Read Pat Buchanan on Wolfowitz

[DaveE]

Pat Buchanan's take on Paul Wolfowitz, of whom George Bush has apparently made a king......



Wolfie's Bank
Barracks language edited out, Tommy Franks once referred to the Pentagon's No. 3, Doug Feith, as "the dumbest guy on the planet."

It now appears Gen. Franks' honorific better applies to Feith's boss, the Pentagon No. 2, Paul Wolfowitz. For a man once hailed as the brightest of the neocons, Wolfie has behaved with a stupidity born of the arrogance of power.

Hailed in 2003 as architect of the Iraq victory, Wolfowitz, by late 2004, was being singled out as the bumbler of postwar planning and the man most responsible for what Gen. William Odom was already calling the greatest strategic blunder in U.S. history.

With the roster of U.S. dead and wounded rising, Wolfie was looking for a place to hide. George Bush, who had heeded his cawing for war on Iraq from the first hours after 9-11, took pity. And more than pity. Bush made him president of the World Bank, the post to which Robert McNamara retreated after seven years at the Pentagon plunging us into a another war, a war we later learned McNamara had come to believe we could not win.

Now, president of the World Bank is not your average sinecure. The job commands a munificent salary, tax free. Nor does it require Senate confirmation, where Wolfowitz might have had to explain his role in deceiving us into war.

Nor is that all. The job consists of flying first-class around the world, dining in palaces, hobnobbing with the Davos crowd, and doling out billions to Third World dictators and despots. For Wolfowitz, it was a heaven-sent chance to rebuild his ravaged reputation. And he blew it.

A few weeks in Eden, and Wolfie went straight for the apple tree. From memos unearthed by the Financial Times, he gave bank officials specific instructions on the care and feeding of his romantic interest, a mid-level Libyan bank bureaucrat by the name of Shaha Riza.

Warned by the bank ethics committee he was to have no role in deciding Shaha's salary, Wolfie brushed the ethics rules aside.

He ordered Xavier Coll, bank vice president for human resources, to assign Riza to the State Department and raise her salary by some 50 percent, to $193,000 today, tax-free. She would take home more than Condi Rice. Coll was then directed to assure that Riza receive annual pay hikes of 8 percent and be put on a glide path to the highest position of any civil servant at the bank.
By 2010, she would be making $245,000, tax-free.

And what has been Wolfowitz's big cause at the bank? Fighting corruption.

According to The Washington Post, Wolfowitz also had super-agent Robert Bennett negotiate a pay raise to $400,000 for him, equal to that of President Bush, only tax-free. He then brought over two Bush aides from the White House and installed them "in senior positions and rewarded them with open-ended contracts and quarter-million-dollar, tax-free salaries, despite their lack of development experience."

As this spilled out into the press, Wolfowitz, by week's end, was barely hanging on to his job. But Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and the West Wing were behind him. In the GOP of Jack Abramoff and Duke Cunningham, this doesn't qualify as sleaze.

Well, let Wolfie stay on as poster boy of Bush ethics, and let the nation decide whether they wish to continue with this crowd in 2008.

But there is a larger issue than the love of Wolfie for Shara. That is the systematic looting of our country by parasites who are paid the world's fattest public salaries, working in Washington, supposedly to alleviate the suffering of the world's poorest people.

Europe was in ruins in 1945, and there was a need for a World Bank to lend reconstruction money to prostrate nations. But Europe and East Asia are prosperous today, the world is awash in investment capital, and foreign aid is a proven failure.

Why do we continue to subsidize jumbo salaries for foreigners to shovel huge dollops of our tax dollars down the same ratholes year after year?

This is not 1945. America is no longer the world's greatest creditor. She is the world's greatest debtor. In 2006, our current account deficit hit $857 billion. Beijing sits atop a mountain of $1 trillion in reserves. Japan sits on $850 billion. U.S. reserves are pitiful.

Why, when the government is deeper in debt than ever in our history, is this Congress borrowing billions every year to send to the least competent, most corrupt regimes on earth? Why has the World Bank not been shut down, its 10,000 overpaid employees dismissed — or the whole thing deeded over to Beijing or Tokyo? Let them play world banker to deadbeat nations. They've got the money. We don't anymore.

Whatever happened to the movement of Goldwater? What happened to the Party of Reagan? Weren't we once going to put a stop to all this?

To find out more about Patrick Buchanan, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.

http://www.creators.com/opinion/pat-buchanan.html

[Rick Lee]

I expected better from someone as bright at Pat Buchanan. Wolfowitz screwed up here for sure. But other stories I've read about it said he stayed out of his gf's promotion there until he got sick of her being in limbo because no one could make a decision. And it's not Wolfowitz's fault that World Bank employees pay no US taxes. It's been that way for a long long time before he got there. It's totally irrelevant that his gf makes more than Sec. Rice, since Rice is paid by the Dept. of State, whereas Wolfowitz's gf is only detailed there a World Bank employee and is paid by the World Bank. Though, as the World Bank's largest contributor (I read 16% the other day), Wolfowitz and his gf go get some of their pay from US taxpayers. Pat can do way better than this.

[techweenie]

"George Bush, who had heeded his cawing for war on Iraq from the first hours after 9-11..."

Pat ignores the public pronouncements by Dubya that he was going for 'regime change' in Iraq at least 2 years before 9/11, and of course, it was all part of the PNAC plan, published still on their web site.

I guess Pat wants to set Wolfie up as the fall guy on Iraq. I'd say 'nice try' but it's beyond lame.

Wolfie gave his GF a salary increase beyond the published guidelines of the world bank and gave several of his buds cush jobs, even though at least one was holding down a full time job elsewhere.

[rrpjr]

Sliming Wolfowitz
THE WORLD BANK PRESIDENT DID NOTHING WRONG.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Tuesday, April 17, 2007, at 12:35 PM ET

We know no spectacle so ridiculous," wrote Macaulay about the vilification of Lord Byron, "as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality." Change the word "ridiculous" to "contemptible," and the words "British public" to "American press," and you have some sense of the eagerness for prurience, the readiness for slander, and the utter want of fact-checking that have characterized Paul Wolfowitz and Shaha Riza as if they were not only the equivalent of Byron seducing his half-sister, but as if they were financing their shameless lasciviousness out of the public purse and the begging bowls of the wretched of the earth.

I ought probably to say at once that I know both Wolfowitz and Riza slightly, and have known the latter for a number of years. Anyone in Washington who cares about democracy in the Muslim world is familiar with her work, at various institutions, in supporting civil-society activists in the Palestinian territories, in Iran, in the Gulf, and elsewhere. The relationship between the two of them is none of my damn business (or yours), but it has always been very discreet, even at times when Wolfowitz, regularly caricatured as a slave of the Israeli lobby, might perhaps have benefited from a strategic leak about his Arab and Muslim companion.

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.

Perhaps uneasily aware that their decision involved an injustice to someone who was highly esteemed and shortlisted for promotion (and whose job was located a long way away from any decision-making by the bank's president), the ethics committee suggested that an upgrade at Riza's new job might be in order, perhaps also "as part of settlement of claims," to be accompanied by "an ad hoc salary increase." On July 27, the committee's chairman, Dutch politician Ad Melkert, sent a memo to Wolfowitz assuring him that "the potential disruption of the staff member's career prospect will be recognized by an in situ promotion on the basis of her qualifying record."

What could be easier to understand? A highly qualified individual, compelled to leave her job for reasons entirely unconnected to her performance—and forced also to undergo bureaucratic scrutiny of her private life —is at least to be recognized with pay and promotion. The bank's ethics czar, the same Ad Melkert, wrote to Wolfowitz on Oct. 24, 2005, to say that "because the outcome is consistent with the Committee's findings and advice above, the Committee concurs with your view that this matter can be treated as closed." Four weeks later, a personal note was added to this sanctimonious and official one. "I would like to thank you for the very open and constructive spirit of our discussions, knowing in particular the sensitivity to Shaha, who I hope will be happy in her new assignment."

Well, I must say I hope so, too. She must indeed be happy to be dragged through the press as if she were some Levantine concubine or nontyping "secretary," feathering a love-nest with ill-gotten gains. But that's nothing to what Riza would have got if she had insisted on sticking to her original job, as was her right.

The same is true of Wolfowitz: damned whatever course of action he takes. I read over the weekend that a certain bank "staffer" accused him of cutting off aid to Uzbekistan after that country had canceled the presence of United States bases on its soil. The innuendo was clear: The sinister neocon uses the World Bank to punish any dissent from imperialism. Well, the American breach with President Islam Karimov's kleptocratic and megalomaniac regime came after a few massacres of civilian protesters and the exposure of institutional torture. Do you believe that Wolfowitz would have got better press if he had insisted on keeping up the aid payments after all that?

Aha, you say, but why did Wolfowitz take so long to release these nonincriminating internal memoranda? Who acts so defensively if they have nothing to hide? I have no private information to impart here. But it could be that two grown-up people, both with previous marriages and with growing children, did not feel much like undergoing yet another round of "disclosure." For the sake of apparent propriety, they had already had to submit to some rather exorbitant demands. That's just my guess. But I didn't choose to say anything until I had seen the relevant papers, which are clear and conclusive. I wonder if any of the ravenous pseudo-moralists will feel even the slightest blush once they have done the same.

[techweenie]

It's all over but the shouting.

Bush draws up list of candidates to replace Wolfowitz
Gabriel Rozenberg, Economics Reporter

The future of Paul Wolfowitz, the embattled President of the World Bank, was in further jeopardy last night after it emerged that the White House was drawing up a list of candidates to succeed him.

Most prominent on th list is Ashraf Ghani, the man credited with overhauling the economy of Afghanistan after September 11, The Times has learnt. Such an appointment would mark the first time a nonAmerican has held the position in the 60-year history of the global lender.

Senior officials in the US Administration have noted that the White House is softening the tone of its support for President Bush’s former Deputy Defence Secretary. They pointed yesterday to the silence of the Treasury Department and Henry Paulson, the Treasury Secretary, as an indication of the Administration’s attempt to distance itself from the man it parachuted into the job in 2005. Mr Wolfowitz appeared yesterday before a meeting of the World Bank’s 24-nation board, which is investigating whether he broke any rules in arranging a high-paying job at the US State Department for his partner, Shaha Riza, in 2005.


-----------------------

Most media, even when pointing out that Shaha is considered Wolfie's "girlfriend" neglect to mention that Wolfie is married and a father of 3.

[jyl]

Who's being short-listed for Attorney General?

[techweenie]

Originally posted by jyl
Who's being short-listed for Attorney General?

The pattern in the Bush administration has been to look to people from Dubya's circle of trusted cronies, people in his bible study groups and graduates of Regent Law School.

[RallyJon]

And the truth is somewhere in between...

The WB ethics committee set Wolfie up the bomb, that's for sure. Buchanan hates the world bank almost as much as he hates internationalist neo-cons. The above article is the result.

and graduates of Regent Law School

You know, that is a much bigger issue than has gotten play so far. Regent ****** law school!?! Making decisions about Stanford and Harvard law grads? Who do these second-rate, out of their depth, clueless bible thumping "lawyers" think they are?

[the]

Originally posted by RallyJon
Buchanan hates the world bank almost as much as he hates internationalist neo-cons.

He also probably dislikes getting root canals or a sharp stick in the eye.

[kach22i]

Dubya's circle of trusted cronies...............it's an ugly picture.

http://www.scaramouche.motime.com/archive/2005-03