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Roger,

That would be choice: bigfoot “neo-con” bete noir Wolfowitz finally the one to bust the left’s top late-20th Century bogeyman.

Lefties will just burst, like in Scanners.

Cordially…

Roger, on the kleptocratic scale, Pinochet’s $15m is chump change. When I was at Citibank during the mid-90s the private bank had a client high in the Mexican federal police department who kept a $15m cash balance in his personal account. Salinas IIRC siphoned off some $100m. Collor in Brazil stole ca. $2B during the ’80s. Arafat socked away $2B acc to MI5. Saddam probably stole several times that sum.

Typical private bank accounts for top officials in countries rich in natural resources like oil (read: fungible exports, huge cash flow, easily concealed profits through intermediary “tading” organizations) are upwards of $100m.

Wolfowitz will have his work cut out for him.

Kleptocracy is indeed the greatest threat to third world living standards. The problem is that it’s almost always associated with massive governmental incompetence in economic matters, along with excessive bureaucracy and weak rule of law. Can’t cure one of these ills without curing all the others simultaneously. Very difficult to do.

The sound that you just heard was Suha Arafat taking Augusto Pinochet off of her speed dial.

ìRoger, on the kleptocratic scale, Pinochet’s $15m is chump change.î

Absolutely correct. $15 million is a joke. Pinochet may not be a perfect human being, but he was right to remove Allende from office. Did he directly know about the tortures and murders, or did he prefer to simply look the other way? I donít have the answer to this question. Nonetheless, Chile is today both prosperous and democratic. This probably would not have occurred without Pinochetís efforts.

$15 million?

What fraction of a percentage of the Oil for Food money does that represent?

By third world standards 15 million is not impressive. But we have got to get to the point where banks and other institutions don’t just look the other way at this kind of thing. No doubt the left will have a field day with this, but since when did they care when one of their own did a little stealing or even starved his own people just to get some more money to sock away in an account on some island somewhere? Aren’t the Caymans a British protectorate?

Pinochet is a sick, senile, incontinent old man now and so it is easier to go after him. But this is Chile’s business more than it is ours.

Like Roger, I hope that Wolfowitz will try to clean things up.

Didnít Forbs just report that Castro is worth something around 400mil? What is this with the right wing dictators, they even cannot steal efficiently. Pinochet should be ashamed of himself.

BTW, ìmassive governmental incompetence in economic mattersî is pure tautology.

This is getting surreal. Wolfowitz as a known freedom fighter! Who knew?

The war aims in Iraq are being spun in the same way as they were in all wars. Who remembers the diplomatic tensions and themes pre WW1, once it became more palatably spun as the war for plucky little Belgium. It inspires more effectively than the war to prevent Germany becoming a major colonial power.

Of all the reasons selected for making Iraq target number two after Afghanistan, how much prominence was given pre-invasion to the desire to spread democracy. This has emerged as your spin because it plays well. But don’t believe your hype. When it comes to your favoured sons, the non-democracies you bought and funded, they will wait a long time at the back of any queue to promote regime change.

You have some strange bedfellows in this promoting democracy lark. Your correspondents approve Pinochet’s overthrow of Allende with an ends justify the means argument, and they praise that wee drunk and excuse for a human being,Joe McCarthy . Don’t you ever get chills about the company you attract?

Finally, no news here on the Vanunu announcement today? I should not have to add that I am proposing any moral equivalency between the Israeli democracy and their surrounding non-democracies but I do so in a probably vain attempt to head off the usual excuses for rebuttals which appear when you mention this major blot on Israel’s credentials.

Welcome to Roger’s Place, Tony. Before you get too snarky, you might try educating yourself on Wolfowitz. Start by reading James Mann’s excellent survey of the backgrounds of Bush’s war cabinet, “Rise of the Vulcans” (dopey name but well-researched and insightful account).

Once you’ve learned a bit about Wolfowitz you’ll realize that advocated standing up to Saddam back in the late 1970s and was bitterly disappointed when Cheney and the other realpolitikers around Bush 41, many of them Kissinger acolytes, refused to support the uprisings against Saddam after the first Gulf War in 1991.

In fact, promoting democracy is not a “lark”, as you’ll learn when you do a bit of research on the matter. It has been a constant preoccupation of those Democrats who opposed Kissingerism and its cynical game of supporting third world dictators and fighting proxy wars while trying to appease the Soviets in Europe. These Democrats– Henry Jackson, Pat Moynihan, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz– ultimately defeated Kissinger and his pals, most notably in opposing the “sham” (in the words of liberal John Kenneth Galbraith) of arms control efforts, in supporting Soviet dissidents, countering the Soviets’ rape of Afghanistan, opposing the Kissingerite puppet in the Philippines and supporting moves toward democracy in South Korea and also carefully positioning the US behind reform in Indonesia.

At the center of all of these victories was Paul Wolfowitz, a former Democrat and liberal who more than anyone in Washington deserves credit for moving the US foreign policy elite around toward democracy promotion today. By the way, it might interest you to note that his companion is a Tunis-born Saudi woman who works at the World Bank and is a strong advocate for women’s rights in the arab world.

Philippines, South Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, Georgia, Lebanon, Egypt…. The train’s leaving the station, Tony. Not to late to get on board. But be sure to give credit to paul Wolfowitz when you do.