Person of the Year: Paul Wolfowitz (Time)

[Tinoire]

Paul Wolfowitz
The godfather of the Iraq war

By Mark Thompson

Posted Sunday, December 21, 2003; 7:45 a.m. EST

As tag teams go, Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, could not be more unlikely. Rumsfeld is a Cook County, Ill., politician, while Wolfowitz would be more at home at the University of Chicago, where he earned his doctorate. That makes them the most interesting one-two combination this side of Bush-Cheney. If Rumsfeld is the face, mouth and strong right arm of the war in Iraq, Wolfowitz—the intellectual godfather of the war—is its heart and soul. Whereas Rumsfeld talks about Iraq like a technician, Wolfowitz sounds more like a prophet. Says a close associate of the deputy's: "Paul asks himself every day how he can limit suffering by toppling another dictator or by helping people to govern themselves."

<snip>

Most Pentagons feature a top guy who's a big thinker and a No. 2 who's the day-to-day manager. Rummy and Wolfie (as the President calls them) have it reversed: Wolfowitz is more ideological than Rumsfeld, which has suited both men for different reasons. Wolfowitz often ventured way ahead of the rest of the Administration on foreign policy matters over the past two years, and Rumsfeld frequently let him go. That allowed Wolfowitz to push the whole Bush team to the right, which also let Rumsfeld align himself with that crowd when it served his purpose to do so. "Rumsfeld's a big-enough maestro to understand that Wolfowitz was the leading edge and that someone had to do it," a Pentagon associate says.

"Are there times when it made him uncomfortable? Absolutely. Are there times when he had to crank it back? Yes. But did it work for him? Clearly." Wolfowitz has spent much of his career as a fierce defender of democracy. In Ronald Reagan's State Department, he pushed autocrats in Indonesia, the Philippines and South Korea toward reform. In George H.W. Bush's Administration, he was the Pentagon's No. 3 civilian and the first to argue that letting Saddam Hussein remain in power was a mistake. In the current Administration, he was the first to push Bush to topple Saddam in the wake of 9/11—and he did so just four days after the tragedy. Over coffee at Camp David, Wolfowitz privately broached the idea with Bush, who pulled him aside during a break and urged him to bring it up at a later meeting.


<snip>

The Rummy and Wolfie show may soon go off the air. It is widely believed in national-security circles that Wolfowitz may leave the Administration sometime in 2004. He has become too controversial for Bush to promote to Defense Secretary; Wolfowitz believed that U.S. troops in Iraq would be greeted with rose petals. He remains unbowed about the postwar effort. "I'd like to know, among those people who say we should have had better plans, just which plan they had in mind that would have prevented the murderers and torturers that raped and abused that country for 35 years from continuing to fight this destructive war until they're defeated. The bottom line is," he says, "these are tough, ugly bastards."

<snip>

http://www.time.com/time/personoftheyear/2003/poywolf.html

[Catherine Vincent]

1. What!

What the hell did he do?

[UTUSN]

16. See Posts 3 & 14 - Wolf. Is NOT PotY, "American Soldier" Is

This WOLFOWITZ piece is under the Person of the Year category of supporting characters. But he would fit in with the HITLER and STALIN choices.

[soothsayer]

2. hey, they named Hitler man of the year, too

This is in keeping with that blunder, I'd say.

[private_ryan]

6. it was NOT a blunder, Hitler deserved it

read who the person of the year should be....

[Spider Jerusalem]

9. Yeah, and Stalin was Man of the Year, too.

But the criteria are: "The person who, for good or ill, has had the greatest impact on the world in the preceding twelve months", if I remember correctly.

[PartyPooper]

11. Don't forget Caligula...certainly, he would have been heralded, too!

:evilfrown:

[Dirk39]

10. I wish they would enlighten the american public about Wolfowitz...

as they did it with Hitler in 1938:

http://www.time.com/time/poy2000/archive/1938.html

"Fuhrer of the German people, Commander-in-Chief of the German Army, Navy & Air Force, Chancellor of the Third Reich, Herr Hitler reaped on that day at Munich the harvest of an audacious, defiant, ruthless foreign policy he had pursued for five and a half years. He had torn the Treaty of Versailles to shreds. He had rearmed Germany to the teeth--or as close to the tooth as he was able. He had stolen Austria before the eyes of a horrified and apparently impotent world."

Hello from Germany, Heil Wolfowitz!
Dirk

[eyesroll]

3. This is, thankfully, just a profile

The cover POTY is "The American Soldier."

[FarLeftRage]

4. Yet still, another good reason

not to read this trashy rag again!!

[acmavm]

5. Do you mean other than help to get us into an ugly, horrible mess that

is bankrupting the country and has cost the lives of 450+ (I think it's a lot more) service personnel and thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians? Not a damn thing that should earn him a man of the year award this side of hell.

[Stephanie]

7. I had to click the link - I thought it was a joke!

Astounding!

[PartyPooper]

12. I did, too! When I first saw this thread I thought I was in the Lounge!

What Next?

[mbperrin]

8. I thought only actual human beings were

eligible for this???!!

[UrbScotty]

13. They named the personal computer "Person of the Year" in the '80s (nt)

[BenDavid]

14. Time Person Of The Year

Time magazine has named "the American soldier" as its Person of the Year of 2003.

[diamond14]

15. Hitler: 1938 Man of the Year...sounds lots like bush* (link to hitler)

1938
Adolf Hitler
FROM THE TIME ARCHIVE
Jan. 2, 1939

.... He had rearmed Germany to the teeth—or as close to the tooth as he was able. He had stolen Austria before the eyes of a horrified and apparently impotent world. ......When Germany took over Austria she took upon herself the care and feeding of 7,000,000 poor relations. When 3,500,000 Sudetens were absorbed, there were that many more mouths to feed. As 1938 drew to a close many were the signs that the Nazi economy of exchange control, barter trade, lowered standard of living, "self-sufficiency," was cracking.

.....When without loss of blood he reduced Czechoslovakia to a German puppet state, forced a drastic revision of Europe's defensive alliances, and won a free hand for himself in Eastern Europe by getting a "hands-off" promise from powerful Britain (and later France), Adolf Hitler without doubt became 1938's Man of the Year.
.... More significant was the fact Hitler became in 1938 the greatest threatening force that the democratic, freedom-loving world faces today.

That the German people love uniforms, parades, military formations, and submit easily to authority is no secret. Fuhrer Hitler's own hero is Frederick the Great. That admiration stems undoubtedly from Frederick's military prowess and autocratic rule rather than from Frederick's love of French culture and his hatred of Prussian boorishness. But unlike the polished Frederick, Fuhrer Hitler, whose reading has always been very limited, invites few great minds to visit him, nor would Fuhrer Hitler agree with Frederick's contention that he was "tired of ruling over slaves." (Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, also complained of the submissiveness of German character.)

.....In bad straits even in fair weather, the German Republic collapsed under the weight of the 1929-34 depression in which German unemployment soared to 7,000,000 above a nationwide wind drift of bankruptcies and failures. ......What Adolf Hitler & Co. did to the German people in that time left civilized men and women aghast. Civil rights and liberties have disappeared. Opposition to the Nazi regime has become tantamount to suicide or worse. Free speech and free assembly are anachronisms. The reputations of the once-vaunted German centres of learning have vanished. Education has been reduced to a National Socialist catechism.

http://www.time.com/time/personoftheyear/archive/stories/1938.html



TIME's cover, showing Organist Adolf Hitler playing his hymn of hate in a desecrated cathedral while victims dangle on a St. Catherine's wheel and the Nazi hierarchy looks on, was drawn by Baron Rudolph Charles von Ripper, a Catholic who found Germany intolerable.

[Moderator]

17. LBN Rules... locking.

LBN Rules require the poster to use the published title of a linked-to article in their subject line. In this case, the subject line should read "Paul Wolfowitz, the Godfather of the Iraq War."

Please feel free to repost this article in the General Discussion or Editorials and Other Articles Forum.

Thanks!

DU Moderator