Paul Wolfowitz.......perfectly incompetent!

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.

Michael Lind tells us the real reason Paul Wolfowitz should not be president of the World Bank has nothing to do with politics but more to do with the fact that he has not been right about anything for over 30 years.

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."

Wolfowitz began his career in the 1970's by vastly overestimating the power of the Soviet Union. He claimed the CIA was underestimating the strength of the Soviet Union. As we later discovered, the CIA was actually overestimating Soviet Strength. The first Bush recognized an incompetent wing nut when he saw one and managed to neutralize Wolfowitz and the neocons. Bush II was just the puppet Cheney and Wolfowitz needed.

Inadvertently proving that talent always skips a generation, Wolfowitz and his neoconservative allies persuaded Bush to pursue two policies his wiser father had rejected as imprudent: a bid for unilateral world domination and going all the way to Baghdad. By adopting the unilateral hegemony strategy that Wolfowitz favored, the younger Bush alienated most of America's traditional allies and gave credibility to anti-Americans everywhere. By going to Baghdad, as Wolfowitz wanted, the younger Bush exposed the limits of U.S. military power to America's enemies and the world as a whole. That not inconsiderable asset, the mystique of American power, is a casualty of the Iraq war.

The return of Mr. Magoo:

With myopia worthy of Mr. Magoo, Wolfowitz focused on Saddam, not bin Laden, as the major terrorist threat to the United States. According to Laurie Mylroie, the crackpot conspiracy theorist at the American Enterprise Insititute who continues to insist on a Saddam-bin Laden connection, Wolfowitz "provided crucial support" for her book "Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America," published in 2000. The following year, shortly after 9/11, according to Bob Woodward, Wolfowitz told a Cabinet meeting that there was a 10 to 50 percent chance that Saddam was involved. According to former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, describing another occasion, "I could not believe it, but Wolfowitz was spouting the Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, a theory that had been ... found to be totally untrue." As late as October 2002, Wolfowitz spoke of the Saddam regime's "training of al Qaeda members in bomb-making, poisons and deadly gasses." This had no basis in reality.
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"To assume we're going to have to pay for it all is just wrong," Wolfowitz declared, alluding to Iraqi oil revenues that could defray the costs of occupation and reconstruction. It is now clear that the hundreds of billions of dollars the United States will spend in Iraq will come from the pockets of American taxpayers.

No summary of Wolfowitz's catastrophically successful career would be complete without acknowledgment that he was one of the major American sponsors of the disgraced Ahmed Chalabi, whom Paul Bremer's administration in Baghdad accused of involvement in Iranian espionage. Last but not least, following Wolfowitz's diplomatic mission to Turkey to obtain support for the forthcoming U.S. invasion of Iraq, Turkey decided to have nothing to do with the war.

Wolfowitz's "promotion" should not be a surprise.

We live in a country in which privates are punished for the crimes of generals, so it is only natural that Wolfowitz should be rewarded for the blunders, errors and miscalculations that have cost the American and Iraqi people so much by promotion to the World Bank. That's the way it is with Mr. Magoo. Whenever he steps blindly out of a building he has accidentally set on fire, a truck is always conveniently passing by.