NY Times: How Battles at Bank Ended `Second Chance’ at a Career

Another official who left [to protest how Wolfowitz was running the Bank] was Shengman Zhang, the top deputy to James D. Wolfensohn, Mr. Wolfowitz’s predecessor. Mr. Wolfowitz charged that it was hypocritical for bank officials to allow Mr. Zhang’s wife to work at the bank but to banish Ms. Riza.

Mr. Zhang, now a senior vice president at Citigroup in Hong Kong, was furious, several associates say, because bank rules permit husbands and wives to work at the bank under circumscribed conditions, which Mr. Zhang said he followed, but they bar bank employees from having a sexual relationship with a top bank official outside of marriage. A Bush administration official said Mr. Wolfowitz did not understand that a World bank president can be successful only if he can form alliances with the bank’s many fiefs, something he failed to do.

This is an interesting angle to this story that I have not seen discussed anywhere. I don’t think these Bank rules are so unusual. There is no taboo against married couples working for the same institution (although there might be grumblings by fellow workers), but coworkers screwing each other outside of marriage is generally frowned upon. Perhaps this might strike some as hypocritical or a double standard, but I think that it makes sense. Marriage means that a couple’s sexual relations are officially acknowledged and socially approved of. (Hmm… What “debate” in contemporary American politics does that remind me of?) Society’s valuation of the institution of marriage creates a counterweight to the problem that sexual partners working for the same institution might create conflicts of interest or the possibility of favoritism.

If Wolfowitz had done the decent thing and married Riza, he would still have his job. So why didn’t he marry her? Why was it worth committing bureaucratic improprieties but not getting hitched up to keep on having sex with her? Was it because Riza is an Arab? American slaveholders liked to have sex with their slaves, but they never contemplated marrying, much less freeing them. Why should neocons be any different?

So what did Wolfowitz in is that he has been living in sin. I wonder if he and Riza ever discussed the option of marriage as a way of getting out of their predicament? In any case, it appears that Wolfowitz wanted to have his cake and eat it too—sex without entaglements, just like the Playboy Utopia of the 1960s. (That’s why they are called neocons: in the 1960s, they were liberals or Trotskyists.) Or, as has been observed about him before, he thought that the usual rules do not apply to him. The way Russians describe such a person is that he thinks that his shit does not smell. That gets Wolfowitz, and the rest of the Bush cabal come to think of it, down to a T.