As many of you know, Paul Wolfowitz is in deep trouble at the World Bank for stipulating lavish concessions for his girlfriend, Libyan-born Shaha Ali Riza. In an extraordinary and explosive article, Salon's Sydney Blumenthal lays out the Wolfowitzian tactics for diverting the lines of control past the professionals (career personnel)via compliant ideologues. If you're wondering how this fits perfectly with the AG's recent debacle, read on.
In his article, Blumenthal notes that with help from Karen Hughes, Liz Cheney, and (of course) Douglas Feith, Wolfowitz somehow managed to place his lady friend--a foreign national--deep into formerly secure areas of both the Pentagon and State Department. While we will likely never know who signed off on this sort of thing (get ready for another session of "I don't recall...")there is no question that it was done--national security be damned. And, thanks to both Sydney Blumenthal and Alberto Gonzales, we now know how it was done. More or less.
In his article, Blumenthal notes that no one knows exactly how Shaha Ali Raza burrowed her way into both the Pentagon and the State Department, but he gives us a clue:
"Surrounded by his Praetorian Guard, Wolfowitz insulated himself at the World Bank from the career staff. There, as at the Pentagon, Wolfowitz pushed aside the professionals and replaced them with a small band of politically reliable assistants."
If this paradigm sounds familiar, think: Alberto Gonzales. While a lot has been written about the mental condition of the A.G., I would suggest that the compromise of the DOJ had more to do with the 400+ "politically reliable assistants" like Kyle Sampson who took their marching orders not from the hapless, tragic Gonzales, but from Karl Rove.
The historic compromise of the Department of Justice happened at the hands of the Wolfowitz Protocol: bypass the professionals, and insert a stream of reliable ideologues through which the legitimizer (i.e. Wolfowitz, Bush, Rove) can transmit the orders.
In Blumenthal's words,
"Wolfowitz's regime also uncannily looks like the occupation of Iraq run by the Coalition Provisional Authority, from which Wolfowitz blackballed State Department professionals -- instead staffing it with inexperienced ideologues -- and to whom Wolfowitz sent daily orders."
Before anyone suggests that Wolfowitz and people like him are "brilliant" in finding a way to game the bureaucracy, they should remember that this is a guy dumb enough to (a) get us into the Iraq war, (b) believe anything written by Laurie Mylroie, (c) greedily demand his Libyan girlfriend get only "outstanding" ratings at the State Department, and, (d)slick down his hair with his own spit. On camera.
More likely the neocon thinkers like Wolfowitz were looking upon a way to take over the goverment, and they found it in the most unlikeliest of places: the old Soviet Union.
Back in the early 1990s, Yeltsin's Russian Federation wasn't really the "democratic Russia" it was cracked up to be. Outside Moscow were places that still relied on the tried and true socialist system--the nebulous *Congress of Peoples' Deputies* that took their orders from "central," whereever "central" might be.
During that time period, I happened to be in Almetyevsk, a bustling little Tatarian city located in the center of the fabled Romashkino oil field. At the time the field was 54% depleted, and my American clients wanted a contract with the Tatarian Oil bosses to extract the remaining oil from the ground. But we quickly found that dealing with the bureaucrats wasn't so easy: they were in fact, as powerless as, well. . .Alberto Gonzales. The real power lay in a shadowy cabal of apparatchiks and nomenclatura that extended all the way from Almetyevsk to Kazan--the new "central." Unless we dealt with these people (sociologists call them "legitimizers") we knew we would get nowhere. And that's the lesson we learned: the Soviet system may have had it's big names, but it was actually organized and run by an army of bureaucrats that existed in the shadows. They made the decisions, they skimmed the cream from the top, they drove the Mercedes.
That same system is in place today here in United States. To see America's equivalent of the nomentclatura, the apparatchik, you need look no further than Kyle Sampson, Monica Goodling or Karl Rove. They run the show. People like Alberto Gonzales are just window dressing. Front men. Shields.
Disposable as Kleenix.
With a compliant press, characters like Rove, Miers, Sampson, Goodling, et al, need only the flimsiest of covers. Like Alberto Gonzales. Anyone willing to bet who owns the Mercedes. . .Sampson or Gonzales? My money's on Sampson. And Goodling. And, of course, their boss, Karl Rove.
So, is Wolfowitz doing to the World Bank what Karl Rove (through his creepy doppenganger Sampson) did to Justice? Of course. That's how governments are undermined: install the communication lines staffed by trusted (and ethics-free) ideologues, force out the professinals, and when confronted, fake an impaired memory.
Finally, was Wolfie the genius behind the wide-scale Bush takeover of the bureaucracy, of our federal government?
I really doubt it. Most of these people are not that smart, and neither is their titular boss, George W. Bush (Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court? Please.)
No. Paul Wolfowitz just did what one would expect him to do: he stole the idea from someone smarter:
A guy named Lenin.
UPDATE: To get some idea of the infiltration of the Bush Nomenclatura, read this.