On September 22, the New York Times Magazine ran a lengthy cover story about Paul Wolfowitz, the number two man in the Pentagon and the Bush administration’s most ardent proponent of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Under the title of “Stalking Saddam: How Paul Wolfowitz’s agenda became the Bush agenda,” the Times’ Bill Keller used over 10 pages of the weekly to reshape Wolfowitz’s hawkish image into that of a man of peace and optimism who has become, in Keller’s view, a trusted confidante and key advisor to “our born-again and resolutely unintellectual president.”
The makeover of “Wolfie,” as Bush calls his Pentagon buddy, was badly needed – and probably eagerly sought – because Wolfowitz’s name and reputation was seriously tarnished in the press during the confusing aftermath of 9-11. Most damaging was an anecdote that appeared in the Washington Post under the byline of veteran reporter (and self-appointed Bush historian) Bob Woodward. It portrayed Wolfowitz as so fanatical about Saddam that once, during a meeting at Camp David, he drew a silent but withering rebuke from Bush, and a reprimand from Chief of Staff Andrew Card, for interrupting Donald Rumsfeld to push his own arguments for invading Iraq. “The story has congealed into Washington wisdom, confirming the image of Wolfowitz as a man possessed,” Keller wrote in his puff piece.
But according to Keller, the Washington “caricature” of Wolfowitz doesn’t do justice to the man. His story, based largely on interviews with his subject, described Wolfowitz as a man who “relies on patient logic and respectful, soft-spoken engagement” to explain his image of a postwar Iraq that could “become a democratic cornerstone of an altogether new Middle East.”
Opening the spread in the Times, readers were treated to a photo of Wolfowitz working intently at his desk with a bright red folder emblazoned with “Secret” strategically lying at his elbow; another shot designed to underscore Keller’s theme showed him whispering in Bush’s ear “at the Pentagon days after the terrorist attack” (unfortunately, Bush doesn’t look very engaged). Wolfowitz’s hard-line views, Keller argued, were shaped by long years of association with Dick Cheney at the Pentagon during the first Bush administration and as a low-level skeptic of dþtente with the Soviet Union during the 1970s. Moreover, claimed Keller, his sunny views about Iraq’s potential as a stable democracy were developed during the Reagan administration, when Wolfowitz served as US ambassador to Indonesia and Washington’s top diplomat for East Asia during the height of the Cold War.
Here is where Keller transforms his article from history into hagiography. In one paragraph, Keller – relying solely on his subject’s own recollections – described Wolfowitz’s record in Asia. The former ambassador, it seems, “prides himself” on a public speech he delivered once in Jakarta urging Suharto, Indonesia’s dictator, to “introduce political openness,” thus “infuriating” the general-turned-president. Wolfowitz’s direct role in “the incubation of Asian democracies and the more recent currents of freedom of Indonesia,” Keller wrote, are “reason for hope for something similar in the Islamic Mideast.”
Keller’s research is badly flawed. If he had bothered to look into Wolfowitz’s role in Asia during the 1980s, he would have found that Wolfowitz’s views on what democracy looks like are highly skewed. During his years as Reagan’s point man on Asia, Wolfowitz’s job was to portray some of the world’s most notorious police states as worthy allies who simply needed a little patience from US policymakers and Congress. He was willing to overlook systematic human rights violations in the name of the greater good: US national security and economic interests. Today in Indonesia, he is continuing in that vein by leading, in the name of fighting terrorism, the Bush administration’s push to lift congressional sanctions on US training programs for the Indonesian military, which is highly tainted by its brutality in East Timor three years ago and its sponsorship of vigilante groups and death squads that, to this day, continue to terrorize dissidents and opponents of US mining and oil companies. If his past history is any guide, Iraq’s future – after it is bombed to smithereens by the US Air Force – is far from the rosy picture painted by Keller and the New York Times.
I covered the Reagan administration’s policies in Asia during the 1980s as an independent journalist. Two years ago, I wrote a portrait of Wolfowitz for Foreign Policy in Focus and Asia Times On-Line based in part on that reporting. At the request of First of the Month, here’s the gist of that article, as it appeared just after Bush’s inauguration. Take it as my rejoinder to the Times and Bill Keller…
In an unguarded moment just before the 2000 election, Richard Holbrooke opened a foreign policy speech with a fawning tribute to his host, Paul Wolfowitz, who was then the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. Holbrooke, a senior adviser to Al Gore, was acutely aware that either he or Wolfowitz would be playing important roles in next administration. Looking perhaps to assure the world of the continuity of US foreign policy, he told his audience that Wolfowitz’s “recent activities illustrate something that’s very important about American foreign policy in an election year, and that is the degree to which there are still common themes between the parties.”
The example he chose to illustrate his point was East Timor, which was invaded and occupied in 1975 by Indonesia with US weapons – a security policy backed and partly shaped by Holbrooke and Wolfowitz. “Paul and I,” he said, “have been in frequent touch to make sure that we keep [East Timor] out of the presidential campaign, where it would do no good to American or Indonesian interests.”
That disclosure reveals much about Holbrooke, Wolfowitz and US policy in Asia. East Timor is a classic example of the bipartisan nature of US foreign policy during the Cold War – and the secrecy surrounding US military support for authoritarian leaders like president Suharto, who ruled Indonesia from the US-backed coup in 1965 until his downfall in 1998. There is an unbroken link from the Ford-Kissinger years, when the US backed Suharto’s invasion of the former Portuguese territory, through the Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton eras, when US policy focused on supporting Suharto’s military and burnishing his image to the world.
During the Reagan years, there was no greater champion of Suharto than Wolfowitz, whose career is a textbook example of Cold War politics that focused for nearly 50 years on the care and feeding of dictators like Suharto, Chun Doo-hwan in South Korea, and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. While there were differences in nuance between Democratic and Republican presidents, these policies remained remarkably consistent from administration to administration. Where Wolfowitz and the Reagan Republicans departed from the Democrats was in their public stance toward these unsavory figures.
During his tenure in the Reagan and Bush administrations, Wolfowitz played a key role in defining US policy toward South Korea and the Philippines at a time of intense repression and growing opposition to authoritarian rule. In a speech in 2000 to the right-wing Heritage Foundation, he castigated those who criticized Reagan for embracing Chun and Marcos, and defended Reagan’s policies as the best hope for Asian democracy.
During a 1983 visit to South Korea, he recalled, the Korean government jailed many dissidents, requiring Wolfowitz to become a “poor hapless administration official sent out to brief the traveling press corps on what was going on and to explain what was our human rights policy.” That policy, he insisted, was to quietly advise Chun, who was later held responsible for the murders of at least 200 people during the 1980 Kwangju rebellion, to “honor the South Korean constitution and to step down after one term as president”. Chun’s decision in 1986 not to run again, he argued, “has indeed been far more important in resolving human rights problems in Korea than any number of lists of political prisoners that the American president might have taken to him.”
That is fantasy, and an insult to the hundreds of political prisoners jailed and tortured by Chun as Reagan and Wolfowitz whispered democratic shibbeloths in his ear. Even long-time diplomats who supported the basic thrust of US policy in Korea believe that Reagan’s public embrace of Chun discouraged Korean dissidents and fueled the fierce anti-American sentiment that still burns today. But more to the point, it wasn’t American pleading that forced Chun out. Rather, it was millions of students, workers, and ordinary citizens pouring into the streets day after day that forced Chun to back off and eventually slink away to his family home in the mountains before he was tried and convicted in 1996 on charges of murder and treason.
In his Heritage speech, Wolfowitz also took credit for the downfall of Marcos. The “private and public pressure on Marcos to reform,” he asserted, “contributed in no small measure to emboldening the Philippine people to take their fate in their own hands and to produce what eventually became the first great democratic transformation in Asia in the 1980s”. Once again, Wolfowitz was rewriting history, implying that the Filipino people, like the South Koreans, ignored two decades of massive US military and financial support for Marcos. In both countries, US policy toward these dictators (which in Korea would include Park Chung-hee, Chun’s assassinated predecessor) only began to weaken when US officials decided that their continued hold on power would lead to further instability, thus threatening US “interests.”
With anticommunism no longer the dominant theme in US foreign policy, US military support for people like Chun or Marcos will be harder to defend. But given the history of Wolfowitz’s dealings with US allies, it seems reasonable to conclude that he and the Bush administration will conjure up other national security justifications to support unpopular leaders.
Imagine what would happen in Iraq, for example, if its US-backed opposition (which Wolfowitz strongly supports) somehow manages to overthrow Suddam Hussein, despite its lack of support inside Iraq. Overnight, the new leaders would become strategic US allies, they would be presented with new weapons systems, and their life stories would be embellished into legend. When authoritarian tendencies eventually emerged, the American people would be told that allies can’t be perfect, but that we have Paul Wolfowitz working behind the scenes and in public to get our allies to straighten up.
If that sounds like hyperbole, consider Wolfowitz’s recent public comments on Indonesia. As late as May 1997, he was telling Congress that “any balanced judgment of the situation in Indonesia today, including the very important and sensitive issue of human rights, needs to take account of the significant progress that Indonesia has already made and needs to acknowledge that much of this progress has to be credited to the strong and remarkable leadership of president Suharto”.
Three years later, Suharto had been swept out of office and replaced by an uneasy coalition of reformists, led by President Abdurrahman Wahid (note: in 2001 Wahid was replaced by Megawati Sukarnoputri, the daughter of Sukarno, the independence leader Suharto overthrew in a bloody CIA-backed coup in 1965). Standing alongside Wahid was the Indonesian army, led by General Wiranto, who for years was a key ally of Suharto and who maintained extremely close relations with the US military. But that coalition was deeply split when Wiranto’s military supported the death squads that murdered hundreds of people and laid waste to much of the territory of East Timor in 1999. In February 2000, Wiranto was forced to step down after being accused by international observers and his own government of masterminding the rampage.
A few days later, Wolfowitz appeared on the PBS Newshour with Jim Lehrer. In the opening segment, reporter Gwen Ifill ran a clip of Holbrooke, then the UN ambassador, calling the struggle in Indonesia one between “the forces of democracy and the forces that look backward.” Asked to comment, Wolfowitz quickly agreed with Holbrooke’s characterization, saying “the stakes [in Indonesia] are huge … it’s very, very important to the United States”. Then Wolfowitz commented on the credentials of General Wiranto – a man he knows well.
“You asked is Wiranto a reformer or anti-reform,” Wolfowitz said, “I think the truth is he is history, whichever he was … Wiranto was the general who commanded the army during the first elections in Indonesian history… where the army genuinely played a neutral role. He may have done bad things in East Timor or failed to stop bad things in East Timor, but that’s what makes it so tricky is this president [Wahid] is a reformer. The old president [Suharto] without any question was fighting reform every step of the way … Wiranto, we don’t know. And I think he should be given a fair trial on these charges in East Timor.”
The fact is, we did know about Wiranto; apparently Cold War habits die hard. Wolfowitz’s efforts to whitewash the likes of Chun, Marcos, Suharto, and Wiranto illustrate the bankruptcy of US foreign policy from Reagan to Bush. Americans concerned about what is being done abroad in their names need to watch Wolfowitz’s every move, from Korea to Iraq to Colombia.
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Tim Shorrock is a freelance journalist who specializes in US foreign policy in Asia, labor issues and globalization. He can be reached at tshorrock51@hotmail.com
From December, 2002