"anyway, the bank is where you go after you fuck up at the Pentagon"

[G_j]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-cohen/wolfowitz-mission-accomp_b_45854.html

Wolfowitz: Mission Accomplished? (90 comments )

As Paul Wolfowitz is proving, it turns out all is not fair in love and war. Only war. Take a nation to war for spurious reasons and no one much complains. But arrange a raise for your girlfriend, and you get booed in the atrium of the World Bank and have to visibly sweat in public.

As Henry Kissinger might have told Wolfowitz, kill a million people, no problemo. Show favoritism in the office and it's auf Wiedersehen.
The Wolfowitz Rule, as it shall now be called, was applied to its eponymous creator when he was transferred from the Pentagon, where he was deputy secretary of defense, to the World Bank, where he became its president. That office is always filled by an American since America provides the largest share of the bank's capital. I can tell you this with absolute certainty, but after that, I have to admit, I quickly run out of knowledge about the World Bank. It makes loans to the third world counties, or something like that. All I know is that I lived in Washington for 28 years and never once saw an ATM for the World Bank. Go figure.

Anyway, the bank is where you go after you fuck up at the Pentagon. Robert McNamara went to the World Bank after directing the Vietnam war which, he later admitted, he knew at the time the U.S. could not win. He was, as always, right.

Wolfowitz made an admission of his own regarding Iraq. He told Vanity Fair that the stated reason for the war - all those awful weapons of mass destruction - hardly mattered to him and, it seems, other neo-cons as well. It was merely "the one issue everyone could agree on," he said. As you can imagine, the world bankers were not thrilled with Wolfie. Truth to tell, they are not thrilled with the Bush administration in general and, to be parochial about it, its hostile view of international organizations, of which the World Bank is one. But the president gets his way and the president named Wolfie and everything was peachy with one exception: Wolfowitz's girlfriend, Shaha Ali Riza, already worked at the World Bank. What to do? So after saying (but not actually doing) that he had consulted with ethics officers, Wolfie arranged for his girlfriend to be transferred to the State Department - and to get a raise of more than $60,000 a year.

..more..

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

1. Something to consider:

Ms. Riza is, IIRC, Iranian. Most likely from one of the families of those loyal to the deposed Shah and thus, deposed and in exile themselves. It is not unlikely that these Iranians would like to regain control of Iran and its sources of wealth. A regional strategy of hegemony by the US plays nicely into their desires.

Seems like a nice symbiosis.