IN APRIL 2002, as the Palestinian intifada raged on the West Bank, Paul Wolfowitz addressed a large crowd of pro-Israel demonstrators on Capitol Hill in Washington.

The Deputy Defence Secretary gave a characteristically thoughtful speech, condemning the violence that was claiming the lives of hundreds of Israelis, but also pleading for sympathy with the plight of the Palestinian people.

It should not be forgotten that “innocent Palestinians are suffering and dying as well”, he told his audience. For his compassion and honesty, Mr Wolfowitz was rewarded with boos by the crowd and had to stop speaking several times.

A few months earlier, in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Mr Wolfowitz had been one of a small group of advisers gathered for a crisis meeting with President Bush at Camp David. As the conversation focused on measures the US should take to attack al-Qaeda and the Taleban in Afghanistan, Mr Wolfowitz pushed hard to bring the discussion around to Iraq. Almost alone among the senior advisers, Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy argued that a wider war in the Middle East was now essential to destroy terrorism and eliminate the threat from weapons of mass destruction.

These two episodes help to capture a little of the complexity of the man nominated this week by the Bush Administration to head the World Bank. Few political figures have been as comprehensively demonised as Paul Wolfowitz. To read the general critique popular in the European media, he is a cross between Joseph Goebbels and Rasputin, a shadowy figure secretly pulling the levers of US policy, while at the same time leading a vast propaganda machine to justify American aggression.

He is caricatured as the intellectual godfather of the neoconservatives, the small cabal of hard-right ideologues who have supposedly taken over the US Government and subverted it to their own, permanent-war, anti-Arab, anti-European, pro-Israel, objectives.

Those few critics who do not regard him as the incarnation of evil, generally dismiss him as a dreamy naif, a man wedded to the palpably fantastic notion that democracy can take hold anywhere in the world if only it is given a little help by US power.

Through this barrage of misinformation the world gets occasional glimpses of the true Paul Wolfowitz, a softly-spoken academic, given to careful deliberation over the merits of a policy debate. He is a deeply cultured man with a firm and sometimes overly romantic belief in the centrality of human freedom as the defining theme of foreign policy. He has a deep fascination with the Muslim world and has for some time been quietly dating a Tunisian-born Arab woman, who, as it happens, works for the World Bank.

He was born, 61 years ago, into an academic family. His father was a mathematician and as a student he assumed that he would follow the paternal route into the academic world of mathematical theory. But in his early twenties he realised that it was international affairs that attracted him and at the University of Chicago he became intrigued by the neoconservative ideas of philosophers such as Leo Strauss and Albert Wohlstetter, who argued for a moral, freedom-based approach to foreign policy.

In the 1980s he was a member of the Reagan Administration, as senior policymaker for East Asian affairs and then as the Ambassador to Indonesia.

It was in the 1990s that he became strongly associated with the aggressive use of US policy to promote freedom. He argued that the US should topple Saddam Hussein, and suggested that regime change in Iraq could lead to a broader movement towards change in a politically and economically stagnant Middle East. At the World Bank he can be expected to put democracy promotion high on the agenda, though he has also suggested that economic assistance should not be conditional on such progress.

And the charge that he will take a unilateralist line is probably misplaced, if only because, under the bank’s constitution, any change in direction requires widespread support. Even his friends acknowledge that Mr Wolfowitz has been guilty of an overly theoretical approach to policy-making. He has struggled to execute some of his responsibilities in the Pentagon bureaucracy. But few who know him recognise the caricature of the cold-eyed, closed-minded ideologue of myth.

Explore World News

• World Agenda

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Afghanistan News

• Asia News

• Africa News

• Ireland News

Times Recommends

• No apology for Germany’s own Nazi victims
• Intricate web of fear and hope tying down deal
• Victims remembered a year after Mumbai attacks