Paul Wolfowitz: The Engine Behind The Power

While digging for stuff about 9/11, I recall a name that always jumped out at me. Paul Wolfowitz. He's been described as the engine behind the Bush administration. The brains.
He left a job teaching at Johns Hopkins University in 1973 to join the Nixon administration. He's a member of the PNAC, He was the Deputy Secretary of Defense under Rumsfeld. He was a military analyst for Reagan and later he was a leading member in the PNAC.
It's interesting that they were pushing new policy that basically said they wanted to push preemptive strikes on any country that was potentially aggressive, they dismissed containment. Sound familiar? It should.
I just described the Iraq war. These are the people we have running our country. Scary isn't it?
In an article by Time Magazine it is said that:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101030127-409546,00.html
"On Sept. 15, 2001, President Bush summoned his top national-security advisers to Camp David to plot America's retaliation for the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington. As the group began to hammer out a strategy for war against the Taliban, Paul Wolfowitz, the 57-year-old Deputy Defense Secretary, took a different tack. An Afghan war in his view had the makings of a quagmire. The larger threat to American security was sitting not in a cave in Afghanistan but in a Baghdad bunker. And so, just four days after Sept. 11, Wolfowitz urged Bush to go to war against Iraq.
"Wolfowitz's presentation didn't persuade his colleagues. But he made a lasting impression on Bush. After telling aides that the first phase of the war would be limited to removing the Taliban, the President privately encouraged Wolfowitz--"Wolfie," as Bush calls him — to keep pressing his case. "When he speaks, his intellect is moving so fast that sometimes he's editing as he goes along," says a senior Administration official. "But you always want to listen carefully to what he's saying."
And that Wolfie spent the months following 9/11 laying out a plan to explain why they went to war in Iraq instead of Afghanistan. Considering the fact that he has close ties to Rumsfeld and Cheney, it's not hard to see why..check this link.
Another quote from Time had Scooter Libby praising his name:
Though often caricatured as Washington's most menacing hawk, Wolfowitz is popular for his self-deprecating humor. "Bad pennies keep turning up," Wolfowitz said in an interview with TIME this month, mocking his own lengthy resume. A trained mathematician who speaks four languages, Wolfowitz is at ease discussing anything from Civil War battles to how he performs Eskimo rolls in his kayak. "Paul is one of the smartest guys I've ever known," says I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff. Says a senior official who has worked with Wolfowitz in both Bush administrations: "He's had an intellectually coherent set of views he's pursued over a long time. On Iraq, on the Soviet Union — those ideas have stood the test of time."
So, who is Paul Wolfowitz? He was Time's Person Of The Year in 2003, and he's also the guy that said:
"I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq. Those who want to come and help are welcome. Those who come to interfere and destroy are not."
What a guy that Wolfie!!