Shifting from 'hard' to 'soft' power

Yenni Djahidin, The Jakarta Post/Washington D.C.

It had been raining unrelentingly since early morning.

The sky was dark and people tried hard to avoid getting soaked. Outside the world's largest office building, the security line was short.

Inside, the line was 10 deep. One by one, those in the line passed through a metal detector and moved to another line to get a visitor's badge. My escort explained that on a busy day, the line could be much longer.

The rain must have kept people away from the Pentagon that day.

The Pentagon is so big that it has its own shopping mall inside the building. Employees can do their banking, shopping, eat a meal and even get groomed without ever leaving the premises.

Deep inside the five-sided building is the office of Paul D. Wolfowitz, the outgoing deputy secretary of defense. He will soon be moving to another huge organization just across the river in downtown Washington, DC: the World Bank.

From running the institution primarily responsible for discharging U.S. "hard" power, 61-year-old Wolfowitz will soon be running a global institution from which the United States, as its largest shareholder, discharges some of its "soft" power.

From helping to fight global terrorism, Wolfowitz will soon be in charge of fighting global poverty.

His impending move to the international lending agency is not as controversial as the role he has played in the four years or so that he served not only as the number two person in the Pentagon, but more as one of the chief advisers to President George W. Bush in waging the war on terror in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

Wolfowitz, rather than his boss, Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, is regarded by many as the real architect of the U.S. campaign to bring freedom and democracy to the Middle East, a theme that President Bush now refers to far more frequently in justifying the March 2003 invasion of Iraq than Saddam Hussein's seemingly non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

"I am most proud of being part of a very impressive team of people," Wolfowitz said during our interview in his office.

Paying tribute to his boss Rumsfeld, he said that during his time there had been a real transformation in the way that the Pentagon was run, chiefly in response to the challenges posed by the threat of terrorism. Still, he recognizes that, ultimately, "soft" power is just as important as raw military power in such a campaign.

"My President has said over and over again that fighting terrorism, which means promoting security for our country, among other things, requires not just the military, but all the elements of national power and influence.

"I think my children and grandchildren will live in a safer world if we can reduce poverty in Africa. So these things are, ultimately, very much connected to one another."

That comes from a family man. Wolfowitz has three children by his wife Clare. The couple are divorced but remain close. Clare Wolfowitz, an anthropologist who specializes in Indonesia, says "we talk almost every day, and sometimes he comes to walk the dog."

In announcing Wolfowitz's nomination for the World Bank job, President Bush referred to the time that Wolfowitz spent as ambassador to Indonesia from 1986 to 1989 as invaluable experience in learning about the challenges facing developing countries.

His time in Indonesia was also when he reached a conclusion on the compatibility between Islam (as practiced in Indonesia) and democracy, a theme that he later used in pushing his ideas for the democratization of countries in the Middle East.

In fact, Indonesia turned into a democracy nearly a decade after he left, but it was Ambassador Wolfowitz in his farewell speech in 1989 who called for greater political openness in Indonesia, a speech that generated a rare and prolonged public debate about the need for Indonesia to democratize.

But when asked about this, Wolfowitz quickly added that it was not just his knowledge of Indonesia that led him to believe that democracy was possible in the Middle East, but also the time he spent at the State Department in the 1980s, when he witnessed a transformation from autocracy to democracy in the Philippines and South Korea.

"I just think that if anyone says that some particular culture, nationality or religious group doesn't care about freedom or doesn't know what to do with it, my usual answer is to invite them to come to the United States and meet that particular group in an environment where they are free, and where they can benefit from hard work and from taking care of their children.

"You see, it doesn't matter where they are from. Under the right conditions (they can), and those conditions require the freedom to pursue your own creative instincts. These differences don't seem to apply, but bad government policy can do all kinds of damage."

There is no doubt, however, that the free and democratic Middle East that President Bush now talks of is a vision that Wolfowitz has entertained for some years now.

There are some signs from the Middle East, notwithstanding the daily violence in parts of the region, that somehow his vision is now very much taking shape, no doubt with some U.S. prodding.

He cited the election in Iraq, including the large turnout in spite of threats and intimidation, the first-ever democratic election in Afghanistan last October, and the Palestinian authority election as examples of how people are seeking to make a difference to their own lives via the ballot box.

The process does not stop there, either. There are, he noted, stirrings of democracy in many other parts of the Middle East, such as in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf states.

"People are debating whether one causes the other. I think there is a tendency for people to be inspired by the example of others."

Nevertheless, he admitted that "there is still a long way to go."

The soft-spoken and mild-mannered son of a Jewish immigrant has been portrayed in the press as, among other things, a neoconservative, a war-hawk and as being naive. So how does he deal with the bad press he has been getting all this time?

Wolfowitz says that he tries to respond in a positive way, explaining to his critics what he is trying to accomplish and why.

"Sometimes, especially if it comes from a very credible source, if it's inaccurate, than you need to correct it.

"But you can't spend your whole life correcting inaccuracies or you won't get anything done."