Worldmaking (79 page)

Working alongside Condoleezza Rice, Wolfowitz became one of Bush's two principal foreign-policy advisers throughout the primaries and the campaign. Yet it was Rice, not Wolfowitz, who forged a closer bond with Bush. According to James Mann, Bush had distrusted bona fide intellectuals since his raucous undergraduate days at Yale (which made Paul Nitze's Harvard experience appear monastic in comparison). Condoleezza Rice was an intellectual, sure, but she could talk baseball, football, and basketball. She had the knack of making Bush feel at ease, which helped her immensely when it came to taking Bush through a crash course in international relations. Rice was close to Bush's father and viewed the arch-realist Brent Scowcroft as her principal mentor. Her diplomatic worldview was quite different from Wolfowitz's, meaning her ascendancy had clear implications for the candidate's core foreign-policy message—which subsequently tended toward caution, not idealism. During the second presidential debate with Al Gore, Bush chided his opponent for his Wilsonianism. “The vice president and I have a disagreement about the use of troops,” Bush said. “He believes in nation building. I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders. I believe the role of the military is to fight and win war … I don't want to try to put our troops in all places at all times. I don't want to be the world's policeman.”
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This was discouraging to Wolfowitz, needless to say. The policies he liked—such as Bush's dedication to building an effective national missile defense program and a willingness to abandon the 1972 ABM treaty—were being drowned out by realist mood music conducted by the multitalented Rice (who was a concert pianist as well as an academic). In the general election of 2000, Al Gore won a majority of the popular vote but eventually lost due to the vagaries of the electoral college and the nation's judicial system. In
Bush v.
Gore
, the Supreme Court halted a protracted recount that was taking place in Florida, caused by myriad voting irregularities, and declared Bush the winner by a narrow majority of 271 to 266 electoral votes. It was one of the most controversial episodes in America's modern political history. Bush was president, but he lacked the legitimacy that accompanied a clear victory at the polls. When one combines this fact with Bush's openly expressed dedication to what he described as “compassionate conservatism,” one might have expected Bush 43 to be a retread of Bush 41—with added humility and a renewed dedication to bipartisanship.

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Wolfowitz's service to the Bush administration began inauspiciously when he failed to land the job he coveted: secretary of defense. His reputation as an original thinker and hopeless administrator endured. One high-ranking colleague observed, “Paul is a brilliant guy, but when you went down to his office … you couldn't even find Paul, the papers were piled so high.”
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Working habits like these more or less precluded his running a behemoth like the Pentagon. So Wolfowitz instead lobbied for what he viewed as the next best alternative, deputy secretary of state. This time Colin Powell, whom Bush had announced as his choice for secretary of state on December 16, 2000, intervened to block his path. Powell had described Cheney and Wolfowitz in his memoir as “right-wing nuts.”
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This was evidently a working relationship that never stood much of a chance, though Powell later described their incompatibility more judiciously in observing that they were not “ideologically in gear.”
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So Wolfowitz was eventually appointed to serve as deputy secretary of defense under Donald Rumsfeld—who was not entirely thrilled himself:

I knew Wolfowitz would be an unusual pick. He did not have an industry background or deep management experience traditional for successful deputy secretaries of defense. I worried that a man with such an inquisitive, fine mind and strong policy instincts might not take well to many of the crucial but often mundane managerial duties—making the hundreds of nonpolicy related decisions—that would come with the deputy post.
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It is no challenge to comprehend Rumsfeld's unease. Wolfowitz was an ambitious thinker driven by a grand Wilsonian vision of what American power might achieve if deployed in an appropriately ambitious manner. Rumsfeld was a hard-hitter with a narrower conception of what his nation owed the world. But in spite of their differences, they became a potent combination. Colin Powell certainly came to regret their coming together. Perhaps he should have welcomed Wolfowitz to State and kept his ideological enemy close.

The Senate confirmed Wolfowitz's appointment unanimously after an illuminating hearing in which he clearly established his priorities. On the Middle East, he observed that the “whole region would be a safer place, Iraq would be a much more successful country, and the American national interest would benefit greatly if there were a change of regime in Iraq.”
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He quickly pushed the Joint Chiefs of Staff on how the United States might assist opposition groups in Iraq. As Saddam Hussein had ordered the draining of Iraq's southern marshes to deny Shiite rebels a safe haven, Wolfowitz asked the military brass if air strikes could destroy dams to flood the region and re-create them. Lawyers in the Pentagon stymied Wolfowitz's proposal as being inconsistent with “the rules of war.” Wolfowitz countered that reinstating a sanctuary for Saddam's opponents was quite clearly a “humane” option.
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Wolfowitz appointed Douglas Feith, whose views on Iraq closely mirrored his own, as his deputy. Feith was even less organized than Wolfowitz, according to his critics, and was a believer in the necessity of deposing Saddam Hussein come what may—to the frustration of many in the military. General Tommy Franks, commander of the United States Central Command, memorably described Feith as “the stupidest fucking guy on the planet.”
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Colin Powell was more temperate in his language but, like Franks, he did not share Wolfowitz and Feith's obsession with Saddam Hussein. During his own confirmation hearings, Powell had observed that the sanctions against Iraq should be strengthened but a change of regime was not essential: “As long as we are able to control the major source of money going into Iraq, we can keep them in the rather broken condition that they are in now. Mr. Saddam Hussein can put a hat on his head and shoot a rifle in the air at an Army Day parade, but it is fundamentally a broken, weak country … His only tool, the only thing he can scare us with are those weapons of mass destruction, and we have to hold him to account.”
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Powell was clear that this would be achieved through enhanced sanctions and the return of UN weapons inspectors. State and Defense were not on the same page. They were not even reading the same book.

Wolfowitz was broadly impressed by the first eight months of the Bush presidency. Bush withdrew the United States from the 1972 ABM treaty and moved forward with the development of a national missile defense program, resurrecting Reagan-era hopes of invulnerability to missile attack. He immediately repudiated Clinton's engagement policy and unveiled a hard line toward North Korea, undermining Seoul's so-called sunshine policy of courting Pyongyang with the prospect of greater economic interaction. On a personal level, Wolfowitz grew ever more admiring of Bush's simple, direct style. During a discussion about the relative merits of economic interests—focused engagement versus principled opposition to an authoritarian regime, Wolfowitz recalled (although he did not disclose the identity of the nations under discussion) that Bush interjected with real moral clarity: “We're talking about them as though they were members of the Chevy Chase Country Club. What are they really like?… How brutal are these people?”
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In Wolfowitz's opinion, Bush's words brought to mind Reagan at his best.

But there was an unevenness in implementation similar to Reagan's when it came to human rights. Bush declined to condemn Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, or Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf, or indeed China's leadership for their many human rights deficiencies. Bush's favorable snap appraisal of Russia's increasingly hard-line president, Vladimir Putin—“I looked the man in his eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy … I was able to get a sense of his soul”—appeared alarmingly naïve to close observers of Putin and Russia.
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Bush also contravened one of the central tenets of the 1992 DPG when he privileged a $1.2 trillion tax cut ahead of increased defense spending. William Kristol's
The Weekly Standard
, the most influential conservative weekly in Washington, editorialized that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz should resign.
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This was a particularly painful episode for Wolfowitz, who was one of the staunchest advocates of military preparedness in Washington.

One issue that was very much on Bill Clinton's radar when he departed office, but that appeared not to elicit the same interest in Bush, was the growing threat posed by al-Qaeda, a global terrorist network dedicated to confronting Western encroachments in the Muslim world and, ultimately, to the establishment of a global Islamic caliphate. In 1993, Ramzi Yousef, an al-Qaeda operative, had detonated a truck bomb in the basement of tower one of the World Trade Center in New York City. Yousef's plan was that one tower would fall onto the other, killing upwards of 250,000 people. But the World Trade Center absorbed the explosion and the attack killed only 9. In August 1998, al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for simultaneous bomb attacks on the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, which killed 223 and injured more than 4,000. Two years later, al-Qaeda militants used a small vessel loaded with explosives to launch a suicide attack on the USS
Cole
, docked in Aden, Yemen. The blast ripped through the ship's galley, killing 17 and injuring 39. On December 19, 2000, Clinton met Bush in the White House and asked if his campaign literature was correct—that his two primary foreign-policy priorities were national missile defense and regime change in Iraq. When Bush replied yes, Clinton suggested that he instead address a wider range of challenges, with al-Qaeda at the top.
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Bush did not reply to Clinton, but he and Wolfowitz clearly did not share Clinton's concerns with stateless Islamist terrorism. During a deputies meeting on April 30, 2001, Wolfowitz pushed hard against those who identified terrorism as a major threat: “Well, I just don't understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden … You give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don't exist.” Richard Clarke, the national coordinator for security, infrastructure protection, and national security, became instantly irritated by Wolfowitz's narrow focus on nation-states and his complacency on the threat posed by al-Qaeda. The CIA had discovered no link between Iraq and the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, but Wolfowitz was talking as if such a link existed and the CIA simply hadn't detected it yet. “I could hardly believe it,” Clarke later recalled. The low opinion Wolfowitz formed of the CIA during the Team B exercise clearly remained; the agency should not be trusted on matters of importance. Wolfowitz was also upset that foreign-policy focus appeared to be shifting away from America's primary adversary: Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Clarke replied that al-Qaeda's ambition to attack America was clearly expressed and entirely plausible. “Al Qaeda plans major acts of terrorism against the U.S.,” Clarke warned. “It plans to overthrow Islamic governments and set up a radical multinational Caliphate, and then go to war with non-Muslim states.” To illustrate this point he deployed a clumsy analogy: “They have published all of this and sometimes, as with Hitler in
Mein Kampf
, you have to believe that these people will actually do what they say they will do.” Had Clarke referenced Brezhnev's speeches rather than Hitler, he might have struck a nerve. Instead, Wolfowitz replied testily, “I resent any comparison between the Holocaust and this little terrorist in Afghanistan.”
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On the morning of September 11, 2001, Wolfowitz met with a congressional delegation at the Pentagon. They were discussing an issue that would soon appear beside the point: national missile defense. A colleague interrupted the meeting to inform the group that a passenger jet had crashed into the World Trade Center. They turned on the television and watched in horror as a plane struck the second tower. Black smoke enveloped lower Manhattan as an inferno, fed by thousands of gallons of aviation fuel, raged inside the towers. “There didn't seem to be much to do about it immediately and we went on…,” Wolfowitz recalled, “then the whole building shook. I have to confess my first reaction was an earthquake. I didn't put the two things together. Rumsfeld did instantly.”
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What felt to Wolfowitz like an earthquake was a Boeing 757 crashing into the west side of the Pentagon, killing everyone on board and 125 in the building. Al-Qaeda terrorists had hijacked the plane, subdued or killed its pilots using primitive box cutters, and crashed it into the Pentagon. The plane was traveling at approximately 530 mph at the moment of impact.
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It was one of a four-part suicide attack using hijacked commercial aircraft that had been many years in the making. The strikes on the WTC that Wolfowitz had observed on television were part of the same assault—this is what Rumsfeld had “put together.” A fourth hijacked aircraft, destined for a second target in Washington—the Capitol or the White House, most likely—crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, following a struggle between the hijackers and the passengers. After learning through cell-phone conversations of what had happened in lower Manhattan, the thirty-three people on board bravely decided to author their own fate, saving hundreds of lives in the capital and preventing the destruction of another iconic building.