"I can't tell you," Paul Wolfowitz says with justifiable asperity, "how much I resent being called a Wilso nian." As he retires as deputy secretary of defense and becomes head of the World Bank, the man most responsible for the doctrinal justification of the Iraq war, who has been characterized as representing Woodrow Wilson's utopian, rather than the realist, strain in American foreign policy, begs to differ. The question, he says, is who has been realistic for almost four decades.

The sprouting of freedom through the fissures in the concrete of dictatorships began, he recalls, in Greece, Spain and Portugal in the mid-1970s. This, he believes, disturbed Soviet leaders, and should have: It called into question the realism of "realists" who, he says, "were factually wrong" in dismissing the possibility of undermining the Soviet regime with pressures short of force.

Those include pressures for human rights and on economies. In the early 1980s Wolfowitz was part of the successful resistance to abolishing the State Department's Bureau of Human Rights. This was more than a decade after he worked with Sen. Henry Jackson, the Washington Democrat, in preparing for Jackson's extraordinary debate with Stuart Symington, the Missouri Democrat, about ballistic missile defenses.

The debate occurred in an almost unprecedented closed session of the Senate in the summer of 1969. Symington argued that offensive weapons can always overwhelm defenses. Jackson, Wolfowitz recalls, said, yes, but the side building the offensive systems can bankrupt itself in the process, as the Soviet Union came to understand in its death throes.

In the early 1980s, Wolfowitz says, when he was Secretary of State George Shultz's assistant secretary for East Asia, it was the so-called realists who said Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines was a thug, but our thug. But the assassination of opposition leader Benigno Aquino in 1983 showed, Wolfowitz says, the limited ability of brutal power to sustain a regime. There in 1986, and the following year in South Korea, U.S. involvement helped enlarge freedom.

Asked how he could have taken the Cold War fetish of arms control seriously enough to serve in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under President Gerald Ford, Wolfowitz says, "I thought it" -- the fetish -- "could be a serious threat to national security." When it threatened to cripple deployment of Tomahawk cruise missiles, Wolfowitz and others, including the then and future secretary of defense, Don Rumsfeld, successfully resisted. Says Wolfowitz, "When I saw cruise missiles making right-angle turns in 1991 [in Iraq], I felt some satisfaction."

Although Wolfowitz has been accused of being irrationally preoccupied with Saddam Hussein, he says he actually consistently underestimated Hussein's malevolence. "I did not think he would invade Kuwait; or that when he did he would take all of it; or that when driven out he would not say enough is enough; or that he would try to kill President [George H.W.] Bush." But, he says, it is an unusual man who tortures children to intimidate parents....