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COMMENTARY
Another Wolf for
Russia
By John Helmer
MOSCOW - And the Academy Award
for the best fascist dictator goes to -
Adolf Hitler! Woody Allen cracked that joke once at
the expense of the US habit of making awards out
of self-congratulation of the least worthy type.
Were anyone to dare in the same spirit, they
might award the new US nominee to head the World
Bank, Paul Wolfowitz, the title of the worst
American ever to hold such an international post.
But wait a minute. Wolfowitz is hardly an
American at all, having spent much of his time as
a career Washington warmonger under investigation
by US counter-intelligence and security agencies
as an agent for a foreign power, for whose benefit
he is suspected of supplying intelligence, cash,
weapons, and other favors. In US law books, these
may be crimes against the state, possibly
espionage, even treason, but not crimes against
humanity, for which Wolfowitz has encouraged his
favorite small state to commit and encouraged his
addled (if not yet treasonous) president to commit
in the first of the great Middle Eastern wars.
For Russia, against whom Wolfowitz has
been waging war since he got out of short pants,
the nomination of Wolfowitz as president of the
World Bank presents something of a dilemma, and
something of an opportunity.
Borrow
from a war criminal?
During the first post-Soviet
decade, the World Bank under James Wolfensohn
was one of the many instruments the United States,
as the World Bank's dominant shareholder, used to
destroy the economic foundations of its rival
superpower; pay stipends to Russian quislings;
oblige the Russian government to incur sizable
debts for the privilege of being advised to
dismantle its systems of command and control; and
transfer the nation's most valuable resources into
the hands of a dozen individuals eager to betray
their country for personal profit.
Not
without reason was Wolfensohn's favorite Russian
Victor Chernomyrdin - the prime minister who
enriched himself through creating Russia's largest
company, Gazprom. Wolfensohn was waging war by
other means: Chernomyrdin was his collaborator;
and the Russian treasury paid in full - principal
and interest - for its defeat.
This
arrangement couldn't last. And indeed, when the
revival of the feeble Russian state began to
challenge the value and terms of the World Bank's
operations in Russia, Wolfensohn decided to
commission an assessment of the effectiveness of
the programs he himself had promoted in Russia.
Wolfensohn could have engaged Joseph Stiglitz, the
World Bank's chief economist and Nobel Prize
winner. But by the time Russia had grown skeptical
of Wolfensohn, and called a halt to new borrowings
from him, Stiglitz had become a ferocious critic
of everything Wolfensohn had done, or tried to do.
Wolfensohn preferred to hand the
assessment job to a minor academic who had
enriched himself selling Russians the very advice
Wolfensohn asked him to evaluate. The hungry fox
invited to call the roll in the henhouse was a
US-employed Swede named Anders Aslund. "We
don't necessarily take his advice," commented
Julian Schweitzer, the World Bank's Moscow
representative at the time, about Aslund's
appointment. Aslund's defense of everything
Wolfensohn had done in Russia did not encourage
the Kremlin to resume borrowing. Instead, it
resolved to pay Wolfensohn off, a task that the
Russian Treasury completed just a few months ago.
From Wolfensohn's point of view, the
evaluation may have helped salve the wounds
Stiglitz had inflicted on him and the institution.
More practically, it encouraged him to try evading
the Kremlin's veto on borrowing, and recruit thin
Chernomyrdins in the Russian provinces -
provincial governors, local warlords, and
corporate magnates - as keen to leverage
themselves with the World Bank as the fat
Chernomyrdin, and president Boris Yeltsin, had
been 10 years before.
With tactics like
these, Wolfensohn has hung on for another four
years after the Aslund report, but in Moscow he
has remained a has-been, the banker no one wants
to borrow from. Wolfowitz's nomination - if it is
ratified by the World Bank board - ought to remove
any possibility that Russia, now a greater oil
power than Wolfensohn or Wolfowitz have thought
possible, would borrow itself, or recommend that
anyone else should.
The dilemma posed
by the Wolfowitz nomination turns out to be
an opportunity for President Vladimir Putin
to conclude that, from Russian experience, the
World Bank does more damage than good, and should
be isolated and ignored by those countries
and economies most in need of development
financing. This should not be interpreted
as anti-Americanism. If the Federal Bureau
of Investigation were permitted to disclose all
it knows, Wolfowitz may not be the American he
claims to be. And with a record like his, it may be
a violation of the US statutes to borrow from
Wolfowitz. In US jurisprudence, it is not just
immoral to make covenants with war criminals, it
is criminal.
John Helmer is the
doyen of the foreign press corps in Russia. He
first set up his Moscow bureau in 1989, and he
specializes in the coverage of Russian business.
US reviews of Western reporting from Russia
have rated him at the top of the profession.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us for information
on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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