Paul Wolfowitz: Hawk with a lot of loot needs a bit of lady luck

[emad]

Sunday Times



Black humour in Washington. A dying man is asked to choose between two donated hearts, a young athlete’s and that of Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy secretary of defence. “I’ll take Wolfowitz’s,” he decides. But the guy’s 61 years old, the doctors exclaim. “Yeah,” croaks the thrombo case, “but his heart’s never been used.”

However, it seems the neoconservative architect of the Iraq war does have a beating heart — for a girlfriend who is causing ructions at the World Bank, Wolfowitz’s next posting if President George W Bush’s nomination prevails over European howls of distress.

She is Shaha Ali Riza, an Arab feminist who confounds portrayals of Wolfowitz as a leader of a “Zionist conspiracy” of Jewish neoconservatives in Washington. More to the point, she works at the World Bank, where staff are muttering mutinously at the ethical implications of their next president conducting a romantic relationship with an employee.

The man Bush calls “Wolfie”, a former academic better known for his cerebral skills than his amorous adventures, has discreetly been walking out with Riza, an Oxford-educated British citizen who was born in Tunisia, grew up in Saudi Arabia and works as the bank’s senior gender co-ordinator for the Middle East and north Africa. She not only shares Wolfowitz’s passion for spreading democracy in the Arab world, but is said to have reinforced his determination to remove Saddam Hussein’s oppressive regime.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-1533085,00.html

[salin]

1. that first joke is a riot.

I am glad that there is potential precedent setting opposition that might arise to Wolfie's nomination. Wouldn't that be something - if his bullying of Europe in the prewar buildup came back to shoot him in the butt (and embarass bush at the same time). May be too much to hope for - but the prospect even being out there is something.

[Wilms]

2. .