have been raised about a military strategist with no financial experience heading the World Bank. To date, America has excluded the bank from the reconstruction process in Iraq, a decision in which Wolfowitz was probably involved. Ironically, his credibility in the new job is likely to depend on his ability to introduce the bank to that process.
But as a military strategist, “Wolfie” is aware of the maxim that what goes around, comes around.
