A Wolfowitz Blog

This is rich and from a fellow Jew too.


Richard Cohen

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04.14.2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-cohen/wolfowitz-mission-accomp_b_45854.html
Wolfowitz: Mission Accomplished? (102 comments )
READ MORE: World Bank, Washington, The Pentagon, Henry Kissinger, Paul
Wolfowitz

As Paul Wolfowitz is proving, it turns out all is not fair in love and
war. Only war. Take a nation to war for spurious reasons and no one
much complains. But arrange a raise for your girlfriend, and you get
booed in the atrium of the World Bank and have to visibly sweat in
public.

As Henry Kissinger might have told Wolfowitz, kill a million people,
no problemo. Show favoritism in the office and it's auf Wiedersehen.
The Wolfowitz Rule, as it shall now be called, was applied to its
eponymous creator when he was transferred from the Pentagon, where he
was deputy secretary of defense, to the World Bank, where he became
its president. That office is always filled by an American since
America provides the largest share of the bank's capital. I can tell
you this with absolute certainty, but after that, I have to admit, I
quickly run out of knowledge about the World Bank. It makes loans to
the third world counties, or something like that. All I know is that I
lived in Washington for 28 years and never once saw an ATM for the
World Bank. Go figure.

Anyway, the bank is where you go after you *** up at the Pentagon.
Robert McNamara went to the World Bank after directing the Vietnam war
which, he later admitted, he knew at the time the U.S. could not win.
He was, as always, right.

Wolfowitz made an admission of his own regarding Iraq. He told Vanity
Fair that the stated reason for the war - all those awful weapons of
mass destruction - hardly mattered to him and, it seems, other
neo-cons as well. It was merely "the one issue everyone could agree
on," he said. As you can imagine, the world bankers were not thrilled
with Wolfie. Truth to tell, they are not thrilled with the Bush
administration in general and, to be parochial about it, its hostile
view of international organizations, of which the World Bank is one.
But the president gets his way and the president named Wolfie and
everything was peachy with one exception: Wolfowitz's girlfriend,
Shaha Ali Riza, already worked at the World Bank. What to do? So after
saying (but not actually doing) that he had consulted with ethics
officers, Wolfie arranged for his girlfriend to be transferred to the
State Department - and to get a raise of more than $60,000 a year.

Now, we must pause to say that this scandal tells you quite a bit
about Washington. In the first place, anywhere else in the world, the
"girlfriend" would be some ditz -- a non-typing, non-filing,
non-working pretty thing who owed her job to a nifty arrangement of
body parts. Not in Washington, though. Ms. Riza is a highly-educated
(London School of Economics, Oxford University) person who is fluent
in French, Italian, Arabic, Turkish and English and can probably, when
plied with enough wine, wax rhapsodic on the appalling agricultural
policies of the Bangladeshi government. This is invariably the sort of
woman who I sat next to at every dinner party I attended in Washington
and to whom you do not dare say, should the moment or the wine seize
you, "Your eyes are like deep pools of love."

Second, the money. In any other world capital a raise to $193,590
would hardly be thought scandalous. This is lunch for some hedge fund
types, a hour or so on a Net Jet, a little car for the little lady, a
bauble for the sec'y or, should the wage earner be a woman, a dress
from Betty at Bergdorf's, a fur or, if you are really splurging,
arugula at Elie Zabar's emporium on the Upper East Side. But
Washington is relentlessly middle class - both in morality and money
which is why, if you concentrate too much on this scandal, you will
fall into a deep sleep.

At this writing - a phrase I've always wanted to write -Wolfowitz is
hanging on by his proverbial thumbs. The world bankers are furious at
him and will, if they can, use the present scandal as a way of getting
back at Bush - for both being Bush (his greatest mistake) and for
inflicting Wolfowitz on them.

As for Wolfowitz himself, you must take pity on the man. He confused
war with love and thought if he could do what he wanted with the
former he could do what he wanted with the latter. Now, he has learned
his lesson.

Mission, as they say, accomplished.

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