And yet for all of Wolfowitz's credentials, Raban was still fundamentally correct about his lack of intellectual curiosity.

Given Raban's talent for character observation, it would be interesting to see what, if anything, he made of Christopher Hitchens.

Hitchens was no saint, thank goodness. I always thought of him more as a hard drinking Martin Luther.

Ah Mahfouz....(ah, bach...)

Alexandria. How small it becomes when you look at it from behind the wheel of my madcap motorcar. I can cut through it like the wind but it keeps turning itself, in spite of me, into a a tin of sardines. Night follows day in dogged stupidity, nothing ever happens. Dawn after dawn the sky gets up and dresses itself, the weather does its usual tricks, and the women arrive in all colours, shapes and sizes. But nothing ever happens. The universe is really dead, you know. These are only the ultimate twitches before rigor mortis sets in.
Naguib Mahfouz from Mirmar / First published in Arabic in 1967

And still I would rather spend an evening in conversation with Christopher Hitchens before suffering a similar evening with Charles.

Good Morning Charles,
I read in some of the tributes/obits of Hitchens that he was acquainted with Wolfowitz. That surprised me a bit. But, I'm not so sure they were friends in same sense that say, Hitchens & Marin Amis were.

BTW, I doubt Wolfowitz is a criminal any more than Obama is after ordering a hit on two Americans in Yemen earlier this year. In the Great Game "war" is a most complicated operation.Hitchens, a great contrarian who endorsed the Iraq War knew that.

The actual points of Hitchen's argument are really appalling.

Wolfowitz wrote his phd on salinity in West Asia, therefore he knows the middle east! And he had a arab lover! She's an anthropologist! So, it's like Wolfowitz is an anthropologist! And he knows details about my writings! He was quite knowledgable! And he was a diplomat in Jakarta (which is muslim, of course), which makes him prefectly suitable to address issues in Iraq!

Then the reversal, Wolfie is no orientalist, Raban is the orientalist! Of course Raban looks down on Americans because he's a Brit, and Hitch knows all about that.

Seems like the man died a fitting way. What was Raban's opening line? "Passionate ideologues are incurious by nature and have no time for obstructive details."