Oh to be caught ’twixt love and duty at the world’s biggest boondoggle

Paul Wolfowitz may have to choose between Shaha Ali Riza’s affections and his sense of duty. She is a gender specialist employed by the World Bank as an acting manager for external relations and outreach, he has been nominated as the Bank’s new President, the world’s biggest boondoggle is full of quasi-jobs like hers, and he must nerve himself to take an axe to them, whatever this may mean for relationships on his domestic hearth. He is the Pentagon’s scholarly super-hawk, who put his shirt on Ahmed Chalabi (now scratched) for the Iraq Stakes and, when ambassador in Indonesia, urged his hosts to stand no nonsense from East Timor. His appointment is seen as a consolation prize for him (he may have hoped to succeed Colin Powell) and as a token of the Bush administration’s no-nonsense attitude to foreigners in general and Old Europe in particular. There, it went down like a bad oyster.