Wolf Baiting

Paul Wolfowitz has some funny notions about the proper use of the military and the extent of American power, but I have to take issue with my liberal friends’ dogmatic antipathy for him – he’s one of us, a bleeding heart. The World Bank is a much better fit for his principles, and he has run the institution with efficiency and vision. Marty Peretz suggests that his recent political troubles have more to do with bureaucratic infighting than with any meaningful wrongdoing:

I've had a feeling all along that Wolfowitz's new troubles were hatched by his political enemies in the World Bank because he has been trying to make it more effective, more honest, and less politicized. These are complicated matters, and he has addressed them clinically with the intention to get results and not only install new procedures.

Peretz goes on to make a less defensible characterization of Wolfowitz as a “practical person who makes practical judgments” – anyone who has seen him testifying before the Senate prior to the invasion of Iraq suspects that Woflowitz’s practicality probably takes second chair to his idealism. But he deserves his defenders, and he finds eloquent ones in Ruth Wedgwood and Christopher Hitchens.

Anti-war/anti-Gonzales/anti-Bush sentiment is strong now. We on the left ought to make sure we hang the right crooks for the right crimes, if only to ensure that we don’t exhaust ourselves in petty vindictiveness.