From the ‘You’ve Got to be Kidding’ Files: Wolfowitz Getting Cushy Defense Job?

Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet at 12:00 PM on December 3, 2007.

Holy jebus ...

Don't ever say the Bush administration doesn't take care of its own. Nearly three years after Paul Wolfowitz resigned as deputy Defense secretary and six months after his stormy departure as president of the World Bank—amid allegations that he improperly awarded a raise to his girlfriend—he's in line to return to public service. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has offered Wolfowitz, a prime architect of the Iraq War, a position as chairman of the International Security Advisory Board, a prestigious State Department panel, according to two department sources who declined to be identified discussing personnel matters. The 18-member panel, which has access to highly classified intelligence, advises Rice on disarmament, nuclear proliferation, WMD issues and other matters. "We think he is well suited and will do an excellent job," said one senior official.

Wolfowitz, now a visiting scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, will replace former senator Fred Thompson, who quit over the summer to run for president.

I’m sitting here dumbstruck.

Giving Wolfie some cushy intelligence sinecure after he's definitively proven himself one of the most ideologically driven, wrong-headed and, as we found out at the World Bank, corrupt individuals in public service is astounding.

This is the guy Bush’s father dismissed as a “crazy”; the guy who, as Ambassador to Indonesia during the brutal Suharto dictatorship, “was considered closest to and most influential with Suharto and his family, but ... never showed interest in issues regarding democratization or respect of human rights”; the man who was dishonestly cherry-picking intelligence to support American militarism as far back as the 1970s — at that time it was the Soviet threat he was wildly exaggerating -- and, yes, this is the clown who spent a decade pushing for the war in Iraq, predicted it would cost between $10-100 billion, that the reconstruction would largely pay for itself from oil revenues, ridiculed General Eric Shinseki’s prediction that 300,000 + troops would be required to stabilize the country, and consulted his profound knowledge of human behavior to assure lawmakers that conflicts between Sunni, Shia and Kurdish factions wouldn’t in any way hinder the post-war peace and reconstruction.

And let’s not forget the “Wolfowitz doctrine” — an explicit demand for a Pax Americana.

Michael Lind ably summed up Wolfowitz’s career like this:

He would be the model of a scholar and a statesman but for one fact: He is completely inept. His three-decade career in U.S. foreign policy can be summed up by the term that President Bush coined to describe the war in Iraq that Wolfowitz promoted and helped to oversee: a "catastrophic success."

Even the greatest statesman makes some mistakes. But Wolfowitz is perfectly incompetent. He is the Mozart of ineptitude, the Einstein of incapacity. To be sure, he has his virtues, the foremost of which is consistency. He has been consistently wrong about foreign policy for 30 years.

In other words, he's done a heck of a job.

Bringing Wolfowitz back and sticking him on a “prestigious State Department panel” on security issues is the height of cronyism. It says, rather clearly, that no combination of incompetence and ignominy rises to the level of disqualifying a person with the right ideology and a Blackberry full of Beltway contacts from serving in this government.

It's reminiscent of political lineages in developing countries that keep coming back, in regime after regime, regardless of the disasters they’ve wrought on their countrymen.

Bush governance: pathetic as always.

Tagged as: bush, wolfowitz, cronyism, incompetence

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.