Buchanan : Wolfie’s Bank

Wolfie’s Bank
By Pat Buchanan


"Barracks language edited out, Tommy Franks once referred to the Pentagon’s No. 3, Doug Feith, as “the dumbest guy on the planet.”

It now appears Gen. Franks’ honorific better applies to Feith’s boss, the Pentagon No. 2, Paul Wolfowitz. For a man once hailed as the brightest of the neocons, Wolfie has behaved with a stupidity born of the arrogance of power.

Hailed in 2003 as architect of the Iraq victory, Wolfowitz, by late 2004, was being singled out as the bumbler of postwar planning and the man most responsible for what Gen. William Odom was already calling the greatest strategic blunder in U.S. history.

With the roster of U.S. dead and wounded rising, Wolfie was looking for a place to hide. George Bush, who had heeded his cawing for war on Iraq from the first hours after 9-11, took pity. And more than pity. Bush made him president of the World Bank, the post to which Robert McNamara retreated after seven years at the Pentagon plunging us into another war, a war we later learned McNamara had come to believe we could not win."