As friends and critics sort through the wreckage of Mr. Wolfowitz’s World Bank presidency, they wonder if it was doomed from the outset.

From The New York Times:

[A]s friends and critics sort through the wreckage of Mr. Wolfowitz’s bank career, they wonder if it was doomed from the outset. Supporters say he arrived at the bank . . . from a four-year stint at the Pentagon, where he was an early champion of going to war with Iraq and left bearing its stigma.

[At the World Bank] Mr. Wolfowitz repeated the mistakes he had made at the Pentagon: adopting a single-minded position on certain matters, refusing to entertain alternative views, marginalizing dissenters.

“Wolfowitz unsettled people from the outset,” said Manish Bapna, executive director of the Bank Information Center, an independent watchdog group. “His style was seen as an ad hoc subjective approach to punishing enemies and rewarding friends.”

At the Pentagon, Mr. Wolfowitz began advocating going to war with Iraq just a few days after Sept. 11, 2001, and continued pressing over the next year to oust Saddam Hussein.

His time at the Pentagon was characterized by infighting, especially with the Central Intelligence Agency, which he thought underestimated Iraq as a threat to the United States. He clashed with Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, and others who warned — correctly, it turned out — that the United States would need more forces in Iraq. His vision of democracy in the Arab world also ran aground in Baghdad.