Newsweek - June 23, 2003
The Mideast: Neocons on the Line A growing number of critics on Capitol Hill and around the world are questioning the Bush administration's credibility-and its assumptions-as never before.
By Michael Hirsh
Paul Wolfowitz seems a bundle of contradictions, all of them roiling inside him. Calm yet driven, a champion of bold action who speaks in a soft, somewhat quavery voice, Wolfowitz today finds himself pacing the world stage like a nervous father. He is a father in a sense-to an idea, one that has taken on a life of its own and, somewhat in the manner of a wayward child, is causing its parent no end of grief.
IT WAS WOLFOWITZ, the gentlemanly superhawk, who within days of 9-11 prodded the Bush administration into a radical new strategy: forcefully confronting states that sponsor terrorism. It was Wolfowitz-the ex math whiz who fell in love with the idea of "national greatness" as a youth and is now seen as the Bush administration's chief intellectual-who pressed Bush hardest to transform the war on terror into a campaign for regime change and democracy in rogue nations, especially in Iraq and the Islamic world.
Now the deputy defense secretary and his fellow neoconservatives are on the defensive. They are battling a growing crowd of critics on Capitol Hill and around the world as the Bush administration's credibility-and its assumptions-are tested as never before. In Iraq, after another week in which U.S. troops died and got into fierce fire fights, elements of more than half of America's Army divisions are tied down. Some U.S. officials have begun muttering the dreaded Q word-quagmire, a term Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had mocked on a visit to Baghdad in the days just after the three-week war. In the Mideast, the hard-liners' move to replace Yasir Arafat with the moderate Mahmoud Abbas-and to ignore the conflict until after the Iraq war-has touched off a new cycle of violence that stunned even the White House in its savagery. It seems increasingly difficult to argue that "the road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad." In the face of a possible congressional probe into why Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction have not been found, two Pentagon neocons, Doug Feith and Bill Luti, sought earlier this month to identify themselves with, of all people, Bill Clinton. In a fumbling news conference, they insisted that their intel squared with the previous administration's.
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