[Dialogue] The Wages of Hubris

[FacilitationFla at aol.com]

May 2, 2007,  9:09 am 
NYTimes
_Wolfowitz and the Wages of Hubris_ 
(http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/wolfowitz-and-the-wages-of-hubris/) 
Tags: _George  Bush_ (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/george-bush) , 
_Iraq_ (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/iraq) , _Paul  Wolfowitz_ 
(http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/paul-wolfowitz) , _World Bank_ 
(http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/world-bank)  
 
Paul Wolfowitz’s failures as a war architect and as a World Bank president  
flow from the same source, suggests Washington Post columnist David Ignatius:  “
_The lesson of Wolfowitz’s failure_ 
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/01/AR2007050101421.html)  is that you can’t change things 
 unless you truly understand them. That was true in Iraq, and it was true at 
the  World Bank.”  
Ignatius calls Wolfowitz “an idealist who understood everything, except his  
own limitations.” He adds, “When Wolfowitz decamped to the World Bank in 
2005,  he took with him two abiding characteristics of the neoconservatives — a 
passion  for transformation and a disdain for lesser beings wedded to the status 
 quo.” 
The fatal flaws of Wolfowitz and of the Bush administration are one and the  
same, Ignatius says. He writes: 
Wolfowitz has failed at the World Bank not because his underlings were out  
to get him (though many probably were) but because he treated the organization  
itself as an enemy. He saw its professional staff as an impediment to  
achieving his goals, rather than as a potential ally. Instead of heeding  advice to 
work with the prickly international staff and win them over, he  installed a 
palace guard of Americans who, like him, exuded the cocky “we know  best” 
confidence of the Bush administration. 
This disdain for career staff officers — whether at the Pentagon, the  
C.I.A., the Justice Department or an international agency such as the World  Bank — 
is a defining characteristic of the Bush administration and a big  reason for 
its undoing. Administration officials are arrogant — no other way  to put it. 
They ignore the advice of the professionals, whom they regard as  obstacles to 
their agenda of transformation. In their impetuous  self-confidence, they 
become wreckers. 
This hubris recurs again and again. We saw it in Defense Secretary Donald  
Rumsfeld’s high-handed management style, in Vice President Cheney’s continuous  
pressure on C.I.A. analysts to bolster the administration’s message on Iraq,  
in C.I.A. Director Porter Goss’s purge of agency officers suspected of  
disloyalty, in Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s treatment of career  attorneys 
at Justice


 
Cynthia N.  Vance
Strategics International Inc.
8245 SW 116 Terrace
Miami, Florida,  33156
305-378-1327; fax 305-378-9178
_http://members.aol.com/facilitationfla_ 
(http://members.aol.com/facilitationfla) 

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