AL TURABAH, Iraq -- Lionized by conservatives and denounced by liberals as the architect of the second Gulf War, Paul Wolfowitz sits cross-legged in the blowing dust of a hall made of reeds and perspires visibly as a tribal sheik pleads for support. Wolfowitz's blue blazer and red tie add to his discomfort; but the U.S. deputy defense secretary insists on showing respect to a people he has almost certainly helped save from extinction.

Watching him in the fiery 115-degree heat and the blinding glare of a parched wasteland that stretches far beyond the horizon, you know that there is nowhere else in the world Wolfowitz would rather be.[...]

This grueling trip has confirmed rather than shaken the long-distance vision of Iraq that Wolfowitz began to develop in 1979 when, as a junior policy analyst at the Pentagon, he identified Iraq as a regional challenge for the United States. This was, he recalls, "when others pooh-poohed" the idea.

"You can be elated that these people are free but still remember how much they suffered and how much of that suffering was unnecessarily prolonged," Wolfowitz says, referring indirectly to the premature ending of the Gulf war in 1991 by the first Bush administration.

"At least there was still a Marsh Arab civilization capable of being preserved. They would not have lasted another 12 years."[...]

"It is important for Iraqis to show what Arabs can do when they live in freedom," he says to the local leaders gathered here. He has arranged to meet them in the company of Britain's Baroness Emma Nicholson, the redoubtable human rights campaigner who has championed the Marsh Arabs in the European Parliament.

"What we are seeing," Wolfowitz tells me later, "eliminates any moral doubt about whether this was a war against Iraq, or a war for Iraq. This was a war for Iraq."