Michael Lind doesn’t mince words in his comments on Paul Wolfowitz moving to head the World Bank. He notes that Wolfowitz has been “astonishingly wrong about U.S. foreign policy for 30 years.
Here is the juicy beginning, but the whole piece is available at Salon:
The nomination of Paul Wolfowitz to be president of the World Bank, following his commission of a long and costly series of blunders as deputy secretary of defense in George W. Bush’s first term, comes as no surprise to those familiar with his career. Wolfowitz is the Mr. Magoo of American foreign policy. Like the myopic cartoon character, Wolfowitz stumbles onward blindly and serenely, leaving wreckage and confusion behind.
Critics are wrong to portray Wolfowitz as a malevolent genius. In fact, he’s friendly, soft-spoken, well meaning and thoughtful. 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.
There is a lot cooking on the Bolton nomination, including some new material on him (we think). I will be back with pieces of it shortly.
Stay tuned.
— Steve Clemons
