Wolfowitz: Mission Accomplished? (Richard Cohen at HuffPost)

Richard Cohen


04.14.2007
Wolfowitz: Mission Accomplished? (72 comments )

As Paul Wolfowitz is proving, it turns out all is not fair in love and war. Only war. Take a nation to war for spurious reasons and no one much complains. But arrange a raise for your girlfriend, and you get booed in the atrium of the World Bank and have to visibly sweat in public. As Henry Kissinger might have told Wolfowitz, kill a million people, no problemo. Show favoritism in the office and it's auf Wiedersehen.

The Wolfowitz Rule, as it shall now be called, was applied to its eponymous creator when he was transferred from the Pentagon, where he was deputy secretary of defense, to the World Bank, where he became its president. That office is always filled by an American since America provides the largest share of the bank's capital. I can tell you this with absolute certainty, but after that, I have to admit, I quickly run out of knowledge about the World Bank. It makes loans to the third world counties, or something like that. All I know is that I lived in Washington for 28 years and never once saw an ATM for the World Bank. Go figure.

Anyway, the bank is where you go after you fuck up at the Pentagon. Robert McNamara went to the World Bank after directing the Vietnam war which, he later admitted, he knew at the time the U.S. could not win. He was, as always, right.
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Now, we must pause to say that this scandal tells you quite a bit about Washington. In the first place, anywhere else in the world, the "girlfriend" would be some ditz -- a non-typing, non-filing, non-working pretty thing who owed her job to a nifty arrangement of body parts. Not in Washington, though. Ms. Riza is a highly-educated (London School of Economics, Oxford University) person who is fluent in French, Italian, Arabic, Turkish and English and can probably, when plied with enough wine, wax rhapsodic on the appalling agricultural policies of the Bangladeshi government. This is invariably the sort of woman who I sat next to at every dinner party I attended in Washington and to whom you do not dare say, should the moment or the wine seize you, "Your eyes are like deep pools of love."

Second, the money. In any other world capital a raise to $193,590 would hardly be thought scandalous. This is lunch for some hedge fund types, a hour or so on a Net Jet, a little car for the little lady, a bauble for the sec'y or, should the wage earner be a woman, a dress from Betty at Bergdorf's, a fur or, if you are really splurging, arugula at Elie Zabar's emporium on the Upper East Side. But Washington is relentlessly middle class - both in morality and money which is why, if you concentrate too much on this scandal, you will fall into a deep sleep. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-cohen/wolfowitz-mission-accomp_b_45854.html

...is that no one in the media mentions that Mr. Wolfowitz is married, and this flap is about his girlfriend. It would seem to be a salient point, yet, nothing.

Does anyone here understand how the Code of Silence works within the Beltway media? Is it just, there's so many glass houses that they don't want to bring something like this up? But somehow it only applies to Republics and cronies of Bush and Cheney. Also, do they feel threatened if they report objectively? Or are they really so far gone that they are mere unwitting collaborators, their minds numbed by their own version of the Stockholm syndrome?

So many questions...