Susie Bright has an interesting take on the scandal surrounding Paul Wolfowitz’s promotion and salary increase of his lover and unearths some info I wasn’t aware of.
The appointment of George Bush’s leading hawk as head of the World Bank was heading for a crisis over his relationship with a senior British employee.
Influential members of staff at the international organisation have complained to its board that Paul Wolfowitz, a married father of three, is so besotted with Oxford-educated Shaha Riza he cannot be impartial.
Extraordinarily, they claim she played a key role in pushing the 61-year-old Pentagon official into the Iraq War. And the row comes amid claims that Wolfowitz’s wife Clare once warned George Bush of the threat to national security any infidelity by her husband could cause.
A British citizen - at 51, eight years younger than Wolfowitz’s wife - Ms Riza grew up in Saudi Arabia and was passionately committed to democratising the Middle East when she allegedly began to date Wolfowitz.
After they moved to America, Shaha worked for the Iraq Foundation, set up by expatriates to overthrow Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War. She subsequently joined the National Endowment for Democracy, created by President Ronald Reagan to promote American ideals.
Bulent Riza said Shaha started to “talk to Paul” about reforming the Middle East. And New Yorker magazine’s respected commentator Paul Boyer observed that a senior World Bank official “named Shaha Ali Riza” was an “influence”.
From Hullabaloo (April 2005)
And even though staff complained then, it didn’t change anything. So, the pen is mightier than the sword?
The World Bank is staffed by a well-paid, highly educated secretariat, the vast majority of whom are non-Americans. … Nearly 90 percent of the staff opposed Wolfowitz’s nomination. A day after the banks directors confirmed his appointment, Bank Swirled, a satirical magazine produced by bank employees, reported that a moving crew had delivered some personal items to his new office, including a 1768 map of Iraq, with hundreds of red X’s denoting WMD’s, hundreds of black X’s denoting ‘Oil Well$,’ and one blue X denoting a ‘decent sushi restaurant’.
The zine is as good as The Onion in it’s way and worth a look see (latest issue here).
It may have sounded goofy when it first came out in 2005, but now that he’s had to apologize for the girlfriend fiasco, evidently it was all too true: we went into Iraq as part of a top-bottom love triangle between Wolfie, his mistress and her ex-husband! And I thought Condie was butch!
As Susie says:
So World Bank Prez Paul Wolfowitz’s siphoning of $100,000’s to tip his demanding
dominatrixmistress has backfired. This wasn’t the spanking he had in mind.Woe is he! The whole bank staff booed him when Wolfie tried to “explain,” and you can hardly blame them.
The hubris of Bush’s unpopular appointee provides the “sexy” reason the Bank’s Board can use to force his removal, since apparently ruining the world on the whim of one’s own conceits is not cause for dismissal.
“His womanising has come home to roost,” a Washington insider said.
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