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Trigger Man
In Paul Wolfowitz, messianic vision meets faith in the efficacy of force.
by Andrew J. Bacevich

...Niebuhr rendered the definitive judgment: “power cannot be wielded without guilt.” Applied to liberal, democratic America, this somber assessment had two implications: first, it rendered obsolete claims of innocence dating back to the founding of Anglo-America; second, it imposed sharp limits on the uses of power. According to Niebuhr, there was no escaping this vise. Any attempt to do so would produce dire consequences, practical but above all moral....

...As the end of the 20th century approached, Providence was clearly summoning the United States to rule. Yet for Wolfowitz, the summons to rule complemented rather than transcended America’s prior mission to redeem. If the New Rome, the United States also remained the New Jerusalem. As Wolfowitz saw it, the possession of great military power facilitated the merger of these seemingly antipathetic roles. America’s interests and American ideology were becoming indistinguishable.

One prospective result would be to free American statesmen from ever again aligning the United States with Stalin to defeat Hitler or with Mao to check Brezhnev. Never again would raison d’etat oblige presidents to soil themselves by associating with execrable tin-pot dictators. Through military power, the United States could recapture the innocence sullied in the aftermath of the nation’s rise to great-power status. An American-dominated military revolution could revive American Exceptionalism and disprove Niebuhr....

...For Wolfowitz, therefore, the unspeakable tragedy of 9/11 also signified a unique opportunity, which he quickly seized. Urging that the global war against terror be recast as a global war on behalf of freedom, he placed himself in the vanguard of those calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. A war to liberate Iraq promised to change the face of American grand strategy. By irrevocably committing the United States to a broader and heavily militarized campaign aimed at liberating the entire Islamic world, it would signify the triumph of principles that Wolfowitz had long espoused.

But for that triumph to occur, the war needed to happen. In this sense, the yearnings for a peaceful resolution expressed by Wolfowitz and other senior Bush administration officials during the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom surely qualify as disingenuous. The object of the exercise was never to disarm Saddam peacefully. The aim was always to demonstrate the invincibility of American arms, thereby resetting in a fundamental way the international correlation of power globally, and especially in the Islamic world. Violence as such was a sine qua non, its use expected to endow the United States with greater reserves of leverage, influence, and respect....