Sunday, March 27, 2005
Wolfie augers in.
This looks to me like that the White House is looking for a personal reason to withdraw Wolfowitz nomination. The classic version is when a nomine gets too hot the white house will discover a "illegal" nanny and the nomine will vanish. No political heat on the white house, and source of trouble vanishes. This looks to be a variation on that theme.
Jax
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.She studied at the London School of Economics in the Seventies before taking a master's degree at St Anthony's College, Oxford, where she met her future husband, Turkish Cypriot Bulent Ali Riza, from whom she is now divorced.
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".
Wolfowitz became known around the world as one of the fiercest proponents of invasion of Iraq. The Mail on Sunday has learned that Downing Street is "furious" about his nomination, fearing his hardline attitude could alienate large sections of the international community.
But it is his tangled private life that could stop him taking up the World Bank post.
Critics say it would be impossible for Wolfie - as he is nicknamed by Bush - to make independent decisions when his lover, who works on Middle Eastern and North African issues, is so committed to overthrowing Middle Eastern regimes.
"His womanising has come home to roost," a Washington insider said. "Paul was a foreign policy hawk long before he met Shaha but it doesn't look good to be accused of being under the thumb of your mistress."
One of his opponents at the bank said: "Unless Riza gives up her job, this will be an impossible conflict of interest."
