Wolfowitz - Return to Sender?

Wolfowitz - Return to Sender?

Analysis by Bill Berkowitz*

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Despite his dismal performance within the administration and his questionable activities at the World Bank, Wolfowitz has been welcomed back into the fold. And, unlike other Bush administration employees -- such as FEMA's Michael Brown, who was forced to resign after his incompetent handling of Hurricane Katrina; or Vice President Dick Cheney's top aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who will be forever linked with the outing of a CIA operative, a subsequent conviction for perjury and obstructing justice, and a presidential commutation; or former Interior Deputy Secretary J. Steven Griles, who was convicted, and recently sentenced to jail time, for withholding information from the Senate Indian Affairs Committee in 2005 about his meeting with Republican Party uber-lobbyist, the now imprisoned Jack Abramoff -- Wolfowitz is once again in a position to influence public policy.

During the early part of its more than 30-year existence, the conservative AEI was seen as "a mainstream, economic policy and political science think tank". A number of respected centrist analysts still at the institute, like William Schneider and Norman Ornstein, still "embody that old style," Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote in a December 2003 piece in The Washington Monthly.

In the early 1980s, AEI was no match for the Heritage Foundation, a younger Washington-based think tank steeped in hard-core conservative politics. The Heritage Foundation combined a capacity to raise significant amounts of money from other conservative foundations with a voracious appetite for publicity. It was able to raise its institutional profile through its unceasing communications with both right-wing and mainstream media sources.

After DeMuth took over the AEI's reins in 1986, the organisation "put in place an astonishingly successful formula for attracting money and garnering influence, which has matched the increasingly aggressive style of Washington's conservative community," Wallace-Wells pointed out.

DeMuth hired the godfather of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, and the late Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who was Ronald Reagan's foreign policy adviser in his 1980 campaign and who had become the first woman to serve as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

From her position as an AEI fellow, Kirkpatrick promoted the policies pushed by the Project for the New American Century, described by RightWeb as "a letterhead group" based in the same office building as AEI and headed by several neoconservative notables including Irving Kristol's son William. Both before and after the 9/11 attacks, PNAC played an aggressive role encouraging the Bush administration to invade Iraq.

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