Paul Wolfowitz
Paul Wolfowitz
Paul Dundes Wolfowitzis a former President of the World Bank, United States Ambassador to Indonesia, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, and former dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, working on issues of international economic development, Africa and public-private partnerships, and chairman of the US-Taiwan Business Council...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPublic Servant
Date of Birth22 December 1943
CountryUnited States of America
If they continue, then we need to think about what our policy is with respect to a country that harbors terrorists or harbors war criminals, or was in recent times shipping things to Iraq.
NATO is still the most remarkable alliance in history. It stuck together through 40 years of Cold War, and it then joined together to fight in Afghanistan. In the 1980s, I would not have thought this was going to be possible.
Poles understand perhaps better than anyone the consequences of making toothless warnings to brutal tyrants and terrorist regimes.
That sense of what happened in Europe in World War II has shaped a lot of my views.
One of the things that ultimately led me to leave mathematics and go into political science was thinking I could prevent nuclear war.
There has been a good deal of comment — some of it quite outlandish — about what our postwar requirements might be in Iraq. Some of the higher end predictions we have been hearing recently, such as the notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post- Iraq, are wildly off the mark. It is hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army — hard to imagine.
It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army. Hard to imagine.
I mean, we're going to probably debate the Iraq war for at least as long as I'm alive.
We did not go to war in Afghanistan or in Iraq to, quote, 'impose democracy.' We went to war in both places because we saw those regimes as a threat to the United States.
There's a lot of money to pay for this ... the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years...We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.
We certainly hope that U.S. military can be handing this off to other people long before (the end of March) but I think it's right to think of it as goal and not a deadline, ... The real objective, the mission, is to take care of the people who survived this horrible disaster.
The scale of the disaster is so enormous that, frankly, a big part of the effort has to go to figuring what the needs really are.
It would be to the benefit not only of Turkey and Europe but to the entire world, including my country, if the December 12 European Union summit in Copenhagen can succeed in advancing two important goals -- a settlement in Cyprus and an agreement on a date to begin talks on Turkish membership in the EU.
The Secretary is not promoting any individual or group to be the future government of Iraq.