Wolfowitz: “The Next Crusade”
The New Yorker’s profile on Paul Wolfowitz by John Cassidy entitled “The Next Crusade,” is a fascinating glimpse into the personality of the current President of the World Bank and co-architect of the neoconservative movement and of the Iraq war.
Wolfowitz is an idealist and this is his tragic flaw. He wants to help make the world a better place and also has helped create the current quagmire of Iraq. In the vein of Isaiah Berlin’s Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty, Wolfowitz parallels other idealists in their single-minded imposition of their conception of reality on a world that is more subtle and human than their ideas can accept. In this he, and the movement he helped found, parallel failed Marxist and other idealist governments of the twentieth century they profess to detest.
The article leaves me with the conviction that Wolfowitz is a good man. After majoring in Mathematics and Chemistry at Cornell, he started his politico-academic trajectory as a graduate student in Political Science at the University of Chicago. Versed in Arabic, French, German, Hebrew and Indonesian, Wolfowitz has travelled in many developing countries and has seen firsthand many of the problems that the world faces. He is not ignorant to the world’s problems and his push towards war was not grounded in an ignorance of the world outside of the United States. The flaw with Wolfowitz’s ideology is that he believes it is America’s role to make it better and, without any operational experience, he lacks knowledge of how one would go about doing so.
As current President of the World Bank it is unfortunate that his ideology seems not to have changed. Fighting corruption around the world, a mission started under the previous president James Wolfensohn, is the new banner under which Wolfowitz is conducting his crusade. At the root, fighting corruption and alleviating poverty through the World Bank, and spreading democracy by pre-emptively striking Iraq are all products of the same thought process – we know what is best and it is our obligation to force it upon the world. I am not saying that spreading democracy, alleviating poverty or fighting corruption are not worthy goals but rather that imposing them colonially through international institutions, mandates or warfare is misguided and ultimately destructive.
A similar point is made in an argument between Bill Gates and William Easterly at Davos on the effectiveness of foreign aid (see article). Easterly is the author of The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, a book which describes the history of the IMF, World Bank and other international institutions that while attempting to do good, do harm. I think that Bill Gates’ organization is an exception to Easterly’s condemnation precisely because it attempts to implement its goals at the grassroots level. However, I think that Wolfowitz and the neoconservative agenda are precisely what Easterly’s book (and its ideological counterpart in the works of Hayek and Berlin) condemn: utopian plans are doomed to failure. May Wolfowitz one day be humble.
