Arrivederchi, Wolfie?

The White House is now signaling that Paul Wolfowitz is welcome to quit the World Bank to spend more time with his family . . . er, main squeeze but will not abide his being fired.

There is a certain inevitability to this turn of events.

Wolfowitz no longer has the support of backers at the bank whom he did not personally install, but Juan Cole is hip to a more salient reason:

"In the end, his career suffered remarkably little from his substantive policy mistakes. But once he moved beyond the forgiving world of high Republican Party politics, his dependence on cronyism finally caught up with him. That he ran into such trouble at the World Bank for behaving in ways that apparently were business as usual for him at the Department of Defense only underlines how corrupt the Bush administration really is."

Inevitable as this may be, I myself am kinda sad. Wolfowitz skates on being a key architect of the disaster that is the war in Iraq but gets nabbed for a penny-ante act of nepotism.