Wolfowitz's Moral Low Ground

Alec Dubro

April 16, 2007

Whether Paul Wolfowitz will remain as president of the World Bank is not at all clear. What is clear is that his trouble is only partly of his own making. While the current scandal can be laid squarely at his door, he came in as an agent of the Bush administration and a proponent of the Iraq War, and nothing he said or did was going to change the general perception of Wolfowitz as a dangerous madman.

Wolfowitz is now being gleefully stomped by a varied collection of critics: global justice activists, offended World Bank staffers, U.S. nationalist conservatives to European bankers sick of having Americans appointed to head the bank, and anyone with a grudge against Bush foreign policy, which includes most of the people in the world.

Is it unfair? Only slightly, because Wolfowitz was not the most bloodthirsty or ideologically blinkered of the Cheney gang. He most certainly was a cold warrior and founding member of the New American Century with all that it entails. And he was one of the architects of the Iraq War. But he has always had a more complex view of the Middle East than his colleagues.

It’s not just that Wolfowitz has a Libyan-born girlfriend, although that’s somewhat startling in itself. He was famously booed at a pro-Israel rally in 2002 for suggesting that Palestinians were suffering and dying as well. As The Right Web put it:

In particular, he has been much more flexible when it comes to Middle East peace, shying away from the extreme Likud-nik line espoused by many neocons and showing concern for the plight of the Palestinians, including opposition to the Jewish settler movement.

Still, it was jaw-dropping to hear that all the financiers in the U.S. with resumes compatible with running the World Bank were passed over and a slightly shabby-looking Iraq hawk named instead. Wolfowitz, unlike James D. Wolfensohn before him, has never looked the part of an urbane, international wheeler-dealer. And he quickly showed that he was not.

Wolfowitz’s attitudes toward poverty and development have been all that one would expect of the premier lender to the world’s poor. And there is no reason to think that he was faking his concern, either. But his actions fitted so neatly with the preconception of a Bushnik that he never escaped the antipathy that awaited him. In particular, he mounted a moral crusade against corruption in developing countries. Very few people would claim that corruption is not a problem, but as occasional TomPaine commentator Antonia Juhasz told the InterPress Service a year ago, “For him to be in a position to preach what good governance should be in Iraq seems highly hypocritical.”

He constantly tried to evade the checks and balances built into the World Bank system. Just as Bush has done in the federal bureaucracy, Wolfowitz appointed loyalists over career bankers. By so doing, and by invoking his own ethical superiority, he set himself up for a bank staff that was just waiting for Girlfriendgate to happen.

He was disliked before he set foot in the place and little he did changed any attitudes toward him. Wolfowitz, like John Bolton at the U.N., was turned loose on an ossified, entrenched bureaucracy with a set of rules and customs as sensitive and arcane as any Medici family reunion. Many of us think that the bank has long outlived its usefulness, but if it’s going to remain, then it, like the U.N. and IMF, needs change badly.

Wolfowitz set about proving that while he had every intention of reforming the bank, he had neither the skill nor the probity. Too bad, because someone will have to do it, but it’s not going to be the increasingly sorry-looking Paul Wolfowitz.