According to a former State Department official, Wolfowitz was quite taken with the notion that he, a secular Jew, was dating a Muslim. Their relationship put a heady, modern, and romantic face on the entire neocon project of democratizing the Middle East. As the Bush-Cheney team prepared to take office, Wolfowitz and Riza, not his wife Clare, took in the neocon social circuit together. Riza was known to Cheney. She moved in the same circles with and was admired by Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile Wolfowitz backed as a successor to Saddam.
"Shaha was the embodiment of the outcome of the modern Arab political system as the neocons saw it," said the State Department source.
"She was the personification of the outcome they hoped for in Iraq. She was not theoretical. She was not in a burka. She was a modern Arab feminist."
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