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NYT, March 17, 2005

Man in the News - The World Is His Stage: Paul Dundes Wolfowitz

ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, March 16 - After surveying the tsunami-pummeled coast of Indonesia from a Navy helicopter in January, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz appeared shaken at the devastation.

"When you fly over in a helicopter you just begin to get a sense of how enormous this tragedy has been, and when people don't just lose a parent or a brother, but they lose their entire family, it gives a new horrible meaning to what it means to be a survivor," he told reporters in Banda Aceh.

"It's also clear," Mr. Wolfowitz added, "that beyond the immediate needs, there are going to be a great deal of work to rebuild, reconstruct."

In that three-day trip to South Asia to assess tsunami damage and the Pentagon's role in relief efforts, his friends and associates say, the seeds for President Bush's selection of Mr. Wolfowitz to be the next president of the World Bank were planted. Freed, however briefly, from his Pentagon office, the daily drumbeat of violence and American casualty reports from Iraq, and a war of which he was a principal architect, friends say, Mr. Wolfowitz was energized both to be back in Asia - he was the United States ambassador to Indonesia in the late 1980's - and to be seen as the harbinger of help, not conflict.

"It did have a huge impact on him," said Sean O'Keefe, an old friend and former NASA administrator who is now chancellor at Louisiana State University. "He was stunned by the human consequences there."

In a telephone interview on Wednesday, Mr. Wolfowitz said the World Bank, which sets development policy for much of the third world, was a logical extension of his longtime goal to spread human rights and political freedoms around the globe. "Economic development supports political development, and it really came home to me with the Asian tsunami," he said.

Caricatured as a hawk among hawks in the Bush administration and a lightning rod for its Iraq policy, Mr. Wolfowitz is tougher to pigeonhole under closer examination. As a teenager, he attended the 1963 civil rights march on Washington, and in 2003 he said he remained a civil libertarian and a "bleeding heart" on social issues. His soft-spoken personal style belies any fire-breathing image. And his activist vision has defined his career inside and outside government. Besides calling for the overthrow of President Saddam Hussein years before American troops invaded Iraq in 2003, Mr. Wolfowitz advocated arming the Bosnian Muslims in their war against the Serbs and criticized the Clinton administration over its Kosovo policy, contending it waited too long to intervene militarily.

His humanitarian impulses have taken him to desolate places. In July 2003, Mr. Wolfowitz sat crossed-legged inside a sweltering reed hut in a tiny dust-choked Iraqi village near the Iranian border listening to tribal elders seeking his help to restore their way of life as marsh Arabs, which Mr. Hussein had taken away by draining the marshes.

But Mr. Wolfowitz's critics say his optimism on America's ability to build a better world has often blinded him to the motivations of people like Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi National Congress leader whose intelligence on Iraq's unconventional weapons, used as the primary basis for going to war, turned out to be wrong.

These critics also say that he failed to prepare a thorough postwar strategy in Iraq and should not be put in charge of a major development agency. "Paul Wolfowitz has a serious credibility problem," said William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the World Policy Institute, a nonprofit research organization. "He understated the cost of the Iraq war, while promoting vast distortions about Baghdad's weapons capabilities as a way to sell the conflict to the American public."

A former aspiring mathematician turned policy maker, Mr. Wolfowitz has world views forged by family history and in the halls of academia rather than in the jungles of Vietnam or the corridors of Congress.

Brooklyn-born and raised in Ithaca, N.Y., Paul Dundes Wolfowitz, 61, is the son of a Cornell University mathematician who left Poland after World War I. The rest of his father's family perished in the Holocaust.

At Cornell, Mr. Wolfowitz majored in mathematics and chemistry, but was profoundly moved by John Hersey's "Hiroshima," and shifted his focus toward politics. "One of the things that ultimately led me to leave mathematics and go into political science was thinking I could prevent nuclear war," he said.

He has held major posts at the Defense and State Departments, including senior foreign policy adviser to Dick Cheney when he was defense secretary. After the administration of the first President Bush, he was dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

In Mr. Bush's first presidential campaign, Mr. Wolfowitz became one of his earliest advisers on foreign and national security policies.

After a meeting at the Treasury Department on Wednesday, he acknowledged the new challenge of reporting to an international board at the World Bank. "I'm leaving one very big job and going to another even bigger job," he said.