With myopia worthy of Mr. Magoo, Wolfowitz focused on Saddam, not bin Laden, as the major terrorist threat to the United States. According to Laurie Mylroie, the crackpot conspiracy theorist at the American Enterprise Insititute who continues to insist on a Saddam-bin Laden connection, Wolfowitz "provided crucial support" for her book "Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America," published in 2000. The following year, shortly after 9/11, according to Bob Woodward, Wolfowitz told a Cabinet meeting that there was a 10 to 50 percent chance that Saddam was involved. According to former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, describing another occasion, "I could not believe it, but Wolfowitz was spouting the Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, a theory that had been ... found to be totally untrue." As late as October 2002, Wolfowitz spoke of the Saddam regime's "training of al Qaeda members in bomb-making, poisons and deadly gasses." This had no basis in reality.

Weapons of mass destruction? Wolfowitz claimed: "Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] for missions targeting the United States." Was Kansas in danger of being nuked by robot drones from Baghdad? Since the war ended, the Bush administration reluctantly has admitted that prewar skeptics were correct to argue that neither the weapons of mass destruction nor the robot planes capable of "targeting the United States" ever existed.

It is unclear whether Wolfowitz actually believed what he said in public on this subject. As he told Sam Tanenhaus in a now-famous Vanity Fair interview, "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy itself, we settled on the one issue that everyone would agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason, but -- Hold on for one second." (At this point in the official Pentagon transcript a handler intervenes, evidently afraid that Wolfowitz has spilled one bean too many.)

In military matters, this deputy secretary of defense displayed a level of ignorance without precedent in the history of civilian appointees to the Pentagon. (Even Robert McNamara's much-maligned "whiz kids" got some things right.) During the Clinton years Wolfowitz peddled the fantasy that American-supported rebels in Iraq could set up a base camp in one region and proceed to depose Saddam with minimal U.S. involvement. With the Bay of Pigs fiasco in mind, Gen. Anthony Zinni described this as the "Bay of Goats" strategy. When Gen. Eric Shinseki predicted that Iraq could not be pacified without hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, Wolfowitz told Congress that Shinseki was "wildly off the mark."

"To assume we're going to have to pay for it all is just wrong," Wolfowitz declared, alluding to Iraqi oil revenues that could defray the costs of occupation and reconstruction. It is now clear that the hundreds of billions of dollars the United States will spend in Iraq will come from the pockets of American taxpayers.

No summary of Wolfowitz's catastrophically successful career would be complete without acknowledgment that he was one of the major American sponsors of the disgraced Ahmed Chalabi, whom Paul Bremer's administration in Baghdad accused of involvement in Iranian espionage. Last but not least, following Wolfowitz's diplomatic mission to Turkey to obtain support for the forthcoming U.S. invasion of Iraq, Turkey decided to have nothing to do with the war.

Diplomat, military tactician, grand strategist -- as I said, Paul Wolfowitz is perfectly incompetent.

We live in a country in which privates are punished for the crimes of generals, so it is only natural that Wolfowitz should be rewarded for the blunders, errors and miscalculations that have cost the American and Iraqi people so much by promotion to the World Bank. That's the way it is with Mr. Magoo. Whenever he steps blindly out of a building he has accidentally set on fire, a truck is always conveniently passing by.

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