among them relaxed and enjoyed their world music and GM-free organic food. Makiya cut a lonely figure as he toured American universities and think tanks trying to prick consciences. In his speeches he declared that it was foolish to regard Iraq as a sovereign nation whose internal affairs were its own business, and not only because of the crimes against humanity the Baathists had committed. Iraq’s political system was now the responsibility of the international community, he argued. The United Nations had imposed sanctions and no-fly zones but had left Saddam Hussein in power. Iraqis were ruled by the Baathists, and punished because the Baathists ruled them.
His audiences tut-tutted and offered what sympathy they could. Few had the faintest idea what to do. At the end of a talk in Washington DC, a well-dressed middle-aged man with a lined face and an intense gaze approached Makiya and offered him an apology. He in particular and the United States in general had let the people of Iraq down in 1991, he said. We should never have allowed Saddam to crush the rebellion. The massacre and his own failure to act haunted him.
‘I was impressed,’ Makiya told me. ‘It was an unsolicited gesture. There was no audience watching, no possible political gain. He said his name was Paul Wolfowitz. It meant nothing to me.’
Within a decade Wolfowitz’s name would be a swear word. As the conservative journalist Mark Steyn noted, the first half reminded his enemies of a scary predator and the second of a scary Jew. At the time, Wolfowitz was just another Republican out of office during the Clinton years. His last government job was as under-secretary of state at the Pentagon from where he watched in 1991 as Bush senior ordered American troops to pull back from helping the Iraqi revolutionaries for fear of upsetting a Saudi Arabian monarchy that most definitely did not want to see democracy in the Middle East. A character based on Wolfowitz appears in Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein fulminating at the cowardice of it all. ‘They send out a terrific army and give a demonstration of up-to-date high-tech warfare that flesh and blood can’t stand up to. But then they leave the dictatorship in place and steal away.’
Bellow didn’t get it right, Wolfowitz wasn’t shouting ‘forward to Baghdad’ in 1991, but he agonized over the failure to remove the Baath Party and the tens of thousands of Iraqis who had died in the attempted revolution. Wolfowitz’s academic parents brought him up on George Orwell and other writers from the democratic left. His father’s family had survived European fascism by fleeing Poland before the Nazis invaded. Other relatives weren’t as fortunate. He did not find a policy which left fascist dictatorships in power easy to live with. According to the conventional measures of the time, Wolfowitz was on the Right and Makiya on the Left, but they weren’t so different in beliefs and background, and in any case, conventional measures were no longer as reliable as they once had been.
George Packer, a historian of America’s involvement with Iraq, presents Wolfowitz as a tortured man who wanted to remove Saddam but accepted the reasons for stopping at the Iraqi border in 1991. If the Americans were to go in, of course, ‘the obvious question would have been: What then? It’s a question that Wolfowitz never managed to answer.’
If this makes Wolfowitz sound a tad more likeable than the standard portrait of a blood-crazed lackey of imperialist oil corporations, then that is because he was. True he had been a Cold Warrior and produced ludicrous overestimates of Soviet strength in the Seventies. But as communism fell apart, democracy began to follow Wolfowitz around. He argued that America should back the revolution against Ferdinand Marcos, its Cold War dictator of the Philippines, and was a supporter of the democratic movement against the pro-American tyranny in Indonesia and the feminist cause in Iran.
I saw him at a press briefing in London in 2004. It was a disconcerting occasion. His adviser told me to meet him in a Mayfair nightclub more usually associated with minor royals than shabby journalists. To make matters worse, the bulk of Wolfowitz’s audience consisted of Conservative pundits I’d attacked over the years – occasionally fairly. This wasn’t my world and I found the only other leftie in the room and huddled next to him for warmth. We listened to Wolfowitz present a coherent case for helping the democratic movement in Iran fight the priests. It was hard not to be impressed by his seriousness of purpose.
On the way out, I asked my friend, ‘What’s wrong with supporting the overthrow of a theocracy?’
‘Well, it may not work, but apart from that nothing.’
That was the nub of it. The Wolfowitz who introduced himself to Makiya in the mid-Nineties, and the other neo-conservatives who were to take up the anti-Saddam cause, were hated because of their espousal of causes the liberal-left had once owned but no longer had the moral self-confidence to defend. Freud’s narcissism of small differences played its part in widening the divide that opened up as the second Iraq war approached; as did the subconscious acknowledgement that the devil had stolen the best tunes. ‘The neo-conservatives were fighting the Left’s battles for them,’ said Makiya pithily, and no one likes a plagiarist.
Like many other political labels from Tory to suffragette, ‘neo-conservative’ began as an insult. Michael Harrington, a left-wing American activist in the Seventies, invented it to describe liberals who retained their support for the New Deal and welfare state but wanted a hard line against the Soviet Union. The Republican neo-conservatives of the Nineties were different. They had no affection for social democracy. They didn’t support the welfare state but said they wanted to ‘reform’ welfare – i.e. cut it – while simultaneously stuffing the pockets of the wealthy. After 9/11, the Republican priority was to give a huge tax cut to the rich – in contravention of the old and honourable policy that in time of war soldiers and their families should be the first to be compensated. The British Liberals and Conservatives who sent hundreds of thousands to die in the trenches of the First World War gave working-class men the vote when it was over. In 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Democrats passed the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act that guaranteed the troops help with finding jobs or a good education when the Second World War was over. When American soldiers came back from Afghanistan and Iraq, they found the Republicans had acknowledged their sacrifice by giving the boss class a tax break for staying at home. Neo-conservatives were as much in favour of privatization and executives bloating themselves at the expense of workers and taxpayers, and just as willing to make excuses for know-nothing creationists, as any other American conservative. In domestic policy, there was no ‘neo’ about them.
Their difference with other conservatives was their opposition to ‘realism’ in foreign policy. Or rather, the neo-conservatives held that they were the true realists, as everyone in politics does. The interests of the United States lay in spreading democracy, they said, because democracies did not go to war with each other. This was an idealistic, almost Utopian foreign policy which looked as if it would have no influence in Washington. George W. Bush wasn’t a convert. He won power in the 2000 Presidential election on an isolationist ticket and said he had no time for the ‘liberal’ wars of his predecessor, Bill Clinton. Wolfowitz and his friends had limited influence until Mohamed Atta and his fellow martyrs proved on 11 September 2001 that oppression in the Middle East was not producing virtue, superior or otherwise. Tyrannies were pushing the disaffected into a psychopathic cult of death. For all the interminable arguments about the origins of the second Iraq war, the simple truth remains that it would never have been possible without the atrocities in New York and Washington.
The friendless Iraqi opposition had been befriended by the neo-conservatives long before. I remember listening in wonderment to socialist Kurds just back from Washington after Bush’s election in 2000. They were full of praise for the determination of Wolfowitz and the other neo-conservatives in the Pentagon to overthrow Saddam. Makiya shared their admiration. By 2002, he had had enough of writing about victimhood and the treason of the intellectuals. The Baathists had been in power for all of his adult life and he wanted them out. Republic of Fear became a part of the case for war. When no weapons of mass destruction were found beyond odds and ends, you could say it became the whole case for war. Makiya too became a partisan. He argued in favour of going in, and threw himself into the intense and vicious debates within the US administration. Afterwards as he looked on the bloodbath that followed the invasion, he explained that he sided with Wolfowitz against the CIA and the State Department because Wolfowitz and the neo-conservative