19 May 2007
“A” Student
I have tried to stay away from the very public disintegration of Paul Wolfowitz for the last few weeks. I hate to watch the slow-motion disintegration of public figures.
Oh, hell, that is not true. I love it like everyone else. Otherwise, there would be no Britney Spears or Mike Tyson. I suppose if I actually knew either of them I would be more sympathetic to their continuing humiliation. They were not very smart, and it must be hard, having all that money, and establishing certain expectations and have it all come unraveled.
I imagine it causes increasingly aberrant behavior to keep the revenue stream going, and the entourage happy, and eventually the end of the road arrives abruptly.
Of course, there is always the come-back, somewhere down the road, and while there is life there is hope.
Paul is in a different category, naturally, since he is legitimately a smart guy and there is only the bit of the salacious in the micro-scandal that brought him down. In my small experience, he was a courteous and nice guy. As far as I can tell, the tempest is at most an ethical blind-spot played out against the back-drop of an attempt to reform a venerable and corrupt institution.
I first met Paul when he was the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy during the first Gulf War. He was smart, and polished, and he had a seat immediately in the front of the little briefing room where we talked to General Powell and Secretary Cheney about the progress of the air campaign to eject Saddam from Kuwait.
The goals seem a little quaint these days, but that is the nature of the past. Working in the Pentagon in those days was stressful but exhilarating. The cast of characters, Cheney, Powell, McConnell and Wolfowitz, were larger than life, and it was electrifying to see them in real human scale.
I have since come to re-evaluate some of my opinions, though not of Powell and McConnell.
In the years that followed, I had with enough of the international organizations- NATO and the UN come immediately to mind- to know that the people that work in them have a very cushy deal and are fiercely protective of their positions.
I often wished I could get one of those deals- the ones with the short working hours, exotic locations, immunity from local laws and nice tax advantages.
Paul came back to the Pentagon when I was just leaving. I assumed he would be a fine DepSecDef for Mr. Rumsfeld, though by then our orbits were not at all in contact. The general feeling in the Five Sided Building was of relief that the Clinton Dilettantes were leaving and the Grown Ups were coming back.
It was with real shock that we realized that the new Administration considered us all tainted, and potentially disloyal, by our association with the former regime.
I was unsettled in a deeply personal way by the attacks on 9/11, since people I knew were killed and the burned gap-tooth of the Pentagon was something we saw every day, going to work or filling up at the military gas station across the road. I was giddy as everyone in the ensuing invasion of Afghanistan and the ejection of the Taliban.
I became increasingly uncomfortable with the linkage of Iraq and the Global War of Terrorism, though I could follow the logic of it. It was better to fight the Jihadis on their own ground, and it would be a grand thing to establish a working democracy in the heart of the corrupt arc of Arab governments.
If I had serious misgivings based on history, I was prepared to put them aside. After all the Grown Ups could not be so horribly wrong and inept, could they?
Of course, as it turned out they were worse than inept, and Paul was becoming a liability as the Deputy at DoD. A fine place for him was found at the World Bank, and despite some controversy over his role in the ramp-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, he was comfortably installed in one of the coolest and cushiest jobs in the international community.
Since World War Two, there has been a tacit agreement that the Europeans would be permitted to appoint the Director of the International Monetary Fund, and the Americans could appoint the Director of the World Bank. The arrangement and the institutions are both growing archaic, relics of the Marshall Plan world. They both have their little quirks and unique cultures.
Paul is nothing if not high-minded, and he apparently believed his mission was to drain the swamp of at the Bank.
I am generally against corruption, and am a wily enough bureaucrat to know that if one is going to embark on a project of breaking rice-bowls, one should don Kevlar underwear and prepare for a robust defense by the entrenched.
He didn't. He took some of his true believers with him and ignored the people who actually ran the bank. He was aloof, and apparently forgot that even if he was cleaner than Caesar's wife he was going to have people with live telephones and sharp tongues gunning for him.
It is almost unthinkable that he would permit himself to have a role, however distant, in the promotion of someone with whom he had a personal relationship. But then, so was the way the Iraq War has played out, strong on offense and without plan for victory.
I got a note this morning from a pal on the Left Coast who said even Paul's greatest admirers acknowledge he was a miserable manager. He was a miserable manager in his spectacularly failure at the Pentagon, and even worse in a tougher management job at the World Bank.
They talked about it on the McNeil-Lehrer Report last night on the Public Broadcast System. They said that Paul was the kind of person Louisiana columnist Walker Percy talked about when he said “do not be the kind of person who gets all “A's” and flunks ordinary living…”
Paul finally quit this week, after negotiating a polite note from the Bank Board or Trustees telling him that he was not an ethical disaster.
Of course, he is leaving another mess behind, having weakened America's position in the international financial community. But that is the way things have worked out for many of the smart people who swept back to Washington with the second Mr. Bush.
“A” students, and professional disasters.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com