Stoopid Stuff

Actions Have Consequences

This is Paul Wolfowitz. The head of the World Bank, he is under fire for using his position to get his girlfriend a cushy job and a huge pay raise. Now this is hypocritical because, as a full-on Neocon Bushie, he had been using an artificial, selective, disingenuous anti-corruption platform to inject Right Wing Bush Administration policies into what has been up to now, and what is supposed to be, a politically neutral agency.

Typical conservative hypocrisy, sure, but here's the interesting part. If it had been most anyone else, the small violation of good faith, this almost understandable overreach in the name of cronyism would have been overlooked, or at most handled quietly and administratively. It certainly would not have resulted in the tumult and shouting we have now, and that Bank President's job would be safe.


Wolfowitz's job is most certainly not safe, with most Bank employees openly wearing blue ribbons to signify their dissatisfaction with his leadership and a number of world leaders, along with the Bank's leadership calling for his dismissal. Why, you might ask, would such a small transgression result in such a large outcry and it's attendant consequences?

Paul Wolfowitz is known as the "Architect of the Iraq War". As early as 1972, as an analyst in the Pentagon he worked with a group that came to be known as "B Team", examining raw intelligence and questioning the assumptions inherent in the CIA's National Intelligence Estimate. In what would become a recognizable pattern, he refused to accept the CIA's "conventional" findings, in this case about the capabilities and intentions of the Soviet Union. B Team produced a report describing a number of secret Soviet superweapons, not a single one of which has turned out to ever even have existed. But that report did serve to turn the US away from what had been "detente" with the Soviet Union under Nixon to a much more adversarial footing under Reagan.

By 1977 Wolfowitz had discovered Iraq. Even then he was warning that the NATO and the west were at risk if Iraq, the dominant military in the Gulf region, were to seize the oilfields. This lead to two things. First, the wests vast expenditures to support and arm the Saudis, and second, it was the beginnings of a core group of American policy makers, including Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith and Libby to agitate for war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

It would take them two and a half decades, but with the election of George Bush as President and Dick Cheney as VP, they got their chance. Driven by Wolfowitz, now Undersecretary of Defense, they exploited the 9/11 attacks, used false or misleading intelligence and ignored any intelligence that couldn't be made to support their position to create the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. With nearly a million dead, as many as another two million displaced, Iraq utterly dysfunctional and every other oil-producing nation in the region at risk of being torn apart by the bitter sectarian and nationalist violence that was unleashed by this illegal and unnecessary occupation, the world knows Wolfowitz's role in bringing about this horror. Everyone knows there is much blood on his clean academic hands, and all the people who have suffered because he treats the world like a giant "Risk" gameboard holds him responsible.

So now, after causing a great upheaval of death and suffering, he is rewarded with the prestigious position of President of the World Bank. But he cannot just walk away from his history. He is responsible for the greatest crime of this century so far, and he will not find peace or continued success. He is hated, for good reason, and there is no transgression he can commit, no mis-step he can make, no lapse in judgement he can have that will not be used to repeatedly punish him.

It is widely believed he deserves nothing less than a cell in The Hague. Indeed, we may yet see that in his lifetime, but until then, he should not expect to be treated as a fellow member of the human race. If he is not a monster, he has acted monstrously, and actions have consequences.

posted by mikey @ 2:56 PM