Maureen Dowd: A Wolfie in Sheep's Clothing

Paul Wolfowitz is having fun.

''It's fun to have the chance to be a retail
politician again,'' he told Andrew Balls of The
Financial Times on a recent trip to India. It was an
economic odyssey designed to warm up his image by
tipping off the press to record his shirt-sleeve visit
to a slum and his street dancing with children in
Andhra Pradesh.

When the reporter noted that Mr. Wolfowitz's role as
No.2 at the Pentagon must seem distant, he agreed,
saying, ''Yes, it does seem like a long time ago.''

A lot has changed for this architect of the Iraq war
since he left the scene of the accident. Following the
lead of that other woolly-headed war theoretician,
Robert McNamara, Wolfie scuttled to the World Bank,
where he changed the subject from bollixing up Iraq to
fixing up Africa.

Unlike the Powell maxim ''If you break it, you own
it,'' the Wolfowitz philosophy is ''If you break it,
walk away from it.''

Where on earth are those who egged on the Iraq civil
war? The neoconservatives have moved on to debates
about China and Iran. Richard Perle has dropped out of
sight, except to pop up, as he did at the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee's annual meeting in
May, to urge a military raid on Iran if it's ''on the
verge of a nuclear weapon.''

The president and his generals are still offering
gauzy assessments of our fight against an insurgency
that grows ever more vicious, and dishing out loopy
justifications for the war.

Before Mr. Bush was dragged out of Crawford this
summer, he was making the case that we had to keep
killing in Iraq to honor troops killed there. This
week, Gen. Richard Myers offered more circular logic,
warning that a U.S. defeat would invite another 9/11.
The Bush administration used 9/11 as a pretext for
invading Iraq and now says it can't leave for fear of
spurring another 9/11.

Wolfie and fellow hawks turned Iraq into a harbor for
Al Qaeda with an invasion they justified by falsely
calling Iraq a harbor for Al Qaeda. General Myers said
that America couldn't leave and allow Al Qaeda to
dominate Iraq because ''then in my view we would have
lost, and the next 9/11 would be right around the
corner, absolutely.''

Here's the weirdest perversion: First Rummy, as
President Reagan's Mideast envoy, was photographed
with Saddam, supporting him in the war against Iran.
Then Rummy and other hawks rushed the U.S. into war
against Saddam and ended up turning Iraq over to
Shiites intertwined with Iran. And now Richard Perle
thinks we might have to bomb Iran.

The president spent years saying that Al Qaeda was on
the run, and Rummy spent years saying we just had to
finish off a few Saddam ''dead enders.'' But four
years after Mr. Bush promised to get ''the people who
knocked these buildings down,'' they are finally
talking about Al Qaeda as a threat again.

Perhaps they have no choice, now that Al Qaeda has
supposedly started its own weekly newscast on the
Internet, ''The Voice of the Caliphate,'' with an
anchorman wearing a ski mask and an ammunition belt,
and props like a Koran and a rifle pointed at the
camera. Its top story was joy over Katrina damage.

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee
on Thursday, Gen. John Abizaid called Al Qaeda ''the
main threat we face'' in Iraq, citing its 400 suicide
bombers deployed worldwide. So, when W. says if we
fight them there we won't have to fight them here,
that's just nutty.

Though the Bush gang has maintained that it would be
hard for Al Qaeda to operate on the run, General
Abizaid noted that the group is ''empowered by modern
communications, expertly using the virtual world for
planning, recruiting, fund-raising, indoctrination and
exploiting the mass media'' to break the U.S. will and
try to form a haven in Iraq.

Al Qaeda is exploiting tribal tensions intensified by
the bungled U.S. occupation. Mr. Wolfowitz's
assumption that America could conquer Baghdad and
install the Shiites at the expense of the Sunnis --
with bouquets thrown -- in a religious war that has
been going on for centuries, was naive and dangerous.

The rest of us may be glued to the gruesome pileup of
bodies in Iraq, but Wolfie has moved on. He told The
Financial Times that he still thought the U.S. and the
British did ''the right thing'' for ''the right
reasons,'' and ''hopefully, it's going to turn out the
right way.''

He said that wherever he travels, from Burkina Faso to
Bosnia, Iraq rarely comes up. How fortunate for him.

I mean, I’m all in favour of redheads (and according to one I know who uses the same coffee shop as Ms. Dowd she is, in person, something of a hottie) but really. Can’t we find her a boyfriend or something, give her something else to write about?