Word: wolfowitzes
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...Within the Administration, the person most closely associated with seeking a democratic transformation of the Middle East is Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense. But it's not clear that his position is shared by all his colleagues, and he is easy to dismiss by those who are pessimistic about the ability of the U.S. to remake the world. In the New York Review of Books, Anthony Lewis recently allowed that he was "moved by [Wolfowitz's] optimism, but I kept thinking of one thing: Vietnam...
...Wolfowitz says, based on his time in Indonesia and friendship with many Indonesians, that the bombing will generate "widespread shock and horror at how evil people have abused their country." And, if the bombing is found to be the work of Muslim extremists, "it's going to be the Muslims of Indonesia who in huge numbers are going to be angriest," he says...
...Wolfowitz says that the U.S. must not pressure Indonesia to crack down on terrorists. After a half-century of living under various autocracies and dictatorships, the Indonesians are leery of giving police too much power. "The Indonesians have been slow to arrest people," Wolfowitz acknowledges. "You get into difficult judgments - we would say that the evidence is there and that they're simply too concerned about the possibility, which is real, that it will be misunderstood by their public as simply a cracking down on people for their religious beliefs, which happen to be the beliefs of a great majority...
...other hand, they would say, look, as you see in so many U.S. domestic cases, the evidence always has a somewhat-murky quality," says Wolfowitz. "Americans need to understand we're dealing with a country that only recently became a free country, after some 50 years of different forms of dictatorship. They're leery about (giving) too much authority to the police. The very kind of civil-liberties issues that make it difficult for us, in many ways make it much more difficult for them...
...Indonesia must get over its fledgling-democracy jitters and do the same, Wolfowitz says. "I think we should be a little bit careful about being judgmental, but I do think that they have got to shift the balance a little more to the security side rather than the caution about over-reaching," he says...