It's All in the Family

PAUL WOLFOWITZ: MISFEASANCE, MALFEASANCE, EXPOSED, DISGRACED, FIRED . . . . HIRED!

And he has been through that sequence not once but twice – first when he was kicked upstairs from his disastrous fraudulent performance as Deputy Secretary of Defense and was immediately hired as President of the World Bank, and most recently when he was kicked out as President of the World Bank and instantly hired by the American Enterprise Institute, a so-called “think tank”, as a visiting “scholar”. (A “think tank” is Washingtonese for a propaganda-generating organization in scholarly guise, and a place to go when you’ve lost your job.)

Wolfowitz is the person primarily responsible for lying the US into the catastrophic holocaust of Iraq – predicting the invasion would be a "cake walk", that the Iraqis would welcome the aggressors with singing and dancing, and that Iraq was a "brittle, oppressive regime that might break easily”. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell initially blocked Wolfowitz’ war schemes, but Wolfowitz, along with Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, held secret meetings about invading Iraq from which Powell was excluded.

During Wolfowitz' pre-war testimony before Congress, he ridiculed General Eric K. Shinseki's estimates of the size of the post war occupation force and estimated that fewer than 100,000 troops would be necessary in the war. General Shinseki had testified that "something in the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" would probably be required for post-war Iraq.

Wolfowitz testified:
‘There has been a good deal of comment—some of it quite outlandish—about what our postwar requirements might be in Iraq. Some of the higher end predictions we have been hearing recently, such as the notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq, are wildly off the mark.’
In 2006, CENTCOM Commander Gen. John Abizaid testified to Congress that General Shinseki's estimate had proved correct. In July 2007 the US has at least 154,000 troops in Iraq, with 30,000 sent over as the “surge”. That’s about twice what Wolfowitz said would be needed, and events show that it is still insufficient.

Eventually Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz left the Bush administration as total failures, and Wolfowitz was punished by Bush & Co. with a nomination to be president of the World Bank. Criticism was widespread in European media. The former chief economist for the World Bank said that if Wolfowitz became its president, "'The World Bank will once again become a hate figure.” But the nomination was, of course, praised by the US press.

Wolfowitz’ presidency brought not only protests, but also a gigantic salary for Wolfowitz’ girlfriend, and loudly protested appointments of two of his Bush administration buddies, Robin Cleveland and Kevin Kellems, as his close advisors with $250,000 tax-free contracts. Basically, Wolfowitz stole from the World Bank to enrich his friends and was properly fired . . . although he called it a resignation.

End of the line for Wolfowitz, right? Shouldn’t he be looking at the “Help Wanted” ads or considering a career in Burger King management? Oh, no. As soon as he walks out the door of the World Bank he walks into the American Enterprise Institute -- which just happens to be home to other leading advocates of the Iraq war, including omnipresent Richard Perle (ex chairman of the Defense Policy Board at the Pentagon, who has at least as many reasons to be jobless as Paul Wolfowitz has), former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, and Lynne Cheney, the wife of Vice President Cheney.

It’s like a family reunion.

More Missing from the News

Jolly Paul Wolfowitz


For me the biggest news in recent days was the death of Kurt Vonnegut, but for U.S. television's prime time news and commentary shows, the big news was the firing of a particularly repulsive “talk show host”, Don Imus, because of his insulting racial comments about a women’s basketball team. Imus deserved to be fired and exiled to an especially small, cold island in the Atlantic, but did his idiocy deserve more than half of hour-long news programs for several nights?

The rest of the evening TV “news” centered on the stale tale of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who oversaw the mass firing of U.S. Attorneys seen as unsupportive of the Bush-Republican political machine.

A more important story about a more important person was never mentioned at all. There was not a hint that Paul Wolfowitz, “the architect of the Iraq war” who was kicked upstairs by Bush to the presidency of the World Bank when criticism of the war became hot, was in trouble for having engineered the transfer of his girlfriend from the World Bank to the U.S. State Department with a huge salary rise to a bloated salary of almost $200,000 a year. There was no justification for the pay raise. Wolfowitz tried to cover his tracks and at first denied the charges, but recently “apologized” for poor judgment.

World Bank personnel are literally shouting for Wolfowitz to resign. Last Thursday, World Bank staffers heckled Wolfowitz by shouting "resign" as he spoke about the issue. Wolfowitz has “declined to address any details of the controversy.” He has been very unpopular at the World Bank not only for his rude manner but for trying to engineer special privileges for himself.

President Bush, of course, of course, “has confidence” in Wolfowitz. The U.S. Secretary of the Treasury has made public expressions of support.

The “New York Times” wire service mentioned the Wolfowitz scandal online a few days ago, and later I found the story on Google news. Today the wire service headlines are to the effect that Wolfowitz intends to “weather the storm” and remain president of the World Bank in spite of demands for his resignation.

My point, of course, is that the U.S. news media are protecting Wolfowitz by not featuring his story – and generally not mentioning it at all on television -- for the same reason that the media screamed for I. Lewis Libby to be pardoned after his conviction for perjury. ”Let’s Hear it for Libby, Folks!”


In the case of Wolfowitz’ s misdeeds, still being debated, silence is the best protection while support is being organized (and paid for) behind the scenes. In Libby’s case, the object is to keep him out of jail after he was convicted, and so the best course was a loud public outcry about “injustice”.

Those two men are being supported and protected in one way or another because they are Jewish. (The publicly whipped Alberto Gonzales, by the way, is Catholic.) I’ve discussed this phenomenon and will discuss it in future posts. Again and again we’ve seen Jews receiving news media support in situations where gentiles have not. In financial scandals and frauds where several guilty parties are involved, it is mostly the non-Jewish miscreants whose names appear in the headlines, while the Jewish participants are hardly mentioned even if they had the leading roles. At the least, the volume is turned down when Jews are mentioned. There is a history in financial and corporate crime of gentile “front men” going down amid loud publicity while the Jewish co-criminals somehow fade away with no or little punishment.

Wolfowitz earned notoriety and condemnation long before he committed misdeeds as head of the World Bank. He is more responsible than any other single individual for engineering the invasion of Iraq. It was he who jumped in front of a camera shortly after 9/11 and said that it would be necessary to "end states that support terrorism." I was shocked at the ominous words “end states”, which were soon translated into, “Attack Iraq.” Wolfowitz and his fellow “neocons” such as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, and Lewis Libby did everything possible to boost arguments and manufacture false evidence to justify a United States war on Iraq. Of course Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were also involved. Interesting, is it not, that Rumsfeld was forced to resign in disgrace, while Wolfowitz – who bears much more responsibility for the Iraq debacle than Rumsfeld – escaped to a plush job as head of the World Bank.