The Wolf At The Pentagon

[Aeschylus]

(Very long. NY Times.)

The Sunshine Warrior

September 22, 2002
By BILL KELLER

Fort Leavenworth in midsummer is a sultry campus for the
Army's new leaders, American and allied majors on the fast
track and generals who have just earned their first star.
When Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense,
steps out of an Air Force Gulfstream into the Kansas heat,
it is not just an overdue courtesy call and not just a
peace overture to a rankled service. (He has just killed
the Army's prized new $11 billion artillery piece, the
Crusader.) It is one more engagement in the war over the
coming war.

The subject of his remarks, which the former
political-science professor delivers seminar style to the
majors and more formally to the generals, is his recent
visit to Afghanistan. But Iraq is never far out of sight.
Introducing Wolfowitz to an auditorium full of new
one-stars and their wives, General Eric K. Shinseki, the
Army chief of staff, points out that as a young Pentagon
analyst Wolfowitz directed a secret assessment of Persian
Gulf threats that marked Iraq as a menace to its neighbors
and to American interests. This, Shinseki informs them with
everything but a drumroll, was in 1979, a dozen years
before Desert Storm.

Wolfowitz then proceeds to use Afghanistan to illustrate
how far the military's pinpoint-targeting ability has
advanced since that war, when American air and ground
forces, unable to communicate with one another, succeeded
in destroying only a single one of Saddam Hussein's Scud
missile emplacements (and that one was a harmless decoy).
The message is that next time around, if there is a next
time, what was demonstrated in Afghanistan -- that
choreography of unmanned aerial vehicles, precision-guided
weapons, indigenous insurgents and special-operations
soldiers on the ground -- should, in the first hours of an
attack, prove far more adroit at disabling Saddam's most
fearsome weapons.

Soldiers tend to cock an eyebrow when civilians who have
not known combat talk confidently about the coming
conquest, but the closest thing to an open challenge this
day comes during Wolfowitz's session with the majors --
from a British officer who raises a hand and asks about
Scott Ritter, the former U.N. weapons inspector. Ritter has
been in London arguing that Iraq's destructive capability
is already neutralized. So where is the threat worth
spending American blood?

An exasperated look crosses Wolfowitz's wide, boyish face;
Ritter's comments are ''simply amazing,'' he says. Then he
stops himself. He acknowledges that Ritter knows something
about Iraq and concedes that Saddam has probably not been
able to rebuild his nuclear program, not yet. But he notes
that when inspectors went in after the gulf war, they found
he was far closer than anyone imagined, that in fact he was
pursuing four separate avenues for manufacturing a nuclear
weapon. And chemical weapons, which he has employed against
his own people, or biological weapons are threat enough,
and much easier to construct in a secretive, fearsome
police state. This is, Wolfowitz tells the majors, a man
who has been known to have children tortured in front of
their parents. (The line would later turn up in the
president's address to the U.N.)

Revisiting Ritter's argument a few days later in his
Pentagon office, Wolfowitz seems genuinely puzzled by the
notion that we need evidence of imminent danger to justify
getting rid of Saddam. He has encountered this argument
earlier -- from the State Department and the C.I.A., in
fact, before President Bush stifled that particular line of
internal debate by declaring Saddam an intolerable threat,
end of story. By the conventions of American foreign
policy, a pre-emptive strike against an uncertain threat is
perhaps the most radical new security notion of the
post-cold-war era. But Wolfowitz says he believes Sept. 11
has awakened us to a world where certainty is an expensive
luxury.

''There's an awful lot we don't know, an awful lot that we
may never know, and we've got to think differently about
standards of proof here,'' Wolfowitz tells me. ''In fact,
there's no way you can prove that something's going to
happen three years from now or six years from now. But
these people have made absolutely clear what their
intentions are, and we know a lot about their capabilities.
I suppose I hadn't thought of it quite this way, but
intentions and capabilities are the way you think about
warfare. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt is the way you
think about law enforcement. And I think we're much closer
to being in a state of war than being in a judicial
proceeding.''

Wolfowitz is always careful to say that the president has
not decided exactly what to do about Iraq and that he
himself is not completely convinced yet that a military
liberation of Baghdad is worth the risk. But in an
administration that is not exactly a hotbed of Saddam
coddlers, Wolfowitz has been on the case longer, more
consistently, more persistently, than anyone. His tenacity
is one reason that the internal debate has moved,
astonishingly fast, from a theoretical possibility to
questions of method and timing. So fast, in fact, that one
argument some make for invading is that Bush has already
gone too far out on the limb to back down.

In the first days after Sept. 11, when Secretary of State
Colin L. Powell and others within the administration
contended it was too early to put Iraq on the agenda --
that there was a war to win in Afghanistan first and that
there was no evidence Iraq was complicit in the attacks on
the Pentagon and the twin towers -- Wolfowitz argued that
Iraq was at the heart of the threat. He suspected then that
those who were saying ''not yet'' really meant ''not
ever.'' Now that the president has declared ''regime
change'' the party line, Wolfowitz says, he takes his more
skeptical colleagues at face value when they say ''not
yet.'' But, he adds, ''it seems to me that people who want
to say, 'I'm in favor of a regime change, but not now,'
have a certain burden to answer the question, 'O.K., well,
when?'''

The answer to that question remains a secret, if it has
been decided at all. But on the way home from Fort
Leavenworth at the end of July, we stopped at Scott Air
Force Base, the military's main transportation dispatching
hub, where Wolfowitz spent a couple of hours closeted with
the men who, soon thereafter, began routing shipments of
men and materiel to the gulf. Just in case.

In Washington, some people go straight to caricature,
without getting much chance to be interesting or
complicated. Paul Wolfowitz, who is interesting and
complicated, has been cast since Sept. 11 in the role of
zealot. Except for one humanizing incident when he was
booed for mentioning the suffering of Palestinians at a
pro-Israel rally, Wolfowitz has been summarily depicted as
a hawk (The Economist preferred ''velociraptor''),
conservative ideologue, unilateralist, nemesis of Colin
Powell's State Department and, sometimes,
''Israel-centric.'' These epithets capture something of
Wolfowitz's views and something of the company he keeps.
His mentors have been hard-liners, many of his friends are
devout Reaganites and the tracts he has signed when out of
public office were written by those who now happily talk of
a new American imperialism. One close friend of Wolfowitz's
is Richard Perle, the combative defense analyst who might
actually relish being called a velociraptor; he heads an
adjunct group of advisers, the Defense Policy Board, that
has been a vehicle for introducing controversial, even
incendiary, viewpoints into the government tent. Perle, in
fact, was offered the No. 3 position in the Defense
Department, under secretary for policy, and after he
declined the job, it went to Douglas Feith, a lawyer and
firebrand who worked for Perle in the Reagan Defense
Department. President Bush may employ many people who
worked for his father, but this is decidedly not his
father's Pentagon.

The shorthand version of Paul Wolfowitz, however, is
inadequate in important ways. It completely misses his
style, which relies on patient logic and respectful,
soft-spoken engagement rather than on fire-breathing
conviction. The stereotype also overlooks a critical
distinction in his view of the world. Unlike many
conservative gloom-mongers, he does not see the world
plummeting toward an inevitable clash of civilizations.

>From a few months' immersion in the subject of Paul
Wolfowitz, it seems to me he has brought at least three
important things to the table where American policy is
made, qualities that have made him, though he holds the
rank of deputy, a factor in moving America this close to
invading Iraq. One is something of a reputation as a man
who sees trouble coming before others do, his long anxiety
about Iraq being one example.

The second thing he brings is an activist bent. It is
forged partly of humanitarian impulse, a horror of standing
by and watching bad things happen. He often talks about
Kitty Genovese, the New York woman murdered in 1964 while
dozens of neighbors watched from their apartment windows
without lifting a phone to call the police. His inclination
to act derives, too, from his analytical style, a residue,
perhaps, of the mathematician he started out to be. In
almost any discussion, he tends to be the one focusing on
the most often overlooked variable in decision making, the
cost of not acting. On Iraq, that has now been taken up as
a White House mantra.

The third striking thing about Wolfowitz is an optimism
about America's ability to build a better world. He has an
almost missionary sense of America's role. In the current
case, that means a vision of an Iraq not merely purged of
cataclysmic weaponry, not merely a threat disarmed, but an
Iraq that becomes a democratic cornerstone of an altogether
new Middle East. Given the fatalism that prevails about
this most flammable region of the world, that is an
audacious optimism indeed.

Wolfowitz's moralistic streak and the generally sunny view
of the world's possibilities may explain the affinity
between the born-again and resolutely unintellectual
president and this man he calls ''Wolfie,'' the Jewish son
of academia who dabbles in six foreign languages and keeps
Civil War histories at his bedside. A senior official who
has watched the two men interact says that Wolfowitz and
the president have reinforced each other in their faith in
''a strategic transformation of the whole region.''

If the interventionists are right, America can reasonably
expect to be more secure, respected and very, very busy --
and much of the foreign-policy old guard will have been
proved wrong. But if Wolfowitz and those with him are
wrong, if Iraq comes down around their ears, America will
be standing deep in the rubble, very alone.

If you spend much time with Wolfowitz, you will probably
hear him tell the joke about Saddam Hussein's barber, an
old one that dates from the years of Communist collapse.
The story goes that every time Saddam shows up for a trim,
his barber asks about Nicolae Ceaucescu, Romania's
cult-of-personality tyrant, who has recently been executed
in a popular uprising. Irritated, Saddam demands to know
why the barber insists on bringing up this toppled dictator
at each visit. ''Because every time I do, the hair goes up
on the back of your neck, and it's easier to cut it.''

Wolfowitz loves the story because he feels if Romania can
throw off a despot and muddle toward modernity, how much
more promising is Iraq, with its bitterly oppressed but
educated, energetic people and the ability to pump billions
of dollars worth of crude oil a year? Look at the Iraqi
Kurds, he says, who have created in their
American-protected enclave in northern Iraq a comparatively
open society ''by Middle East standards,'' despite
suffering the U.N. sanctions against the country.

Wolfowitz says he worries deeply about the risks of going
into Iraq -- about disabling the small arsenal of Scud
missiles before one possibly delivers poisons to Israel or
the Saudi oil fields, about persuading Israel (as he
personally helped do during the gulf war) not to join the
war even if attacked, knowing that would tend to mobilize
the Arab world against the United States, about the
potential mess of urban warfare and civilian casualties.
''I think the getting in is the dangerous part,'' he says.

He worries considerably less about the day after.

''I
don't think it's unreasonable to think that Iraq, properly
managed -- and it's going to take a lot of attention, and
the stakes are enormous, much higher than Afghanistan --
that it really could turn out to be, I hesitate to say it,
the first Arab democracy, or at least the first one except
for Lebanon's brief history,'' he says. ''And even if it
makes it only Romanian style, that's still such an advance
over anywhere else in the Arab world.''

This is a notion regarded with deep skepticism at the State
Department, where Powell and others tend to see the
aftermath of an invasion as a long, world-class headache
administered by an American general. Not only within the
State Department but elsewhere where foreign policy is
discussed and formulated -- including the Capitol Hill
offices of leading senators of both parties -- there reigns
the view that Iraqi democracy is a utopian fantasy, that
the country will fragment like a grenade into ethnic
enclaves, that American garrisons will be targets for an
eruption of Arab fury, that oil supplies will be
endangered, that Americans lack the patience and generosity
to midwife a free and pro-Western Iraq.

''This is a very risky operation at best,'' I was told,
typically, by Henry Siegman, a Middle East scholar at the
Council on Foreign Relations. ''And the expectation that we
will then be splendidly situated to resolve all the
region's problems is wildly optimistic.''

Iraqi democracy, it should be said, is not the president's
declared purpose of ''regime change'' in Iraq, which is to
get rid of a very bad man with a fondness for terrorists
and a hunger for weapons of hideous power. But it is, to
many in the administration, including Wolfowitz, a large
part of the enticement.

''You hear people mock it by saying that Iraq isn't ready
for Jeffersonian democracy,'' Wolfowitz says, citing a line
that Colin Powell has been known to use. ''Well, Japan
isn't Jeffersonian democracy, either. I think the more we
are committed to influencing the outcome, the more chance
there could be that it would be something quite significant
for Iraq. And I think if it's significant for Iraq, it's
going to cast a very large shadow, starting with Syria and
Iran, but across the whole Arab world, I think.''

The idea of Iraq as a launch pad of Arab democracy and a
counterweight to Islamist extremism has gained some
credence in Washington. As unromantic an expert as Dennis
B. Ross, who ran the Middle East account for President
Clinton, thinks Wolfowitz is right, that liberating Iraq
would not only chasten despots and encourage democrats but
that it could also unleash a joy in Iraq that would help
alleviate the wider Arab anger against America. So does
Henry Kissinger, whose cold realism has not often meshed
with Wolfowitz's sense of the world.

A democratic Iraq, however, is sure to be unnerving to some
of America's less-than-democratic allies in the region,
including Saudi Arabia. Wolfowitz does not demonize the
Saudi royal family, as a briefer did in July at one of
Perle's Defense Policy Board meetings, but he seems more
pleased than not that democracy in Iraq (and a free flow of
competing Iraqi oil) makes the Saudis uneasy. He does not
sound so sure that rocking the stability of tyrannies in
the Arab world, even West-leaning tyrannies, is a bad
thing.

In January, Bob Woodward, the investigative eminence for
The Washington Post, and his colleague Dan Balz wrote a
voluminous reconstruction of the decision making in the
Bush administration during the weeks following Sept. 11.
Most senior officials, including the president, Vice
President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld,
gave interviews for the series. Paul Wolfowitz, following
the advice of the Rumsfeld press office, declined. That may
have some bearing on the fact that he was one of the few
officials to come across in the series as less than
commanding. He is portrayed as single-mindedly obsessed by
Iraq. At one point, Colin Powell and General Hugh Shelton,
then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are
described sharing an eye roll over Wolfowitz's war fever.

The narrative reaches a climax in the Laurel Lodge at Camp
David, where the president gathered his war council the
weekend following the attacks. During the meetings,
Wolfowitz keeps pushing Iraq toward the front burner. He is
so persistent, so seemingly deaf to the politics of the
moment, that he even interrupts Rumsfeld to push his point.
During a break, Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief
of staff, on a signal from the president, takes Wolfowitz
and Rumsfeld aside to ask that the Defense Department speak
with one voice, which is a polite way of telling Wolfowitz
to shut up.

The story has congealed into Washington wisdom, confirming
the image of Wolfowitz as a man possessed.

Wolfowitz and two others who were in the room told me an
alternative version of the day. It is not exactly
incompatible (though both Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz say the
Card scolding never happened, while Card, through a
spokesman, confirms it), but it casts the day in a somewhat
different light. They say that during a break in the
meetings, the president listened in as Wolfowitz expounded
on the Iraqi threat for a small group gathered around the
fireplace of the rustic lodge. The president asked
Wolfowitz why he hadn't made those points in the meeting
and encouraged him to do so. Far from being an unwelcome
voice, he was invited to speak up.

Some students of Washington intrigue have deduced from all
this that Wolfowitz was set up. Rumsfeld brought him to
Camp David specifically to make the Iraq case, knowing full
well that the State Department, the C.I.A. and some of the
brass would be opposed, knowing that a war with Iraq was
more than the president could bite off in the first phase.
The defense secretary wanted to define the ultimate problem
as something bigger than Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan.
So he pushed Wolfowitz forward. Wolfowitz would end up with
the knives in him -- better a deputy than Rumsfeld himself
-- but he would get the case for Iraq out where the
president could consider it. And, sure enough, the
president did define the terrorism problem early on as a
global one including state sponsors. (Rumsfeld denies any
such Machievellian design and says he doesn't even remember
his deputy talking at the meeting.)

The larger point is that even as early as Sept. 15 of last
year, the president was intrigued by what Wolfowitz was
saying. By April, sooner than anyone expected, the
president was telling journalists that ''regime change''
was his goal for Iraq. And when the president earlier this
month assembled his war advisers in the Laurel Lodge, Iraq
was on everybody's front burner.

In Washington, no career-conscious official would ever
suggest that he had influenced the president. It is
essential to the mythology of executive leadership that
presidents make up their own minds, and this administration
is more hypersensitive than most to any suggestion that the
president needs to be propped up by smart people. In any
case, on the question of a more muscular American presence
in the world, Wolfowitz is hardly a lone voice. His most
important Washington patrons -- Cheney, whom he served in
the first Bush Pentagon, and Rumsfeld -- have increasingly
taken over the role of drum majors on Iraq. But the new
worldview evolving in the Bush administration Washington --
interventionist, idealistic, less sensitive to alliance
diplomacy -- is one created more at the Pentagon than the
State Department and one to which Wolfowitz has brought
intellectual weight. Morton Abramowitz, a veteran diplomat
who has worked with, and occasionally sparred with,
Wolfowitz, calls him ''the pre-eminent house
intellectual.''

Wolfowitz says that the new approach reflects the
president's own instincts, which he maintains were evident
even during the 2000 campaign to anyone who cared to look
beyond the awkwardness of a foreign-policy novice -- and
the scorn he heaped on nation building. Wolfowitz, who was
one of the so-called Vulcans, the small cadre of thinkers
who advised the campaign on defense and foreign policy,
clearly finds the younger Bush more open to big, bold,
activist ideas than his father.

''He's much more comfortable with speeches that lay out
visions,'' Wolfowitz says. ''I think he really believes in
them. So there's that sort of Reaganism, if you want to
call it that, in him, but a little more on the pragmatic
side than Reagan when it comes to actual policy.''

When the new Bush administration was coalescing, Colin
Powell called Wolfowitz and offered him the job of
ambassador to the United Nations. Given this
administration's standoffish relationship with the U.N. and
Wolfowitz's own wariness of multilateralism, that could be
regarded as a trap rather than an honor, but Powell insists
it was a sign of his great admiration for Wolfowitz's
ability to think big and argue an issue to the ground.
Wolfowitz has been similarly effusive in his praise of
Powell, especially since news reports of their battles over
Iraq.

And not only Iraq: the tensions between State and Defense
are rooted in starkly different views of how America should
deal with the world. The State Department tends to see the
world as a set of problems to be handled, using the tools
of professional diplomacy and striving for international
consensus. This Defense Department tends to define
leadership as more (in the Pentagon's favorite buzzword of
the moment) ''forward leaning,'' including a willingness to
act unilaterally if need be and to employ muscle. Rumsfeld
and Cheney, who have been friends since the Nixon
administration, are visceral advocates of this more
assertive view, but Wolfowitz is its theorist -- its
Kissinger, as one admirer put it.

''What I think distinguishes him, and it's very alarming to
some people, is that there is this spirit in Washington
that foreign policy consists of managing problems,'' said
Charles H. Fairbanks, a Johns Hopkins political scientist
who has known Wolfowitz since college. ''Paul Wolfowitz is
really free of that tendency.''

In 1992, in what would turn out to be the last year of the
first Bush administration, Wolfowitz, then under secretary
for policy in Cheney's Defense Department, presided over
the writing of a new ''Defense Planning Guidance,'' a broad
directive to military leaders on what to prepare for. An
early draft proposed that with the demise of the Soviet
Union the United States doctrine should be to assure that
no new superpower arose to rival America's benign
domination of the globe. The U.S. would defend its unique
status both by being militarily powerful beyond challenge
and by being such a constructive force that no one would
want to challenge us. We would participate in coalitions,
but they would be ''ad hoc.'' The U.S. would be ''postured
to act independently when collective action cannot be
orchestrated.'' The guidance envisioned pre-emptive attacks
against states bent on acquiring nuclear, biological or
chemical weapons. It was accompanied by illustrative
scenarios of hypothetical wars for which the military
should be prepared. One of them was another war against
Iraq, where Saddam had already rebounded from his gulf-war
defeat and was busily crushing domestic unrest.

After the draft was leaked to The New York Times and was
roundly denounced as bellicose and unilateralist, the
language was softened. But a number of years later, in an
essay published in The National Interest, Wolfowitz
contended that most Americans had come around to favoring
the kind of Pax Americana envisioned in that document. He
argued that American interventions in the Balkans and
elsewhere had demonstrated a growing consensus for an
American leadership, which entailed ''demonstrating that
your friends will be protected and taken care of, that your
enemies will be punished and that those who refuse to
support you will live to regret having done so.''

That now seems to have become the Bush doctrine, sprung
from Sept. 11, and Iraq stands to be its most serious test.
The evidence suggests that the world consensus is somewhat
shakier than Wolfowitz predicted. Allied support is
confined to the loyal Tony Blair, who may pay a high price
at home for it; the American public is supportive, but in
no hurry; the president's father's inner circle is sounding
cautions.

Wolfowitz regards all of this as little different from the
hand-wringing before Desert Storm or before the
intervention in Bosnia. ''If we get to the point where
we're talking about reconstructing a post-Saddam Iraq, I
think we'll have an awful lot that we agree on,'' he says.
''And a lot of the differences of today, which revolve
around how you get there, will seem like ancient worries.''

In its early days, the Bush administration set in motion a
review of Iraq policy, but it dragged on without much
direction, so that by Sept. 11 the Bush policy on Iraq was
essentially the one inherited from the Clinton
administration. At the C.I.A., the holdover director,
George J. Tenet, was pushing the idea of ''stateless''
terrorism, which implied less, not more, emphasis on the
role of state patrons. At State, Colin Powell seized on an
idea that had been gestating in the Clinton administration
-- smart sanctions'' -- that would have eased restrictions
on food and medicine sales to Iraq but would have clamped
down hard on smuggling of equipment for Saddam's
rearmament. There was general agreement within the
administration that sanctions were an abject failure, doing
little to impede Saddam's military ambitions while creating
a P.R. nightmare of hungry children. It is not clear that
anybody had much faith that sanctions could be fixed, but
smart sanctions created the impression of doing something.
Iraq was, frankly, nobody's high priority -- not Rumsfeld,
who was preoccupied with missile defense; not Cheney, who
was consumed by the domestic agenda; not Condoleezza Rice
or Powell, who had Russia and China to think about. When
the Sept. 11 terrorists struck, Wolfowitz was the first
into this vacuum.

Friends of Wolfowitz's say his initial reaction was that
Iraq was probably a party to the attacks. He had already
studied the work of Laurie Mylroie, an investigator who has
labored to connect Iraq to earlier terrorist attacks,
including the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and
now an ardent student of clues connecting Saddam to Sept.
11. The Clinton administration treated Mylroie as, in her
words, ''a nut case,'' but Wolfowitz -- then spending the
Clinton years as dean of the prestigious School of Advanced
International Studies at Johns Hopkins -- listened to her
90-minute briefing on the evidence trail and wrote a
sympathetic blurb for her book blaming Iraq for the first
trade-center attack. After Sept. 11, he encouraged his
friend R. James Woolsey, the former C.I.A. director, to
visit England as a consultant to a Justice Department
mission and sniff out evidence of Iraqi connections.
Woolsey contends that evidence connecting Iraq with
terrorist assaults on America, while circumstantial, is
''about as clear as these things get.'' Few others go that
far, Wolfowitz included. He can describe the evidence in
detail, the clandestine meetings between Iraqi intelligence
and figures who may have been Al Qaeda operatives, and says
he finds it intriguing but not conclusive.

But the more general connection between Saddam and
terrorists -- his hosting of the murderous and recently
deceased Abu Nidal, his subsidies for Palestinian suicide
bombers -- is enough, in Wolfowitz's view, to make their
future collaboration against America almost a given. While
Iraq might arm a missile or a bomber with one of those
horrible weapons, Wolfowitz says, the more likely delivery
system is via the terrorist international. And that, too,
is an underlying assumption in the administration's case
for war.

Throughout his career, Wolfowitz has managed to push hard
against the prevailing view while avoiding the kind of
confrontation that gets you marked as not a team player.
But several people who know Wolfowitz say he seemed
galvanized by Sept. 11 into a bet-your-career sense of
purpose.I think Paul tended to be Mr. Interagency Stealth
in the past, and now he's Mr. Open Warfare,'' says Stephen
Sestanovich, a Russia expert who once worked for Wolfowitz
as a policy planner. ''Right after Sept. 11, the idea that
Iraq was where we had to go next was the lunacy that had to
be fought back. Now, in this town, there's a near consensus
about it. They've accepted the Wolfowitz goal, and now
they're just haggling about how it's to be done. That was a
result that could only be achieved by open warfare.''

A result of his being so out front, of course, is that
along with the considerably higher stakes of human life and
strategic order, one thing riding on the future of Iraq is
Wolfowitz's future. If, as some of his friends believe,
Wolfowitz, who is 58, would like to ascend to a cabinet job
-- Rumsfeld would be 72 at the start of a second Bush term;
Powell has dropped hints of being a one-termer; and a
shuffle could land him as national security adviser or
C.I.A. director -- his prospects are paradoxically wedded
to those of Saddam Hussein.

Olfowitz grew up in a household in which Hitler and Stalin
were not abstractions. His father, a mathematics professor
at Cornell and an innovator in the field of statistics, was
a Polish Jew who emigrated from Russian-held Warsaw in
1920. He often told his children how lucky they were to
have escaped the totalitarian horrors of Europe for the
benign security of America. There were many Wolfowitzes
consumed in the Holocaust, and according to Wolfowitz's
sister, Laura, the world's perils and America's moral
responsibility were constant topics at their dinner table.

As a teenager, Wolfowitz was a lonely John F. Kennedy
Democrat in his conservative Ithaca, N.Y., high school. He
says the only time he ever marched in a demonstration was
when he was 19, at Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights
spectacular in Washington. He remains, by his own
description, a ''bleeding heart'' on social issues and a
civil libertarian. The day I watched him under questioning
from those eager majors at Fort Leavenworth, he argued
against the use of torture in interrogating terror suspects
and against the deployment of the military in domestic
crises.

But his sense of America's large place in the world, like
his father's, has always hewed close to that of the late
Senator Henry M. Jackson, the pioneering Democratic hawk
nicknamed Scoop, who believed in an American obligation to
support democracies and in the willingness to use military
force sometimes to accomplish that. (Jackson was also
Richard Perle's mentor.) Wolfowitz, who switched parties
during the Reagan administration, now describes himself as
''a Scoop Jackson Republican.''

Wolfowitz followed his father into mathematics, taking
courses from him at Cornell, shifted to chemistry and
''probably would have ended up a very unhappy biochemist''
if not for the intervention of Allan Bloom, the charismatic
political philosopher, who was a resident scholar in the
elite student dormitory where Wolfowitz lived. Bloom
emboldened Wolfowitz to follow his childhood fascination
with world affairs, to the enormous dismay of his father,
who regarded political science as roughly equivalent to
astrology.

Wolfowitz earned his doctorate at the University of
Chicago, a seedbed of what is now called neoconservative
thinking in economics, political science and strategic
studies. His mentor there was Albert Wohlstetter, perhaps
the most influential thinker about military strategems of
the nuclear age and godfather of the anti-detente school
during the cold war.

Student deferments kept him out of the military draft
during the Vietnam War, and he looks back on that war with
a kind of scholarly detachment that is in striking contrast
to, say, Colin Powell, who served two tours there and
regards Vietnam as the paradigm of good intentions gone
wrong. Wolfowitz was sympathetic to the war and only later
came around to the view that it was ''a very costly
overreach.'' At the same time, he wonders if the American
role in Vietnam might have given anti-Communist forces in
Asia time to gather strength. ''We know the costs of
Vietnam,'' he says. ''They were horrendous.'' And then he
adds a quintessentially Wolfowitz kicker: ''But we don't
know what that part of the world would have looked like
today if it hadn't been.''

After three years teaching political science at Yale,
Wolfowitz was recruited through Wohlstetter's profuse
grapevine to work in Washington at the Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency. In the waning days of the Nixon
administration, the agency was one link in a network of
conservative insurgents. Their target was the diplomacy of
patient coexistence with the Soviet Union. Their ringleader
was Perle, operating out of Scoop Jackson's office. Their
Antichrist was Kissinger, the mastermind of detente. The
insurgent view was that the Soviet Union should be not
simply contained but challenged on all fronts. They argued
that American intelligence agencies had played down the
aggressive designs and military advances of the Soviet
Union to conform to the White House drive for arms control.

In the waning days of the Ford administration, the C.I.A.
(director: George H.W. Bush) sought to appease the
hard-liners by commissioning ''Team B,'' a group of
kibitzers with license to second-guess the intelligence
reports on the Soviet Union. Wolfowitz was one of the 10
members. The report they produced was more than Bush
bargained for. It painted the Soviet Union as an
expansionist boogeyman. In hindsight, much of the Team B
report was worst-case hyperbole; it credited the Soviet
Union with developing superweapons it never had and ignored
the handicaps of a failing Soviet economy. But Team B
became a political bludgeon to batter the proponents of
arms control and drive up American military spending.
Wolfowitz, who contributed a thoughtful and unhysterical
chapter on the importance of intermediate-range missiles to
the Soviet strategy, says he never bought Team B's alarmist
contention that the Soviet Union believed it could fight
and win a nuclear war. But he says the report was a useful
guerrilla attack on conventional thinking, including the
tendency of intelligence agencies to assume that rival
countries think the same way we do.

It was a similar Team B-style exercise that led to his
current job. Rumsfeld was impressed by Wolfowitz's work for
him on a commission set up by Congressional hawks in 1998
to prod the Clinton administration toward deploying missile
defense. (Rumsfeld is a missile-defense devotee; Wolfowitz
somewhat less so, since he worries it would not stop
low-flying cruise missiles.)

Wolfowitz abandoned the Yale tenure track and threw himself
into the practice of national security, moving back and
forth between Defense and State. His earliest jobs were in
the wonkish realm of policy analysis -- gazing at the
horizon. He had a knack for luring bright, opinionated
thinkers, some of whom rank high in the current
administration. Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby,
was captivated by Wolfowitz's political science course at
Yale and worked for him at the in-house think tanks in both
the State and Defense Departments. Condoleezza Rice's
deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, who is chairman of an
influential committee of cabinet deputies that meets
several times a week on national-security issues, worked
for Wolfowitz in the Cheney Defense Department and was a
fellow Vulcan in the campaign.

Contrary to his ideologue image, Wolfowitz is described by
colleagues as open to new ideas and encouraging of dissent.
Dennis Ross went to work for Wolfowitz shortly after
writing a paper trashing the work of Team B. ''What I
always found in him that separated him from everybody else
on that side of the political spectrum is not that he
didn't have predispositions, but that he was much more
open, much more intellectually open, to different kinds of
interpretations,'' Ross says. Charles Fairbanks, who also
worked for Wolfowitz in the policy-planning office of the
State Department, recalls him as ''sort of on the one hand,
on the other hand on most issues,'' but ardent on the
subject of certain regimes he regarded as outside the norms
of civilized behavior, including the radical Baath party of
Iraq and Muammar el-Qaddafi's Libya. ''I once presented
talking points on Libya, which I considered very tough. He
said: 'You don't understand. I really want to destroy
Qaddafi, not just constrain him.'''

His proteges cite several examples of Wolfowitz's homing in
on subjects before they grew into major issues, often when
they were politically inconvenient. For example, as the
Soviet empire was unraveling and the first President Bush
was clinging to the waning figure of Mikhail Gorbachev,
Wolfowitz and his boss, Cheney, believed that Boris N.
Yeltsin represented a better prospect of a real end to the
cold war.

And then there is Iraq. When he arrived at the Pentagon in
the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the Arab oil
embargo, Wolfowitz was surprised to find that the Persian
Gulf region was scarcely on their minds.

''There was a fairly big NATO office,'' he recalls, ''and a
modest size East Asian one and then a cats-and-dogs office.
I said, 'Where's the Persian Gulf office?' 'Oh, we don't
plan forces for the Persian Gulf.' This was 1977. And one
of the unspoken reasons, I think, was Vietnam. But one of
the spoken reasons was, the shah takes care of the Persian
Gulf for us. And I said, 'Well, that's a little
shortsighted.'''

So he assembled a small group, including Dennis Ross, and
they wrote a secret assessment of threats. Much of the
report was about possible Soviet moves into the region, but
planted in the midst of this is a bright red flag about
Iraq. Examining Iraq's outsize military and unresolved
territorial claims, the report talked about possible
attacks on Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, which would give Iraq
control of the West's oil lifeline. The U.S. was seen as
woefully unprepared to respond. The report recommended
beefing up forces to provide ''a credible and visible
balance to Iraq's local power.''

The report was not well received by the Carter
administration, which was then busy courting Iraq as an
offset to the new revolutionary regime in Iran. But
Wolfowitz persisted, and one result was a decision to
permanently pre-position cargo ships in the gulf region
loaded with tanks, artillery and ammunition. By the time of
the gulf war, some of the equipment was rusty, but as Lewis
Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, points out, it was the
first heavy weaponry to hit the ground against Saddam's
army.

When Iraq swooped into Kuwait in 1990, Wolfowitz was
Cheney's under secretary for policy. He was the strongest
advocate for dispatching warships early as a sign of
American resolve, and his was a persistent voice for
putting American troops on the ground. After Iraq was
driven out of Kuwait, Wolfowitz argued unsuccessfully that
America should support the Kurds in the north and Shiites
in the south in their attempts to finish off Saddam.

There is an entertaining echo of his frustration in
''Ravelstein,'' Saul Bellow's roman a clef about
Wolfowitz's college guru, Allan Bloom. In the novel,
Wolfowitz has a walk-on part as a former student who has
made it big in Washington and periodically delights his old
tutor by phoning in tidbits of inside dope. Professor
Bloom/Ravelstein returns from one such phone call during
the gulf war to inform his friends: ''Colin Powell and
Baker have advised the president not to send the troops all
the way to Baghdad. Bush will announce it tomorrow. They're
afraid of a few casualties.''

Neither Wolfowitz nor anyone else in the administration was
calling for sending American troops to Baghdad, since that
far exceeded their mandate from Congress and the United
Nations to liberate Kuwait. But Wolfowitz was dismayed by
the decision to quickly extricate American troops and let
the situation in Iraq run its course. When Clinton, who
inherited the aftermath of the war, continued to stand by
as Saddam suppressed the Kurds, Wolfowitz wrote a
blistering op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal,
calling it ''Clinton's Bay of Pigs'' -- a rebuke he could
as aptly have applied to the first President Bush. In
language unusually fierce for Wolfowitz, he derided ''our
passive containment policy and our inept covert
operations'' and clearly implied that ousting Saddam should
be American policy without quite saying it. The following
year he was explicitly proposing ''the military option,''
unilateral if necessary, to rid the world of Saddam.

Until America came directly under attack last year,
Wolfowitz says, he was still thinking in terms of providing
arms, training and air support for indigenous rebels, not
sending in American divisions.

''I certainly would not then have favored us sending
occupying forces into Iraq,'' he says. ''But we might have
overthrown a terrible regime. It might have worked out
well. It could hardly be worse than what we've had for the
last 10 years. And if it had been a mess, we could've said,
O.K., well, we gave them their chance.

''In contrast, we're at a point now, I think, that if Iraq
is liberated, our responsibility for it is going to be so
large that our responsibility for the outcome -- and our
stake in the outcome -- is going to be much larger.''

Wolfowitz's pentagon jobs under various presidents
persuaded him that Iraq was chronic trouble. His vision of
Iraq as an opportunity, though, evolved from his work in
the State Department.

Two years into the Reagan administration, Wolfowitz asked
Secretary of State George P. Shultz to move him from the
world of theory into the world of practice, as assistant
secretary of state for East Asia. Shultz says he hesitated
-- Wolfowitz was known for his brains, not his management
skills -- but agreed. Wolfowitz quickly found himself
riding shotgun on another campaign against the geopolitics
of Henry Kissinger, this time on how to deal with China.
Shultz and Wolfowitz agreed that Kissinger put too much
value on China as a counterbalance to the Soviet Union,
with the result that the U.S. bent over backward to
preserve ''the relationship'' by making concessions on
issues like Taiwan. The new team argued, in essence, that
it was possible to be a hard-liner on the Soviet Union
without pandering to China. Once China was downsized as a
factor in the cold war, the administration felt freer to
turn more attention to Japan, first, but also to the
emerging Asian democracies of South Korea and Taiwan.

For his next act, Wolfowitz applied to be ambassador to
Indonesia, the country with the world's largest Muslim
population and a place that his wife and college
sweetheart, Clare, had chosen as the focus of her
anthropological studies. (They are now separated, but she
speaks of him with intense admiration.) He threw himself
into the public diplomacy, learning the language well
enough to take questions at public gatherings and even
entering a cooking contest sponsored by a women's magazine.
(He won third place for a dish he dubbed Madame Mao's
Chicken.) He especially prides himself on a public speech
that called on the Indonesian strongman, Suharto, to
introduce political openness -- a message he diplomatically
saved for the end of his tour as ambassador but one that
still infuriated Suharto.

Wolfowitz has talked for years about the incubation of
Asian democracies and the more recent currents of freedom
in Indonesia as reason to hope for something similar in the
Islamic Mideast. Since Sept. 11, this has been a favorite
theme in his speeches.

Wolfowitz was still a young Pentagon wonk when President
Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt braved the wrath of the Arab world
to visit Jerusalem and deliver a speech of peace to the
Israeli Parliament. To an American Jew raised with a high
sense of individual moral obligation, this was such an
admirable piece of statesmanship that Wolfowitz bought
Arabic language tapes and studied them in his car on his
commute to the Pentagon so that he could appreciate the
valor of Sadat's speech in the original.

You hear from some of Wolfowitz's critics, always off the
record, that Israel exercises a powerful gravitational pull
on the man. They may not know that as a teenager he spent
his father's sabbatical semester in Israel or that his
sister is married to an Israeli, but they certainly know
that he is friendly with Israel's generals and diplomats
and that he is something of a hero to the heavily Jewish
neoconservative movement. Those who know him well say this
-- leaving aside the offensive suggestion of dual loyalty
-- is looking at Wolfowitz through the wrong end of the
telescope. As the Sadat story illustrates, he has generally
been less excited by the security of Israel than by the
promise of a more moderate Islam.

''As a moral man, he might have found Israel the heart of
the Middle East story,'' Stephen Sestanovich says. ''But as
a policy maker, Turkey and the gulf and Egypt didn't loom
any less large for him.''

After Sept. 11, Wolfowitz supported the successful effort
to include the localized killers of Hamas and Hezbollah on
America's global terror list and was part of a large
administration chorus (basically, everyone except the State
Department) that argued for bypassing Yasir Arafat. But he
has not hesitated to tell Israel when American interests
trumped theirs. He supported selling sophisticated
surveillance aircraft to Saudi Arabia, despite intense
Israeli lobbying against the sale -- and those Awacs planes
proved invaluable in the gulf war. Benjamin Netanyahu, the
right-wing former prime minister, still complains that
Israel was wrong to succumb to Wolfowitz's diplomacy during
the gulf war, when he persuaded Israel to hold its fire as
Iraqi Scuds were landing. Netanyahu, who generally admires
Wolfowitz, thinks this forbearance emboldened his country's
enemies. If there is a new war, persuading Ariel Sharon to
show similar forbearance may be more difficult, but
Wolfowitz will be foremost among those arguing the case.

Alongside the conference table where we did our talking,
Wolfowitz has mounted a painting that, from across the
room, resembles a tranquil Maryland landscape. On closer
inspection, the dark foreground is a river of corpses.
Wolfowitz, a Civil War buff, had it copied from a painting
called ''The Bloody Lane,'' a rendering of the deadliest
battle in American history, Antietam, which shattered the
momentum of the South and emboldened Lincoln to issue the
Emancipation Proclamation. It seems like sobering company
for a man who deals in the gruesome cost-benefit analysis
of warfare.

Wolfowitz says that he agonizes a good deal over the
dangers of dispatching Americans to war, that he respects
the traditional conservatism of men in uniform who know the
Antietams of the globe firsthand. Interventions that are
only indirectly about American interests, like Somalia, he
says, should be ''as close to risk-free as possible,'' and,
he suggests, ''maybe somewhere along the way we should have
a volunteer force that is specifically volunteering for
missions other than defending the country.'' The opposite
of the Peace Corps, you might say.

Wars that defend our safety may command a higher price.
What price? Would the danger posed by a nuclear-armed
Saddam be worth, say, the lives of thousands of American
soldiers, if that is what the experts estimated it would
take to disarm him by force?

Wolfowitz posed the question himself and answered no.
Weapons of mass destruction would not be enough to justify
the deaths of thousands of Americans. And in any case,
thousands killed would mean the mission had gone badly
wrong.

But Wolfowitz was not letting the discussion end there.
Later, he e-mailed me an afterthought about that grisly
calculus of going to war against Iraq.

''So if that's what you estimate the costs of action to be,
then you have to have something more on the other side of
the ledger than just the possession of weapons of mass
destruction,'' he wrote. Whether that ''something more''
that would justify that greater sacrifice meant evidence
that Iraq was on the verge of using its weapons, or the
prospect of establishing Iraq as an outpost of democracy,
or a smoking gun tying Iraq to Sept. 11, he did not
specify. ''In the end, it has to come down to a careful
weighing of things we can't know with precision, the costs
of action versus the costs of inaction, the costs of action
now versus the costs of action later.''

Bill Keller is a Times columnist and a senior writer for
the magazine.