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Wolfowitz Agonistes

I'm on vacation and should really let Monica do her job in peace, but something had to rouse me from my post-tax filing malaise, and this able defense of Paul Wolfowitz did just the trick.

Don't know if you've been following the non-story of how the former defense secretary had to have his girlfriend at the World Bank — Shaha Riza, a long-time employee — reassigned when he became president there, but all evidence suggests that neither he nor she did anything improper or self-serving whatsoever. Has that stopped the headlines from pouring in implying an honorable and tough-minded Muslim feminist is little more than an arriviste using the nasty neocon behind the Iraq war for career gain? Of course not.

The European presses — always eager to place the wrong syllabic stresses on Wolfowitz's name — bury the lead every time, finding inconsistencies and favoritism where none exist, both in and outside the bedrooms of global lending power. When the World Bank cut off funds for Uzbekistan, following the Uzbek "president" Islam Karimov's massacre of government protestors and the U.S.'s swift reply of removing its air force bases from that country, this was another gotcha of compromised democracy export: Wolfowitz was now using the Bank to do the work of the Pentagon. Yet had he kept the checks rolling into to Tashkent after such a gruesome episode of dictatorial state murder, you can be sure that the Guardian and other newspapers would have been all over that story, too, questioning only how the land Borat despises is somehow a new solemn ally of Israel.

Hitchens shows how Wolfowitz is damned if he does, damned if he doesn't:

It is scarcely Riza's fault that she was working in a senior position at the World Bank when Wolfowitz was gazetted as its president. And quite frankly, if I were he, or indeed she, I would have challenged anyone to make anything of it. Of very few other people working there could it so obviously be said that she held her post as of right, and on merit. But we all think we know about "the appearance of a conflict of interest," and so I would like you to read what the general counsel to the bank, Robert Danino, wrote to Wolfowitz's lawyers on May 27, 2005. His letter opens like this:

First, I would like to acknowledge that Mr. Wolfowitz has disclosed to the Board, through you, that he has a pre-existing relationship with a Bank staff member, and that he proposes to resolve the conflict of interest in relation to Staff Rule 3.01, Paragraph 4.02 by recusing himself from all personnel matters and professional contact related to the staff member.

Instead of settling the matter, this disclosure and plain offer on Wolfowitz's part has become the source of all his woes. It was decided by the board of the bank and the "ethics committee" that the board established, that for no reason except a private relationship, Riza had to leave her work at the bank. Feminists and opponents of the glass ceiling should begin paying attention here.

The only recourse that might have saved them — and us — of seeing a private relationship turned into an audited panty-sniff would have been for Wolfowitz and Riza to cover up their relationship and continue at their original posts. And if they were found out… Well, all of a piece with the crafty, lupine intellectual's m.o. for lies and deception, right?

RELATED: Wolfowitz's Girlfriend Troubles

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