Paul Wolfowitz (born December 22, 1943) is an American political advisor and United States Deputy Secretary of Defense.
He is a neoconservative and Straussian known for his "hawkish" views, passionate pro-Israel advocacy and staunch support for war on Iraq.
Wolfowitz is currently United States Deputy Secretary of Defense — second in charge of the defense department, under the US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld.
A military analyst under Ronald Reagan, Wolfowitz was later a leading participant in the Project for the New American Century. That think tank formed in 1997 during the Clinton presidency, and expressed a new foreign policy with regard to Iraq and other "potential aggressor states", dismissing "containment" in favor of "preemption"; strike first to eliminate threats.
Clinton, along with George H. W. Bush, Colin Powell, and other former Bush administration officials, dismissed calls for "preemption" in favor of continued "containment." This was the policy of George W. Bush as well for his first several months in office. Many saw Wolfowitz's plan as a "blueprint for US hegemony" and his "preemption" policy remained contained until the terrorist attacks of September 11 revived hawkish advocacy for defending by attacking.
Folllowing the terrorist attacks of 9-11 debate began within the White House as to the degrees of action to take against Al Qaeda. The neoconservative members of President Bush's cabinet led by Wolfowitz advocated premptive strikes on terror cells in Afghanistan. This signaled the start of a new direction in the foreign policy plan of the Bush Administration, and led to the creation of what would later be dubbed the Bush Doctrine.
Secretary of State Colin Powell supports the philosophy behind containment, as a moderated degree of action. It is his advice which President George W. Bush has balanced with Wolfowitz's calls to action, beginning with the US appeals to the UN which resulted in UN Security Council Resolution 1441, and other diplomatic maneuvers.
Wolfowitz received a bachelor's degree from Cornell University (1965) in mathematics, and a doctorate in political science from the University of Chicago (1972).
On October 26, 2003, Wolfowitz was in Baghdad, Iraq, on a visit to the war-torn country. While he was staying at the Al-Rashid Hotel, several rockets were fired at the building, killing an American colonel and wounding 17 others. Wolfowitz escaped unharmed.
--below is from gov site " class="external">http://www.defenselink.mil/bios/depsecdef_bio.html On February 5, 2001, President Bush announced his intention to nominate Dr. Paul Wolfowitz to be Deputy Secretary of Defense. He was unanimously confirmed by the Senate on Feb. 28th and sworn in March 2, 2001 as the 28th Deputy Secretary of Defense. This is Dr. Wolfowitz's third tour of duty in the Pentagon.
Dr. Wolfowitz taught previously at Yale (1970-73) and Johns Hopkins (1981). In 1993, he was the George F. Kennan Professor of National Security Strategy at the National War College. He has written widely on the subject of national strategy and foreign policy and was a member of the advisory boards of the journals Foreign Affairs and National Interest .
For the last seven years, Dr. Wolfowitz has served as Dean and Professor of International Relations at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of The Johns Hopkins University. SAIS is widely regarded as one of the world's leading graduate schools of international relations with 750 students, studying on campuses in Washington, D.C.; Nanjing, China; and Bologna, Italy. As Dean, he led a successful capital campaign that raised more than $75 million and doubled the school's endowment. Also under his leadership, the curriculum and facilities were modernized and new faculty and programs were added to shift the school's focus from the Cold War to the era of globalization.
From 1989 to 1993, Dr. Wolfowitz served as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy in charge of the 700-person defense policy team that was responsible to Secretary Dick Cheney for matters concerning strategy, plans, and policy. During this period Secretary Wolfowitz and his staff had major responsibilities for the reshaping of strategy and force posture at the end of the Cold War.
Under his leadership, the Policy Staff played a major role in reviewing war plans for the Gulf War, and developing and executing plans that successfully raised more than $50 billion in Allied financial support for the war and prevented Iraq from opening a second front with Israel. Other key initiatives included the development of the Regional Defense Strategy, the Base Force, and two presidential nuclear initiatives that led to the elimination of tens of thousands of U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons.
During the Reagan administration, Dr. Wolfowitz served for three years as U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia - the fourth largest country in the world and the largest in the Moslem world. There he earned a reputation as a highly popular and effective Ambassador, a tough negotiator on behalf of American intellectual property owners, and a public advocate of political openness and democratic values. During his tenure, Embassy Jakarta was cited as one of the four best-managed embassies inspected in 1988.
Prior to that posting, he served three and a half years as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, where he was in charge of U.S. relations with more than twenty countries. In addition to contributing to substantial improvements in U.S. relations with Japan and China, Assistant Secretary Wolfowitz played a central role in coordinating the U.S. policy toward the Philippines that supported a peaceful transition from the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos to democracy.
Dr. Wolfowitz's previous government service included two years as head of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff (1981-82); An earlier Pentagon tour as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Regional Programs (1977-80), where he helped create the force that later became the United States Central Command and initiated the Maritime Pre-positioning Ships, the backbone of the initial U.S. deployment twelve years later in Operation Desert Shield; Four years (1973-77) in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, working on the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and a number of nuclear nonproliferation issues; and a year as a Management Intern at the Bureau of the Budget (1966-67).