The problem that is Wolfowitz - International Herald Tribune
'Paul Wolfowitz is often mentioned as the most brilliant person in government. . . . He is the intellectual force behind a whole new way of looking at U.S. foreign policy. But for all of that [he] should be fired."
I wrote those words in July 2003. It was clear by then that the Iraq mission had not been accomplished in the previous May, as the president had said, and that we were in for a long, hard war made worse by Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld's "fatal combination of hubris and incompetence."
I could have added corruption. For we soon learned the extent of the wholesale corruption of the intelligence gathering process to promote the war, generated in the Pentagon and from Vice President Dick Cheney's office.
Generals who said that invading Iraq would cost more in money and troops than the Pentagon hoped were swept aside, and advice from anyone who actually knew anything about Iraq was willfully ignored.
As I write these words, Wolfowitz is still head of the World Bank, the job President George W. Bush chose for him in 2005 as a reward for failure at the Pentagon. But the time for him to be fired has again arrived.
Instead of the grand corruption of cooking the Iraq intelligence books, Wolfowitz has been caught in the squalid little impropriety of using his influence to get his World Bank girlfriend a job at the State Department, at a salary that exceeds that of the secretary of state herself. It is all the more ironic in that Wolfowitz made stamping out corruption a World Bank crusade.
The real problem with Wolfowitz, however, is that he is a compulsive idealist who cannot see that the price of his ideals may be too high to pay, or that they may do more harm than good.
No one is arguing that Wolfowitz's ideals are wrong. It would be very nice if Iraq were to become a democracy like the United States. It would be even nicer if this could transform the entire Middle East in our image. However, the occupation of Iraq will lead to neither.
It would also be a good thing if world corruption could be weeded out, root and branch, and it would be foolish to deny that the World Bank needed some shaking up.
However, just as a wiser man might have seen that going to war in Iraq was unjustified, unless weapons of mass destruction could be found, Wolfowitz might have seen that his usual practice of riding roughshod over colleagues and board members might be counterproductive to his goals at the World Bank.
A wiser man might have seen that suspending loans to such countries as India and Kenya because there was corruption to be found there, without consulting his own board, might be counterproductive to the ultimate mission of reducing poverty.
A wiser man might have seen that suspending aid to Uzbekistan after it ousted American troops might be seen as an American power play unbecoming to an international aid organization.
The same traits that marked his Pentagon job followed him into the bank - the arrogance, the hubris, and the neoconservative doctrine of going it alone and imposing America's way.
A wiser man might see that ignoring World Bank experts, board members and staff to push through your own agenda, relying on henchmen you had brought over from the Pentagon, might not be the best way to go about getting the bank's work done.
The astonishing thing is that he would be given another chance to practice his zealotry at the World Bank, especially after being the architect of a losing war strategy at the Pentagon.
If character is destiny, one sees a direct link between Wolfowitz's twin failures at the Pentagon and at the World Bank. One sees the danger of idealists who are so sure of their own abilities and truths that they are blind to the damage they do.
Wolfowitz could no more resist forcing his will and methods on the World Bank than Lenin could have kept his hands off corrupt old Russia.
So even if his goals are right, his methods are so deeply flawed and his presidency so badly damaged that it is unlikely that he can remain effective. As the Financial Times said, if Wolfowitz stays, the campaign for good governance will be seen as "not a believable struggle, but blatant hypocrisy."
Let his report card show "doesn't play well with others." But then, that will be the epitaph of the Bush administration.
H. D. S. Greenway's column appears regularly in The Boston Globe.
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