#paul wolfowitz

Fece in tempo a udire il suono del secondo crollo. Attraversò Canal Street e cominciò a vedere le cose, per qualche motivo, in modo diverso. Non parevano pregnanti come al solito, le strade lastricate, i fabbricati in ghisa. C’era una qualche mancanza cruciale nelle cose intorno a lui. Erano incompiute, per cosí dire. Erano inosservate, per cosí dire. Forse era quello l’aspetto che avevano le cose quando non c’era nessuno che le vedesse. Udí il suono del secondo crollo, o lo avvertí nel tremore dell'aria, la torre nord che cadeva, uno sconcerto sommesso di voci in lontananza. La torre nord che crollava era lui. Il cielo era piú leggero, lí, e riusciva a respirare piú facilmente. C’erano altri dietro di lui, migliaia, che andavano riempiendo la media distanza, una massa prossima a formarsi, gente che fuoriusciva dal fumo. Proseguí finché non dovette fermarsi. Lo investí rapida, la consapevolezza di non poter andare oltre. Provò a dirsi che era vivo, ma era un’idea troppo oscura per riuscire a prendere corpo. Non c’erano taxi e il traffico in genere scarseggiava e allora apparve un vecchio furgoncino, una ditta elettrica di Long Island City, e gli si accostò e il conducente si sporse verso il finestrino dal lato del passeggero a esaminare ciò che stava vedendo, un uomo incrostato di cenere, di materia polverizzata, e gli chiese dove voleva andare. Fu solo una volta salito a bordo e chiusa la portiera che capí dov’era diretto fin dall'inizio. "

Don Delillo, L'uomo che cade, traduzione di Matteo Colombo, Einaudi, 2008. [Libro elettronico]

Dear Gus,

On this day 16 years ago, I was a few months into a deployment to Bosnia, where I was writing articles about our troops and taking pictures of visiting dignitaries. Probably the coolest mission I ever had was to tag along with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz while he toured the country. It’s not that Wolfowitz was impressive (because he wasn’t), but I got a behind the scenes look at how a Pentagon PR/marketing team works, and I got all the same treatment as we raced through the cities in our bullet-proof suburbans and flew low over the treeline in our Blackhawks.

Due to some miscommunication, I ended up missing my ride back to Eagle Base in Tuzla and had to spend the night at the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo with Pentagon folks. One of the guys gave me some civilian clothes and took me down to the bar where he bought me my first Red Bull & vodka, which was an emerging thing at the time. We hit it off and he offered me a job to be a photographer at the Pentagon if George W. Bush got re-elected. He did get reelected, but I never called the guy about that job. I would say it was a mistake not to call him, but had I called, I probably would have never ended up at Garver, and therefore never met your mother, and therefore never met you. So I don’t regret it.

Dad

What dreamers they were! They imagined a kind of global power that would leave even Rome at its Augustan height in the shade. They imagined a world made for one, a planet that could be swallowed by a single great power. No, not just great, but beyond anything ever seen before — one that would build (as its National Security Strategy put it in 2002) a military “beyond challenge.” Let’s be clear on that: no future power, or even bloc of powers, would ever be allowed to challenge it again.

And, in retrospect, can you completely blame them? I mean, it seemed so obvious then that we — the United States of America — were the best and the last. We had, after all, outclassed and outlasted every imperial power since the beginning of time. Even that other menacing superpower of the Cold War era, the Soviet Union, the “Evil Empire” that refused to stand down for almost half a century, had gone up in a puff of smoke. 

Imagine that moment so many years later and consider the crew of neoconservatives who, under the aegis of George W. Bush, the son of the man who had “won” the Cold War, came to power in January 2001. Not surprisingly, on viewing the planet, they could see nothing — not a single damn thing —in their way. There was a desperately weakened and impoverished Russia (still with its nuclear arsenal more or less intact) that, as far as they were concerned, had been mollycoddled by President Bill Clinton’s administration. There was a Communist-gone-capitalist China focused on its own growth and little else. And there were a set of other potential enemies, “rogue powers” as they were dubbed, so pathetic that not one of them could, under any circumstances, be called “great.”

In 2002, in fact, three of them — Iraq, Iran, and North Korea — had to be cobbled together into an “axis of evil” to create a faintly adequate enemy, a minimalist excuse for the Bush administration to act preemptively. It couldn’t have been more obvious then that all three of them would go down before the unprecedented military and economic power of us (even if, as it happened, two of them didn’t).

It was as clear as glass that the world — the whole shebang — was there for the taking.  And it couldn’t have been headier, even after a tiny Islamist terror outfit hijacked four American jets and took out New York’s World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. As President Bush would put it in an address at West Point in 2002, “America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge, thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.” In other words, jihadists aside, it was all over. From now on, there would be an arms race of one and it was obvious who that one would be. The National Security Strategy of that year put the same thought this way: “Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.” Again, anywhere on the planet ever.

Look at more or less any document from the period and you’ll sense that they weren’t shy about touting the unprecedented greatness of a future global Pax Americana. Take, for instance, columnist Charles Krauthammer who, in February 2001, six months before the terror attacks of 9/11, wrote a piece swooning over the new Bush administration’s “unilateralism” to come and the “Bush Doctrine” which would go with it. In the process, he gave that administration a green light to put the pathetic Russians in their nuclear place and summed the situation up this way: “America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly, America is in a position to reshape norms, alter expectations, and create new realities. How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will.”