Paul Wolfowitz, of DoD and World Bank fame, has a cover story in Foreign Policy in which he attempts to repair his shredded reputation as a strategic thinker. Our question: should we be accepting advice from arguably the most murderous and incompetent foreign policy czar since Henry Kissenger, from whom we are also still recovering?
A minor flap has blown up in the most recent issue of Foreign Policy Magazine, where Paul Wolfowitz, former Deputy Secretary of Defense and president of the World Bank, is attempting to rehabilitate his reputation as a thinker in the field of international affairs. Wolfowitz sets out to analyze Barack Obama’s leadership style – to determine whether the President is an idealist or a realist. Idealists, as we all know, populated George W. Bush’s administration, and Bush’s high-minded and well-intentioned idealist camp, we are to understand, includes Wolfowitz himself.
Granted, Wolfowitz, in his FP piece,http://www.foreignpolicy.com/... gives Obama his due, quoting his speech in Ghana: "No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. That is not democracy; that is tyranny, and now is the time for it to end."
"I like the sound of that," Wolfowitz chimes in from his lofty moral perch, "But some realists may not."
The simplistic dichotomy of realist versus idealist, of course, is borrowed from some primitive political science textbook that has little relevance to the planet Earth. Its only utility is to provide a framework on which Wolfowitz can hang a crack-brained explanation for the disastrous decision-making of which he himself was guilty. With the apparent approval of the deep-thinking FP establishment, he now portrays his ideas and the catastrophe that followed their execution as an idealistic commitment to principle and morality in foreign policy. Predictably, the pundits who comment on Wolfowitz’s opinions go baying off in the wrong direction – debating the categories and definitions of idealism and realism. One of them even provides guidance on how to distinguish ‘realism’ with a capital "R" to from realism with a small "r." It is hard to see the usefulness of this exercise, especially considering the source of the debate. For Wolfowitz himself was a both a dopey demagoguing idealist and a cold-eyed throat-cutting realist, depending on the time of day.
After displaying his imperious idealist side at the Defense Department by invading a functioning country of no real danger to the US, he showed his more realistic inclinations at the World Bank. Before his inglorious expulsion, he had displayed for Bank staff and for the public at large neither realism or idealism; in fact, he practiced nothing but mismanagement, poor judgment, abuse of authority and petty personal corruption. As World Bank president, Wolfowitz placed incompetent and unqualified aides with bloated salaries in high-level management positions. He allowed lending to Africa to collapse because he preferred foreign travel and photo-ops to reading tedious and technical World Bank lending documents. He permitted a know-nothing right-wing managing director to expunge funding for family planning from the Bank’s health, nutrition and population strategy (who, amazingly, is still at the Bank). This directive was only stopped by the timely intervention of a whistleblower. Wolfowitz was attempting, over the objections of the board of directors, to embroil the Bank in an ill-conceived lending program in Iraq, which, at the time, had no working banking system and was descending into civil war. And of course, in collusion with the Chair of the board’s ‘Ethics’ Committee, he arranged for his romantic partner to receive generous salary increases and promotions that she had not earned.
In the two years that have elapsed since Wolfowitz was forced to resign as Bank president, he has repeatedly claimed the label of idealist by referring to his anticorruption agenda at the Bank. But in fact, Wolfowitz simply stumbled into the ‘good-governance’ strategy of the previous World Bank president, and bungled it further. Initially, he unilaterally suspended lending to governments he suspected of corruption. When these governments pushed back, he was naively shocked and surprised. Expediently (and realistically), he caved. The government of China, for example, forced him to execute an awkward about-face by threatening to suspend its borrowing requests. Inconveniently this story leaked to the press, complete with an incriminating e-mail.
Before the end, Wolfowitz sat down for chummy chats with Joseph Kabila, the corrupt president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Nursulatan Nazarbayev, the kleptomaniac who runs Kazakhstan. On Kabila’s behalf, Wolfowitz had the Bank’s investigative unit censor a report on corruption that implicated one of Kabila’s girlfriends. She seemed to have stolen a chunk of cash from a World Bank project intended to airlift children out of the Congolese war zones. Next, Wolfowitz helped unfreeze $84 million in bribes that Nazarbayev had stashed in a Swiss bank account. So much for idealism. As he left the Bank in June 2007. Wolfowitz’s main concern was ensuring that he departed with his pension intact. In short, Wolfowitz was an abysmal manager, sniveling sycophant, and craven opportunist. That’s opportunist with a capital "O.’