Wolfowitz Interview

The British periodical Prospect has an excellent interview with Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz conducted by Radek Sikorski, formerly of the Polish ministries of Defense and Foreign Affairs and now at the American Enterprise Institute. Coming from such a similar ideological stance, Sikorski doesn’t throw any curveballs, but this article is still one of the better of recent Wolfowitz interviews.

Of particular note is Wolfowitz’s rather glib take on America’s messianic mission to instill(install) democracy. The slow, assiduous Occupation task of institution building is ignored in favor of simply removing the “shackles on democracy,” as if democracy and free markets are not the result of particular national evolutions and structures but the natural state of human societies, a default position that will arise organically when tyranny is removed:

“Export of democracy isn't really a good phrase. We're trying to remove the shackles on democracy. . . . . But it's a funny empire that relies on releasing basic human desires to be free and prosperous and live in peace.”

We’ve seen the culmination of this anti-sociological view of democracy and state building with the tragicomically brief tenure of former General Jay Garner as American proconsul.

Credit where credit is due, Wolfowitz may be the first American official I’ve read who gives a half nod to Chechenya’s “legitimate political concerns (For an OTR discussion of this, along a very similar vein, please click here.):

“The Chechens have legitimate political concerns. But the fact that some of them pursue those ends by means of terrorism puts any country that's serious about opposing terrorism in a very difficult position. And you have to be absolutely clear in denouncing atrocities like what took place in Beslan. But I think it is not condoning terrorism to support a political solution to the Chechen conflict.”

Lastly, the following is revealing of Wolfowitz’s own evolution on the subject of Iraqi democracy. Back in September of last year, I saw with Morgan at New School University, a live Wolfowitz interview conducted by the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Goldberg. During the question section from the audience section (mostly dominated by Trostkyite and Larouchian cult devotees), a woman asked what the Pentagon would do if the Iraqis voted for a theocracy. Wolfowitz tilted his head upward, smiled as if amused, and responded that he doubted that this would happen since “51% of Iraqis are women.” Compare that past faith with a singular modernity, a universal rational that transcends culture with the concerns expressed here:

“We are not trying to control these countries so we can exploit their resources. We're trying to enable these countries to stand on their own feet and our experience says that when they do so, we're better off. It's back to the absurdity of saying we're trying to impose our ideas on other people when we want to help them become democracies. There's more legitimacy to the question of whether we are really prepared to live with what they produce when they become democratic. There's an uncertainty about the democratic process and there's always a danger that bad people will get elected.”

Bad people, eh?
AK