http://wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3275
by Srdja Trifkovic
Former World Bank chief Paul http://wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3313 will head a high level advisory panel on arms control and disarmament, the State Department announced on January 24. He is returning to government as chairman of the International Security Advisory Board (ISAB). This is appalling news. It is deplorable that this devious and tainted man, who has been wrong—spectacularly, damagingly and provenly wrong—on every issue of substance in the post Cold War era, is to get any government post ever again. It defies belief that he is getting the one that entrusts him with “supplying independent advice on arms control, disarmament, nonproliferation and related subjects,” which means that he will be able to have an impact on the U.S. Iran policy.
Almost three years ago, upon learning of President Bush’s nomination of then Deputy Defense Secretary to become the new president of the World Bank, I expressed relief (Chronicles, May 2005) that “at his http://wvwnews.net/story.php?id=402 from the World Bank. Ostensibly his ouster was the result of a sordid corruption scandal involving his role in securing improper salary raises for his mistress, and trying to cover it all up. According to the Bank insiders, however, her employment contract was used as the handy pretext to get rid of Wolfowitz, the true reasons being gross mismanagement, utter misunderstanding the Bank’s role in the world, and an extreme of arrogance. Either way, however, I assumed that his public service career was finally over:
“Wolfowitz is no longer able to engineer doomed foreign adventures that cost thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of our dollars. The fruits of his past labors are still with us, but at least he is no longer directly involved in foreign policy making. Other officials also make mistakes and blunders; but he is unique in being certain to make them all the time, and on a grand scale.”
I was wrong. Like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, he springs back with gusto just as you think he’s finally done for. Like with Count Dracula (or like with the presumably late Charles Haughey, as per Connor Cruise O’Brian) you need to look over your shoulder even if you find him lying, at midnight, with a stake driven through his heart.
The facts of the case add up to a perverse and troubling story. Most Americans—or at least those who try to think about such things— implicitly assume that the U.S. foreign policy (whether they agree with its conduct or not) is coherent in its assumptions and rational in its execution. Wolfowitz’s various inputs into the “decision making community” over the decades, however, have been neither coherent nor rational by any conventional standard. His personal and professional credibility in the world is non-existant. He has been wrong on so many issues, and so spectacularly and visibly wrong, that his return into the fold marks an apt finale for this deeply flawed administration.
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?p=507#more-507