AL TURABAH, Iraq — Lionized by conservatives and denounced by liberals as the architect of the second Gulf War, Paul Wolfowitz sits cross-legged in the blowing dust of a hall made of reeds and perspires visibly as a tribal sheik pleads for support. Wolfowitz’s blue blazer and red tie add to his discomfort; but the U.S. deputy defense secretary insists on showing respect to a people he has almost certainly helped save from extinction.
Watching him in the fiery 115-degree heat and the blinding glare of a parched wasteland that stretches far beyond the horizon, you know that there is nowhere else in the world Wolfowitz would rather be.
We have flown by helicopter 100 miles northeast of Basra and descended into a man-made inferno on the eastern edge of what once were Iraq’s lush and productive marsh lands.
Today, that territory is a salinated desert, the product of Saddam Hussein’s wrath against the half-million people known as Marsh Arabs.
For more than a decade, the Iraqi tyrant drained and diverted water from their lands. His genocidal campaign here was even more devastating than his serial wars on the Kurds in northern Iraq. An estimated 300,000 Marsh Arabs perished. Forcibly resettled in what is as close to Hell as I ever want to experience, the survivors here have re-created a traditional gathering hall that Wolfowitz is visiting.
On this five-day fact-finding trip that began in Baghdad Thursday, Wolfowitz has made a point of putting Hussein’s victims rather than himself in the spotlight. At each station, he talks repeatedly — his critics might say obsessively — about the Baathist regime’s crimes against humanity.
Isn’t he concerned, I ask later, that he seems to be dwelling on the past when Iraq needs to secure its future? Is he seeking to justify a regime change he pursued relentlessly for two decades by raking up deeds that are monstrous but overtaken by the vast new problems of liberated Iraq?
For once, Wolfowitz does not pause to reflect judiciously before responding to a question. Trained as a professor of international relations, he has become passionate about the need for and possibilities of change in Iraq and the Arab world at large. That passion today drives much of the Bush administration’s policy in the greater Middle East.
"It is important to offer firsthand testimony about things I have only read in books until now," the 59-year-old defense intellectual says.
"That part of history I am observing — the destruction, the fear and trembling that the old regime induced in its subjects — is still alive in the minds of many Iraqis. We have to be aware that things could go backwards here if we do not put to rest that part of their history."
Wolfowitz continues: "I plead guilty to optimism — but not excessive optimism — that these are remarkable people who can achieve a change in their lives that will also mean much for the whole region, even if there is more unease than I would have hoped to see at this stage."
This grueling trip has confirmed rather than shaken the long-distance vision of Iraq that Wolfowitz began to develop in 1979 when, as a junior policy analyst at the Pentagon, he identified Iraq as a regional challenge for the United States. This was, he recalls, "when others pooh-poohed" the idea.
"You can be elated that these people are free but still remember how much they suffered and how much of that suffering was unnecessarily prolonged," Wolfowitz says, referring indirectly to the premature ending of the Gulf War in 1991.
Critics who cast him as the leader of a neoconservative, pro-Israeli cabal that has seized control of the administration’s Middle East policy deride him as Wolfowitz of Arabia. But such critics ignore Wolfowitz’s deep intellectual interest in Arab society and his firm belief that it can reform itself, especially if given encouragement from outside.
In his spare time, Wolfowitz reads Arab writers such as Egypt’s Alifa Rifaat, whose collection of short stories, "Distant View of a Minaret," graphically portrays the frustration of women in purdah and other restrictions they face.
"It is important for Iraqis to show what Arabs can do when they live in freedom," he says to the local leaders gathered here. He has arranged to meet them in the company of Britain’s Baroness Emma Nicholson, the redoubtable human rights campaigner who has championed the Marsh Arabs in the European Parliament.
"What we are seeing," Wolfowitz tells me later, "eliminates any moral doubt about whether this was a war against Iraq, or a war for Iraq. This was a war for Iraq."
Jim Hoagland can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200 or hoaglandj@washpost.com.
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