“He had taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land.” - Joseph Conrad

American policy maker Paul Wolfowitz reminds me a lot of Joseph Conrad’s character, Kurtz, from his seminal tome, “Heart of Darkness.” Kurtz never allowed himself to be judged by the same standards as other mere mortals, nor has Wolfowitz. He seems manufactured in the image and likeness of another purveyor of malevolence - Henry Kissinger! Wolfowitz has so far escaped earthly punishment for his serial wrong doings. In fact, incredibly, he has been rewarded with another high paying sinecure by the Wire Pullers.

Wolfowitz was the prime architect of the Iraqi War, when he was the Deputy Secretary of Defense for the Bush-Cheney Gang. (1) He is the father of the Pre-emptive War Doctrine. He also has close ties to the supra-hawkish Neocon, Richard Perle, and to elements within the Military-Industrial Complex. The appalling Abu Ghraib and Gitmo torture scandals happened on his watch, as did the notion that the Geneva Convention didn’t apply to Muslim POWs seized by the U.S. in Afghanistan. He also wrongly predicted that the oil revenues from Iraq would finance the war. Now, Wolfowitz runs the World Bank from a plush office, located in Washington, D.C. He is also an intellectual, a former teacher, a Zionist and Israeli Firster, a fanatical disciple of the Nihilist philosopher, Leo Strauss, and a man, (thanks to Michael Moore’s film, “Fahrenheit 9/11” for this disclosure), who isn’t afraid to publicly spit on his dirty comb and apply it to his hair before doing a sound bite for a tv news program. (2)

Getting back to Conrad’s novel, “Heart of Darkness.” In the book, the sinister Kurtz insisted on being treated as a God by the natives in the Congo. His lust for the valuable ivory caused him to lose his soul and to abandon all restraints. Kurtz was a hollow man, and so is Wolfowitz, who has been morally blinded by his own Neocon-infested extremism. Kurtz sought riches and fame from the ivory. He had written an idealized document on how the natives should be treated, but it ends with these words, ”Exterminate all the brutes.” Wolfowitz wanted to be seen by his peers as an idealistic ideologue, more specifically, a “pragmatic idealist.” He arrogantly believed the U.S. could export democracy to an Arab country at the barrel of a gun. As the U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia, he regularly ignored the gross human rights violations of its dictator, General Suharto, particularly in East Timor. And when Wolfowitz was a State Department honcho assigned to the Philippines, he, and his then assistant, the now indicted Irv “Scooter” Libby, failed to curb the excesses of the thuggish Ferdinand Marcos’ regime. (2) What a hypocrite Wolfowitz is!

Despite how the Establishment uses its immense power to protect Wolfowitz’s image, I think he’s a bum. (3) Every time a bomb goes off in Iraq, I curse his name. Every time I see a dead body on the tv screen lying in the streets of Mosul, Fallujah and Baghdad, I curse him again. And when the news reader says, “Four more Americans were killed in Iraq today,” I curse Wolfowitz even louder. I despise him for what he has unleashed in the name of the American people in Iraq and for all of the innocent wounded and dead there; for destroying a country of over 26.7 million souls, whose roots go back into antiquity and who had never offered us any harm. I curse him, too, for the enormous cost of this conflict to our treasury. I also damn him for all of those brave men and women in our military, who have returned to their homes without their eyes and limbs; and, finally, for making more enemies for us in the Islamic World. It was the arrogant Wolfowitz, who said that the Weapons of Mass Destruction were just a convenient excuse for the war. If there is a hell, he deserves a very special place in it.

Wolfowitz is a gross distortion, a caricature of our country, its badly conned masses and its fast-fading values. He represents what can happen to a nation, when it allows a warmongering bureaucrat, without any real checks and balances on his conduct, to act out his darker, lethal impulses. Putting someone like Wolfowitz, a raving Neocon, in a position of power was like putting the fox in charge of the hen house. (4) How did this loose cannon get into a place of making our defense policy? When will our nation be rid of this dangerous Neocon menace? (5) When, if ever, will our rudderless country comes to its senses?

Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired USAF Lt. Col., who worked at the Pentagon for nearly five years, shared this keen insight into Wolfowitz’s psyche. On June 30, 2003, she wrote, “For a refined intellectual type, [he] has a lot to answer for in the arena of human life and death...But when the blood toll is paid, Wolfowitz’s soul will resemble the Civil War painting he keeps in his office. The painting, known as ‘The Bloody Lane,’ represents the deadliest single day in the Civil War. It is a ghastly reminder not only of death and war, but a powerful symbol of the tyranny of the state and the sacrifices it requires, machine-like, in its name. I am not sure why Wolfowitz chooses this painting for his office...In Wolfowitz’s war, a war of security for Israel, security for global oil and the petrodollar, and a war of occupation, the reasons fail to inspire the kinds of sacrifices seen in ‘The Bloody Lane’... To unseat a dictator, to end WMD proliferation in the Middle East, to bring ‘democracy’ to Iraq - since when have these types of hypocritical imperial explanations meant anything other than state corporatism spiked with a dose of the righteous evangelical?”

Continuing in the same prescient vein, Kwiatkowski zoomed in on her subject, “Wolfowitz is an intellectual fan of the War of Aggression, as he is the intellectual father of today’s aggression in Iraq. To flesh out the sacrificed souls for neo-conservative imperialism - to make these souls real, to hear their crying, to consider their demands for respect and national autonomy, to perceive their suffering, to sense their frustrated anger - that is unacceptable for neo-conservatives in general, and it is unacceptable for Wolfowitz in particular, as a key thought-donor in this ill-conceived aggression...” (6)

Unfortunately, there are others like the deranged Wolfowitz in the Bush-Cheney Gang, who want to take this country into yet another unjust war. This time their “First-Strike” target is Iran, which like Iraq, is also “swimming in oil.” If you suspect that these schemers are planning a “surprise,” before this November’s midterm elections, you may be right. (7) The Congress, with liberal fakers such as Democrats Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-MD), Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) and Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA), in it, is mostly too cowardly, or too complicit, and/or too timid to stop them. The controlled Media is also part of the problem. It will be worse after that pathetic Katie Couric takes her post at the CBS TV evening news desk. Only the people can do it. But, if they can’t understand the evil that is Wolfowitz, how can they be expected to see the awesome devastation that will soon be unloosed by his clones? No wonder, Conrad had the beastly Kurtz’s utter these final words as he lay dying in the jungle: “The horror! The horror!”

Sources:

1. www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/041101fa_fact
2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Wolfowitz
3. www.antiwar.com/justin/j072803.html
4. www.holology.com/neocon.html
5. www.batr.net/neoconwatch/
6. www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski24.html
7. www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/060417fa_fact

© William Hughes 2006

William Hughes is the author of “Saying ‘No’ to the War Party” (Iuniverse, Inc.). He can be reached at: liamhughes-AT-comcast.net.