by Jim Mannion
WASHINGTON - Paul Wolfowitz is a soft-spoken hawk in the US administration whose belief in US activism made him a leading intellectual force behind the invasion of Iraq and the greater US push for democracy in the Middle East.
The nomination of the deputy US defense secretary to head the World Bank had been rumored although the Pentagon had played down the possibility.
"He's a compassionate decent man who will do a fine job in the World Bank," President George W Bush told reporters announcing the nomination.
A controversial figure because of his key role in the Iraq war, Wolfowitz, 61, has been closely identified with the neo-conservative wing of the Republican party, founded by onetime liberals disenchanted with the Democratic Party's retreat from the muscular use of US power after the Vietnam War.
Most of his career has been bound up with US foreign and defense policy, rather than economic development that is the traditional mission of World Bank presidents.
The son of a mathematician, he has a PHD in political science from the University of Chicago.
He served as the State Department's director of policy studies from 1981 to 84, as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs from 1982 to 1986 and as US ambassador to Indonesia from 1986 to 1989.
He speaks proudly of his role in helping to engineer the fall of President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines in 1986, who fled exile in the face of a "peoples power" revolution similar to that this year in the Ukraine.
He advocates close ties to Israel, fervently promotes missile defense and argues that Washington, if need be, should not shy away from unilateral action around the world.
During the 1991 Gulf War, as the Pentagon's undersecretary for policy, Wolfowitz was credited with being the most forceful opponent of cutting the war short, and leaving Saddam Hussein in power.
The elder President George Bush rejected his advice, and the US military stood by as a Shiite uprising in southern Iraq that had been encouraged by the United States was ruthlessly crushed by Saddam's Republican Guard.
During President Bill Clinton's two four year terms, Wolfowitz was dean of Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, a leading institution in the training of diplomats and foreign affairs experts.
He kept a hand in debates over the rise of China, later influencing the view of current president George W. Bush that Beijing is a strategic competitor of the United States.
He lobbied unsuccessfully for the United States to arm, train and provide air cover to an Iraqi insurgency being promoted by exiles such as Ahmed Chalabi.
"The key lies not in marching US soldiers to Baghdad, but in helping the Iraqi people to liberate themselves from Saddam," he told Congress in 1999.
A year later, he was back in the Pentagon as deputy to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, another early supporter of action to oust Saddam.
Iraq policy remained on a back burner, however, until the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
But in the years leading up to the US invasion of Iraq in March, 2003, Wolfowitz proved to be one of the administration's most articulate proponents of a war to disarm the Iraqi regime.
When US forces failed to find weapons of mass destruction and were greeted by a bitter insurgency, Wolfowitz came under fire from Democrats and some Republicans for a rosy view of the war's outcome. The violent aftermath of the invasion has left more than 1,500 US troops dead.
During a visit to Baghdad in October 2003, six months after Saddam's fall, Wolfowitz escaped a rocket attack on the Al-Rashid hotel, where he was staying. Visibly shocked, he immediately promised that the United States would continue its work "despite the desperate acts of a dying regime of criminals."
Last summer, he was forced to apologize to journalists covering the war after accusing them of being too afraid to leave Baghdad and reporting rumors instead.

03/16/2005 18:03 GMT