Neocons On The Line

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.

Fairly or not, Paul Wolfowitz has become a lightning rod for much of this criticism, and to "cry Wolfowitz" has already become a catchphrase for the pressing questions about U.S. credibility. At a recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Wolfowitz--always a striking presence with his thick black hair, vaguely lupine looks and air of tense repose--was rocked by hostile questioning. Wolfowitz not long ago dismissed Army chief Eric Shinseki's call for a large peacekeeping force as "wildly off the mark." Now he indicated that Iraq looked more complicated than Bosnia. "We've been in Bosnia for eight years," Sen. Joseph Biden snapped back. "That would seem to compute that we're likely to be in Iraq for a long time--a long time."

Wolfowitz himself never thought that his long-sought goal of democratic transformation would be easy. This week, Wolfowitz and the neocon elite gather again for their annual conclave in Beaver Creek, Colo., the ritzy ski resort where last year Natan Sharansky, the Israeli politician and hard-line advocate of Arab democracy, gave the keynote speech (inspiring Dick Cheney, among others). And in Beaver Creek the neocons can--and will--claim an uncertain triumph. There is a kind of emerging democracy in the Palestinian territories. And there is regime change in Iraq. If WMD evidence remains elusive, the horrific evidence of Saddam's savagery only grows: many Iraqis remain grateful for the U.S. intervention. In some ways, things have been easier than expected: U.S. troops scored a lightning victory in Iraq and the worst fears proved unfounded. Americans were not hit by chemical or biological weapons, and the country hasn't yet disintegrated into civil war as some warned. Certainly no one expected a sudden flowering of Mideast peace.

Yet even as the neocons savor these victories, some critics suggest their moment may already have passed. Few in the Bush administration invoke the toppling of Saddam's statue in Baghdad any longer, as they did so euphorically in early May. The future does look messier and more ambiguous than some neocons had hoped, and the hawks now have to figure out how to build things up, rather than knock them down. Among those at last year's Beaver Creek gathering--which is sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, the neocon think tank--was Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi exile leader who was then seen as the neocon candidate of choice to lead postwar Iraq. Now he's been sidelined by the American czar in Baghdad, State Department careerist L. Paul Bremer. Other key neocons, like Wolfowitz's old ally and friend Richard Perle, have withdrawn from public view; Perle resigned as chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board in March amid questions over alleged conflicts of interest related to his business dealings. Most deflating of all, a new Pew Research poll shows rampant anti-Americanism has overtaken even formerly pro-American Muslim countries like Indonesia and Nigeria, both chaotic places where terrorists can congregate.

Just as worrisome is the issue of how to confront other state sponsors of terror and WMD, like Iran, Syria and North Korea. The administration seems far less willing to go to war in those places than it was in Iraq, pushing for multilateral solutions for the moment. But "the neocons have painted themselves, rhetorically, into a corner," says a former senior Bush official. "They're kind of stuck in a position where they can't just let this go. If they're not seen as doing something to get Syria and Iran to take care of terror, they'll look incoherent."