Does she get her job back now?

For Wolfowitz, a 2nd Chance Dissolves Into Failure

Excellent article about the real issues involved in Paul Wolfowitz's being driven from the World Bank with pitchforks.

I feel really bad for Shaha Riza, because I agree that she shouldn't have had to leave her job. Consider this:

Mr. Wolfowitz contended that it was hypocritical for bank officials to allow Mr. Zhang’s wife to work at the bank but to banish Ms. Riza. Mr. Zhang, now a senior vice president at Citigroup in Hong Kong, was furious, several associates say, because bank rules permit husbands and wives to work at the bank under circumscribed conditions, which Mr. Zhang said he followed, but they bar bank employees from having a sexual relationship with top bank officials outside of marriage. [Mr Zhang's statement may be found here - it's the last of five]

If you're a liberal, put aside your feelings about Wolfie to realise how repulsive this is. OK, I'd hope that this rule is designed to prevent sexual harassment and droit de seigneur and, conversely, favouritism to partners. But where I come from, serious relationships that are not sanctioned by bits of paper are recognised. It is of course hard to know what effect this has actually had on her career, but this will make it hard for her to get work for no crime other than having eccentric taste in men.

In any case, it was found that the Riza issue was not really the problem. The issue was unprecedented for the bank - it can't happen every day that you get a new President with a partner who works in your Middle East section - and the bank agreed that everyone handled the matter poorly. The real issue seems to have been Wolfowitz's propensity to cut the Gordian knot in terms of bank management. For instance:

One official recalled Mr. Wolfowitz dressing down several top employees in the Africa division because they could not tell him whether the incidence of malaria among children had declined as a result of the bank’s program distributing bed nets to families.

I am kind of sympathetic to this because one of the reasons I'm about to launch into a public service career is that I started in an organization where the boss was a really enthusiastic, hands-on sort of a person who also liked to cut the bureaucratic bullshit and get on with the job. It's a tendency I admire. However, my boss didn't complement this tendency with a habit of accusing others of incompetence and corruption! Wolfowitz even managed to alienate the British, which is an impressive achievement.

As you've probably guessed, I do have a bit of a soft spot for Wolfie, despite his multitudinous faults. He has made some genuine efforts to consider the needs of Muslim populations, and seems to have really given a shit about the fate of the Iraqi people under Saddam Hussein, which you wouldn't say about Cheney or Rumsfeld. Still, his trail of destruction illustrates the dangers of letting academics anywhere near policy.

Conservative infighting over the Muslim Brotherhood

This is a very interesting discussion. Conservatives have taken up the cause of Western approaches to the various Muslim Brotherhoods in different countries (including Britain and France as well as Middle Eastern countries), using Reaganite reasoning that moderates protect against radicals, and that approaching China was successful in sidelining the USSR. For instance:

European Social Democracy was our key ally in the Cold War. Without it we would have lost Europe to the Communists. Without the Muslim Brotherhood, and with Poole’s policies, we stand to lose the Middle East and the entire Muslim world. The analogy fits: the Muslim Brotherhood is to jihadism as Social Democracy was to Communism.

In that article, (linked from the MB's very good English website) the authors defend their considerable conservative credentials and reject the idea that they have been soft on the MB. More interesting is their response to Joshua Muravchik:

Josh [Muravchik] adopted the method of the pundit. He consulted one source- MEMRI (an estimable but hardly an objective, scholarly one dedicated to providing the whole picture).

This kind of polemical method took root in the West in the 1960s in the sectarian debates emanating from the universities and the left. It was followed by the gradual takeover of the university, particularly the social sciences and the humanities by those whose first aim was to politicize it, and by politicizing it they meant to radicalize it. They have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. That pole in the partisan landscape was formed by the politically correct left in the university and much of the media, including Hollywood and the network news.

The neoconservatives arose as a reaction to this. They did not throw the first stone. More often than not they were right, especially on this issue of Communism, about which they (and I with them) have been corroborated by historical developments. Bill Bennett was right on the culture wars and that is a vast unexplored area of conservative agreement with Muslims, including many Islamists.

Aside from my disdain for his slagging of leftists, Leiken raises an interesting issue that I have often wondered about. So far, MB supporters in the West have been liberals - people like myself who would also support organisations like Helem, the Saudi Arabian Green Party, and other issues and causes that the MB is less than thrilled about. Conversely, enemies of the MB in the West have been conservatives. This causes me some degree of cognitive dissonance. Does - not - compute!

I have somewhat mixed feelings about what Leiken and Brooke's research will do to Western conservative approaches to Islamism. On the one hand, I despise sectarianism and feel that it is only correct that Western centre-right figures reach out to their counterparts in the Islamic world. The MB has already started doing this in the opposite direction, running (for instance) a positive article about Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. (They lifted it in its entirety from a website called Taqrir Washington, but this is not the place to discuss the MB's enthusiastic embrace of copyleft.)

On the other hand, I am naturally cold on the notion of conservatives gaining more power. I have no love for the notion of gender apartheid, and the increasing fashionability of 'men are from mars, women are from uranus' nonsense in the West gels nicely with Islamist gender separatism. The MB doesn't seem to have a very unified position on women's rights - Abdul Monem Al-Futoh seeks to assure us that women may hold the highest political office, but the official MB line is that "The only public office which it is agreed upon that a woman cannot occupy is the presidency or head of state." Well, that's sort of good - and a great improvement over some other Middle Eastern countries - and I note that the MB has started linking to the Egyptian Centre for Women's Rights campaigns in its Women section. But my skin crawls at the idea that I might inadvertently contribute to making life more miserable for women, gays, atheists or other minorities in the Middle East via my support for the MB.

I endorse Leiken and Brooke's suggestion of engaging the MB, as I have written elsewhere. However, what I would say to the MB and what Leiken, Brooke or even Muravchik might say would probably be quite different.

Besides, it's just really fun to watch conservatives fight each other. You know you love it.

[EDIT] Now the New York Times gets in on the act with Islamic Democrats?, a look at the Egyptian MB and its practices, its need to deal with its Qutbian past, its attitude to Israel and Palestine, which comes to the conclusion that "Even a wary acceptance of the brotherhood... would demonstrate that we take seriously the democratic preferences of Arab voters." Even better, the writer's contact in the MB asks

“I’ve heard that even George Bush’s mother thinks he’s an idiot; is that true?”