"We hate your policies!" shouted one young woman, standing ten meters (yards) from Wolfowitz who went pale and clenched his jaw.

"Killing innocents is not the solution but rather the problem," she said.

"I have to (infer) you'd be happier if Saddam Hussein was still in power," he replied dryly before recalling the regime's cruelties.

A lot of innocents were sacrificed and "the alternative would have been far more brutal, there is no question in my mind."

Two other students among the dozen that had lined up to speak to the man held up as the Bush administration mastermind of the Iraq war also attacked US policy there.

A visibly shaken Wolfowitz caught his breath to tell one of them, "You and I should both calm down."

He later said that the Iraq war was "not an ideological, but a moral issue."

"There is not much question in my mind about the morality of having gotten rid of this regime."

WAR.WIRE