Wolfowitz Up to More Mischief?
Just 15 months after being forced to resign as president of the World Bank over a conflict of interest regarding his professional and personal relationships with his girlfriend, former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz may be involved in another, far more geo-strategic conflict of interest involving his dual roles as chairman of the State Department’s International Security Advisory Board (ISAB) and chairman of the U.S.-Taiwan Business Council, among whose U.S. members are military contractors who have been dying to get the Bush administration’s approval to sell about 11 billion dollars worth of arms to the island to protect it against the threat of an attack by the mainland.
Condi Rice appointed Wolfowitz - apparently part of her campaign that featured the appointment of Eliot Cohen to become to her Counselor at the State Department to co-opt neo-cons - back in January this year. Like the Defense Policy Board, the ISAB became under Bush a stronghold for all manner of national-security hawks (among the members are former Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security Affairs Robert Joseph; James Woolsey; former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger; and missile-defense devotees associated with the Center for Security Policy, the National Institute for Public Policy, and Southwest Missouri State University, including Keith Payne, Robert Pfaltzgraff, and William Van Cleave), as well as executives from the arms industry (Lockheed, Boeing, SAIC, to name a few). Wolfowitz’s appointment, coming after his disgrace at the Bank - not to mention his performance as Rumsfeld’s deputy and Douglas Feith’s superior from 2001 to 2005 - was seen as a kind of token public redemption that would presumably have little consequence in actual policy terms.
That assessment may have been premature, because, judging by an article appearing in Wednesday’s Washington Times by Bill Gertz, Wolfowitz’s ISAB may be trying to gin up tensions with China, acting as a new “Team B” in persuading policymakers and the public at large that Beijing’s military modernization, especially its missile program, is more threatening to the U.S. than, in Gertz’s words, “many current government and private-sector analyses” have depicted it. At least, that’s the message of the article, which is purportedly based on a draft of an ISAB report that Gertz says is due out in a few weeks.
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