Word: wolfowitz
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...Sept. 15, 2001, President Bush summoned his top national-security advisers to Camp David to plot America's retaliation for the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington. As the group began to hammer out a strategy for war against the Taliban, Paul Wolfowitz, the 57-year-old Deputy Defense Secretary, took a different tack. An Afghan war in his view had the makings of a quagmire. The larger threat to American security was sitting not in a cave in Afghanistan but in a Baghdad bunker. And so, just four days after Sept. 11, Wolfowitz urged Bush...
...Wolfowitz's presentation didn't persuade his colleagues. But he made a lasting impression on Bush. After telling aides that the first phase of the war would be limited to removing the Taliban, the President privately encouraged Wolfowitz--"Wolfie," as Bush calls him--to keep pressing his case. "When he speaks, his intellect is moving so fast that sometimes he's editing as he goes along," says a senior Administration official. "But you always want to listen carefully to what he's saying...
...public and behind the scenes, Wolfowitz spent the following months laying out the case for taking the war to Baghdad. In doing so, he cemented his reputation as the Administration's most influential strategist. Since 1973, when he left his teaching job at Yale to join the Nixon Administration, Wolfowitz has served under every President except Clinton. Along the way, he has won some powerful patrons--including Donald Rumsfeld, his current boss, and Dick Cheney, who hired Wolfowitz as his No. 3 during the first Bush Administration...
When Bush needed a new national-security strategy for the post-9/11 world, he turned to Cheney, who had been carrying one around in his briefcase for a decade. As Secretary of Defense, Cheney had commissioned two top aides, Paul Wolfowitz and I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, to draw up a plan to reorient U.S. defense policy after the cold war. When word of the strategy was leaked, its muscular call for the U.S. to prevent the rise of hostile powers and act pre-emptively against states developing weapons of mass destruction was met with an uproar in the foreign...
Even with close associates, Cheney doesn't tell stories out of the Oval Office. Wolfowitz says he can't describe the evolution of Cheney's thinking on Iraq, "because he is so tight-lipped and careful, I still don't know from the end of the last war what his positions were." Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona considers himself Cheney's friend and a fellow conservative hawk. "Every time I talk to him and I make a pitch about something, he'll say, 'O.K.'" says Kyl. "And you don't know what he's going to do with the information...