i heard this on the news today too. Wolfowitz certainly has his own take on things. i always thought the PNAC was a little too heavy handed or paranoid. i don't really know what more they can do militarily at the moment, though. we are tied up in iraq and invading iran or n. korea would be a mistake. bush is mainly focused on domestic issues right now anyway.
here's an interesting article ("The Believer") about Wolf's political stance written during a visit to Europe and injured soldiers:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?041101fa_fact
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Wolfowitz’s critics accuse him of naïveté, of setting out a vision that fails to consider fully the complex and unpredictable regional dynamics of tribal loyalties, honor, revenge, and Arab pride in Iraq and in the region generally. They argue that the invasion and the subsequent insurgency have undermined American authority throughout the world and have led to more, not fewer, jihad-minded terrorists. Wolfowitz often responds to critics by drawing an analogy to Asia, where skeptics once argued that Confucian tradition was a barrier to the development of democracy. He has said, “This is the same Confucian tradition that more recently has been given a substantial share of the credit for the success of the Korean economy and many others in Asia.”
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perhaps their pigheadedness will do some good. fareed points out that if bush visited the middle east more, he would probably be less optomistic about the prospects to turn it around.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7103517/site/newsweek/
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But therein lies the danger. It is easier to imagine liberal democracy than to achieve it. Ronald Reagan imagined a Soviet Union that was politically and economically free. Twenty years later, except for the Baltic states, not one country of the former Soviet Union has achieved that. There have been more than 50 elections in Africa in the past 15 years—some as moving as those in Iraq, had we bothered to notice them—but only a few of those countries can be described as free. Haiti has had elections and American intervention, and still has foreign troops stationed there. Yet only a few of these elections have led to successful and free societies.
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by the way, those asterisks had me confused.