One of Paul Wolfowitz's admirers is Christopher Hitchens. That's one thing we learn in a Washington Post portrait of "probably the best-known deputy secretary of defense in recent memory" (to quote a White House aide), published today.

Another Wolfie watcher, Hisham Melhem of Beirut's Al-Safir, a paper which has absolutely no sympathy for the administration's war in Iraq, is quoted as saying:

It takes my breath away when I think about the scale of the transformation that [Wolfowitz and others] are trying to achieve in the Middle East. It is so radical, so optimistic, so audacious. It is a new American imperium. . . . They are going to create an earthquake in Iraq that will reverberate throughout the region.

Hisham probably meant it negatively, but somehow that didn't quite come through. It does remind me, though, of what the Syrian intellectual, Sadeq al-Azm, told me, namely that a democratic Iraq could have an impact on the Middle East similar to that of Perestroika on the USSR.