Monday, April 16, 2007

Good-bye Wolfowitz: A Retrospective


Paul Wolfowitz carries the strongest of the worst – a sanctimonious conservative worldview couched in the wonderful terms of peace and democracy accompanying the hawkish pre-emptive nuclear capability that he is author of, both directed at the preservation of Israel.

By Jim Miles
Special to PalestineChronicle.com

"One of the most influential figures in the current American government is Paul Wolfowitz with a history that takes him back more than a generation to the Reagan era and the renewed militarism of the United States and its emphasis on nuclear armaments. Wolfowitz is a Jewish neocon, with strong ties to the Israeli government and the Jewish lobby in America. He is a student of Wohlstetter, one of the early academic formulaters of a policy supporting the use of nuclear weapons in an increasingly antagonistic and imperative political foreign policy. Like most of the other neocons who are adamant war hawks, he has not seen any active service, nor did he have to invent any excuses to avoid it. That is one of the fuller ironies of the current crop of American militarists – perhaps if they had actually suffered through the horrors of warfare they might not be so fond of promulgating it. More so, given their supposed intellect, it is an intellect blinded by narrow egotism and ignorant hubris that their way is the only way. Wolfowitz appears to fit this description remarkably well.......

After the first Iraq war, Wolfowitz penned a Defence Planning Guide (1992) that denied other nations the aspirations to “protect their legitimate interests” and to “discourage them from challenging our leadership” by maintaining the “mechanisms for deterring poptential competitiros from even aspiring” to a larger role.[38] Wolfowitz had been “indiscreet” but his message carried through to the younger Bush regime.

Combined with the rationalizing intellect for the irrational use of nuclear weapons, Wolfowitz carries his Jewish heritage, and his acknowledged interest in a strong Jewish state. In a pro-Israeli rally speech, Wolfowitz closed by praying, “May God bless America, may God bless Israel, and may God bless all the peacemakers in the world.”[39]. Too many ironies and hypocrisies abound in all these characters about their professions for peace and their advocacy of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear) and terror (missiles and bombs) that they hardly need to be pointed out. While he is “circumspect in public….it is clear that at bottom Israel is a major interest and may be the principal reason for his near obsession with the effort…to dump Saddam Hussein, remake the Iraqi government in an American image and then further redraw the Middle East by accomplishing the same goals in Syria, Iran and perhaps other countries.”......."

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