AMBASSADOR WOLFOWITZ?….Juan Cole retails a rumor “flying around official Washington” today that on July 1 Paul Wolfowitz will become the new U.S. ambassador to Iraq, effectively replacing Paul Bremer. I had two immediate thoughts:
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It serves him right. After all, he’s the one who thought we’d be greeted as liberators and that 100,000 troops would be more than enough to mop things up after the war. Since his rosy estimates got us into this, it’s only fair to make him put his money where his mouth is.
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Paul Wolfowitz as an ambassador!?! What the hell are they thinking?
Now, Juan thinks that having a Likudnik running Iraq would be a disaster, but I have to admit that my thoughts weren’t even that sophisticated. Having a prominent Jewish neocon of any kind running a conquered Muslim country sounds like a disaster to me. I somehow doubt that the thugs in Fallujah, the Baathist remnants, and the al-Qaeda insurgents care all that much about the various intellectual and partisan subtleties of modern Judaism.
Anyway, this strikes me as either (a) a meatheaded idea unparalleled in recent history, (b) a move so brilliant I can’t get my head around it, or (c) another one of those dumb Washington rumors that’s completely baseless. (After all, you don’t really think Kerry is planning to pick Gephardt as his VP, do you?)
Other possibilities are welcome.
