WASHINGTON, March 16 (UPI) -- Having nominated John Bolton to be ambassador to the United Nations and now Paul Wolfowitz to the World Bank, it can only be a matter of time before President Bush proposes Dick Cheney to be the next pope.
Somebody in the White House is either having a lot of private fun with these appointments or thinks it makes sense to test to the limits the efforts being made by a lot of America's allies to forget the troubles of the last four years and start acting like friends again.
"They can't be serious. Can they?" was the reaction of one Cabinet-ranking European minister when he heard the news Wednesday.
Paul Wolfowitz has become one of the best-known No. 2s in history. He is deputy secretary of Defense, and not a member of the Cabinet, and while he is very smart, there were doubtless all sorts of good reasons why President Bush did not give him a more senior job in the first term.
Wolfowitz, who was dean of the School of Advanced International Studies, badly wanted to be director of the CIA. A reputation for messiness both in his famously disheveled office and in his private life after an ugly divorce damaged his chances. But his loyalty and intelligence and single-minded ability to push a policy through the bureaucracy has raised Wolfowitz's stature in Bush's eyes. He is associated with the triumph in toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan and what Bush now thinks of as the delayed triumph in the elections and the eventual democratization of Iraq.
Few Middle East experts see it quite that way, but the president is convinced that he is on the right side of history in the region, and Wolfowitz has consistently been the second-most influential voice of such optimism in the administration after Vice President Cheney.
But nobody in the White House seems to have pondered the lessons of the most obvious failure of Wolfowitz's time at the Pentagon -- his total misreading of the politics of Turkey. Shortly before the Iraq war began, with the Pentagon strategy planning an invasion on two fronts, Wolfowitz visited Turkey and reported that all would be well for the 4th Mechanized Infantry Division to attack through Turkey and northern Iraq.
He was wrong. The newly elected and moderately Islamic government of the AK (Justice and Development) Party, led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who had no liking for the general staff of the Turkish military who had assured Wolfowitz that all would be well, did not want to open its territory as the invasion route against a neighboring Muslim state. Erdogan's government was not so blunt as to say no; they simply left it to a vote in Parliament, which said no - as various Turkey-based correspondents, the local CIA station chief and the British, German and Swedish embassies had predicted. Given Turkish opinion polls and the absence of a U.N. mandate, plus the heavy financial cost that Turkey had suffered for supporting the first Gulf War through the closure of the Iraqi oil pipeline, Turkey's "no" was not all that surprising - except to Wolfowitz.
So despite Wolfowitz's background as an ambassador to Indonesia, and as assistant secretary for Asia, diplomacy and an astute sense of the political dynamics of foreign countries do not seem to be his strong points. Maybe he is learning. He certainly seems able to forgive and forget, telling a visiting delegation of Turkish politicians (mainly from the AK Party) this week that he had put the 4th Division setback behind him. To prove it, he arranged for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to drop by and shake hands.
"Let's look to the future," Wolfowitz told the Turks, according to Turkish sources, and then asked for their support in putting pressure on Syria. He was told that the Turkish government was not comfortable with treating neighbors that way, and indeed, Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer had a friendly visit to Syria planned for next month.
Maybe he'll do better at the World Bank - if the other countries accept him. After all, the European and Japanese pay a lot more into the Bank than the United States, and the Europeans have not forgotten that the White House had blocked one of their nominees to run the International Monetary Fund. Unless Bush has smoothed the way very carefully, Wolfowitz could find his nomination running into some resistance.
It will depend largely on how much the Europeans are prepared to swallow in the interests of good relations in the wake of President Bush's conciliatory European trip. And the Europeans have already collected some concessions. Bush has accepted that Hezbollah may have a political future in Lebanon, even though he still sees it as a terrorist group, and Bush has also gone along with the European diplomatic initiative in trying to cajole Iran to give up its nuclear enrichment (or rather, weapons) program. Above all, Bush earned some very big favors in Brussels when he became the first U.S. president to pay a formal call to the institutions of the European Union, and also rejected conservative advice and repeated that the increasing integration and unity of Europe was still seen to be in the interests of the United States.
In return for those favors, the Europeans will probably grin and bear the nominations of Bolton and Wolfowitz. The Japanese have fewer problems with the nomination; they rather like Wolfowitz, whom they know from his time at the State Department, and he has been most appreciative of Japan's decision to send troops to Iraq.
Still, there are two other constituencies to think of. The World Bank staff were in a kind of shocked mourning Wednesday after the news broke, and without their support, no head of the World Bank can achieve much. Then there is the NGO community, who have never been great fans of the neo-conservative approach to foreign policy.
And finally there are the World Bank's main clients, the developing countries, who may not have much of a say, but they know when a man is controversial. Above all, they remember the last time the Americans sent a man from the Pentagon to run the World Bank. It was Robert McNamara, who had just been running the Vietnam War, which was probably even more unpopular internationally than the Iraq war. And what the developing countries will note is the demotion. McNamara was the Secretary of Defense; now they are being fobbed off with his deputy.
