The Wolfowitz Career Path : Make Disastrous Blunders and Get Promoted
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by
Helen Thomas
25 March 2005
Read here full article in Sun-Sentinel
Edited article
One way of manipulating public opinion away from any negative thoughts that the Bush administration messed up by invading Iraq is to promote Paul D. Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, one of the leading architects of the weapons-of-mass-destruction theory.
Make him President of the World Bank.
Not only are you not admitting a mistake, you're daring the American public to think otherwise.
The Wolfowitz appointment follows
Wolfowitz -- the principal architect of the U.S. invasion of Iraq -- has been wrong so many times that it's a wonder he is still in office.
It's simply astonishing that he's up for a big promotion.
But if Wolfowitz had been put out to pasture or given a second-tier post in the second term, the public would have interpreted such a step as a quiet way of getting a policy embarrassment out of sight.
How to foil such a perception?
There's a note of presidential in-your-face defiance here.Promote the heck out of him. Make him more prominent than ever.
Forget the awkward absence of weapons of mass destruction or the zero links between Saddam Hussein and the 9-11 terrorist attacks. Reality is as the administration defines it.
And that's how Wolfowitz got this plum reward at the World Bank.
- Wolfowitz, the No. 2 civilian at the Pentagon, told Gen. Eric Shinseki, the former Army chief of staff, that he was "wildly off the mark" when he told Congress a month before the invasion that the United States would need at least 200,000 occupation troops in Iraq.
For speaking truth to power, Shinseki was eased out of his Pentagon job ahead of his scheduled departure. To drive the point home, none of the top Pentagon civilians had the grace to attend his formal retirement ceremony.
There are some 150,000 American forces in Iraq, scores of whom have been redeployed there two and three times. - Wolfowitz also is known for falsely forecasting a jubilant welcome for the American invaders. Iraqis would shower them with bouquets of flowers and greet them as liberators.
Wrong again. - He also predicted those Iraqi oil revenues would more than pay for the costs of war and reconstruction.
That has not happened. - My favorite Wolfowitz utterance came when he was winding up his first visit to conquered Iraq in July 2003. "Foreigners," he told reporters, "should stay out of Iraq." (Duh.)
- When asked why the Bush administration hyped the nonexistent threat of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, Wolfowitz admitted that the WMD script was chosen because it was the most saleable argument to persuade the American people to support the war.
His reputation had preceded him.
Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist at the bank and a Nobel laureate, opposes the Wolfowitz nomination on grounds that Wolfowitz could make the bank "an explicit instrument of U.S. foreign policy."
But the major European nations appear resigned to the controversial appointment.
After all, the bank is traditionally headed by an American.
The World Bank is the main lender to poor countries to help fight poverty and disease. Wolfowitz said he supports the bank's "noble mission."
The bank appointment of a high Pentagon personage follows the career path of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who moved from Lyndon B. Johnson's Cabinet to the World Bank after he developed second thoughts about the wisdom of the Vietnam War.
McNamara served as the World Bank president from 1968 to 1981 and focused on reducing poverty.
I saw a very distraught McNamara leave the Johnson inner circle. Johnson -- who was not prepared to brook McNamara's newfound anti-war sentiments -- was happy to see him go.
Since he left the Pentagon, McNamara has spent a lot of time revealing his remorse over the mistakes and miscalculations about the Vietnam War.
I'll wager we won't be getting any apologies or confessions of mistakes about Iraq from Wolfowitz down the road.
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