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Wolfowitz at the World Bank
door
By Emad Mekay and Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - US Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz, a chief architect of one of the
most unpopular wars in US history, is President
George W Bush's choice to head the World Bank, the
 world's
largest development agency. His nomination has
sparked a wave of outrage among independent
development groups, who blame him for promoting
unilateralism and militarism in US foreign policy,
and for a lack of transparency in bidding for
reconstruction contracts in Iraq.
Traditionally, the World Bank's president
has been a US citizen as the US is the largest
shareholder in the institution. Wolfowitz's
nomination would be subject to a routine vote of
the World Bank's executive directors.
"I
appreciate the world leaders taking my phone calls
as I explained to them why I think Paul will be a
strong president of the World Bank," Bush told a
press conference on Wednesday. "I've said he's a
man of good experiences. He helped manage a large
organization. The World Bank is a large
organization; the Pentagon is a large organization
- he's been involved in the management of that
organization," Bush said. He described Wolfowitz,
62, as a skilled diplomat, referring to his
positions at the State Department and his tenure
as US ambassador to Indonesia in the 1980s. The US
president also said Wolfowitz is "committed to
development".
The nomination was quickly
welcomed by fellow countryman James Wolfensohn,
the outgoing World Bank president, and by Rodrigo
Rato, the managing director of the bank's sister
institution, the International Monetary Fund
(IMF). "If he is confirmed by the member
countries, Wolfowitz will bring to the bank an
impressive record of public service with extensive
experience of management and of international
affairs, in particular in Asia and the Middle
East," said Rato in a statement.
Wolfowitz's 35-year public and academic
career - notably lacking in direct experience
either with banking or development, let alone the
bank's supposed core mission of poverty reduction
- has also steered a wide berth around both Africa
and Latin America, two regions of enormous
importance to the bank. Before moving into the
Pentagon's No 2 position, Wolfowitz spent seven
years as dean and professor of international
relations at the Paul H Nitze School of Advanced
International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
There, he recruited, among others, Francis
Fukuyama, a close friend from college days at
Cornell, who also worked under Wolfowitz when the
latter was director of policy planning at the
State Department in the early 1980s.
Many
independent development groups and watchdog
institutions say they are shocked at the choice.
"The deputy defense secretary's strong support for
the Iraq war reflects a disdain for international
law and a multilateral approach to conflict
resolution that disqualifies Wolfowitz from
leading a multilateral institution," said the
International Rivers Network (IRN), a
California-based non-government organization, in a
statement.
Some civil society analysts
predicted a new phase of confrontation between the
global social justice movement and one of the
largest symbols of US and European domination, the
World Bank. "In his career, Wolfowitz has so far
not shown any interest in poverty reduction,
environmental protection and human rights," said
Peter Bosshard, the policy director of IRN. "His
election as World Bank president would most likely
exacerbate the current backlash against social and
environmental concerns at the World Bank, and
would initiate a new era of conflict between the
Bank and civil society."
Wolfowitz was
behind the US decision to exclude non-US companies
from competing for billions of dollars in Iraq's
reconstruction contracts, a move that fueled
international fury and accusations that the US was
motivated by economic greed in its invasion of the
oil-rich Arab country. Iraq reconstruction
contracts and projects have been marred ever since
by charges of favoritism, corruption and fraud
because of the no-bid contracting process, little
or no official supervision and manipulation of
prices by US companies. Watchdog groups say that
hundreds of millions of dollars are being wasted
as a result of corruption by contractors and
sloppy government controls.
Wolfowitz is
an architect of many of the post-invasion policies
in Iraq, including privatization, deregulation and
commodification of social services and public
goods, along with plans to end subsidies that
sustain millions of Iraqi citizens. "Wolfowitz's
role in promoting economic changes in Iraq and
elsewhere suggest he would work to push the bank
to focus even more on imposing the so-called
'structural adjustment' policies like forced
privatization and indiscriminate trade
liberalization, policies which have failed to
create growth and have exacerbated poverty across
the globe," said Neil Watkins, national
coordinator for the anti-debt campaigning group
Jubilee USA Network
"Paul Wolfowitz is the
most controversial choice Bush could have made,"
said Njoki Njoroge Njehu, director of the 50 Years
Is Enough Network. "As the most prominent advocate
of imposing the US's will on the world, this
appointment signals to developing countries that
the US is just as serious about imposing its will
on borrowers from the World Bank as on the
countries of the Middle East," she added.
Critics say that the Wolfowitz nomination,
coming on the heels of the nomination of another
hawk, John Bolton, as US ambassador to the United
Nations, reveals "the contempt this administration
has for the international community". According to
Robert Weissman, director of Essential Action,
"Wolfowitz brings no apparent development
experience to the job, but does offer a record of
unabashed militarism and unilateralism that
represents exactly the wrong direction for the
World Bank."
But some economists argue
against his lack of experience in development and
poverty issues. "His term as ambassador to
Indonesia taught him a lot about development,"
said Peter Timmer, senior fellow at the Center for
Global Development in Washington. "My personal
sense is he got the idea of what a liberal Muslim
society would look like by working in Indonesia. I
honestly think he is going to surprise people and
turn out to be quite effective," said Timmer, who
worked as a development economist in Indonesia
while Wolfowitz was ambassador, and later served
on academic committees with him.
Timmer
compared Wolfowitz's anticipated leadership of the
World Bank to that of Robert McNamara, a former
secretary of defense during the Vietnam War.
McNamara later became the longest-serving
president of the World Bank, instituting sweeping
changes. Those opposed to Wolfowitz's nomination
are placing their hopes on a strong European
opposition. European countries together form a
substantial enough bloc to reject the US choice.
But some say that given the
anti-democratic nature in which the heads of
international financial institutions, dominated by
the Group of Seven most industrialized nations,
are chosen, the Europeans are unlikely to be
effective in their opposition. Last year Rato, a
European, was appointed to head the IMF after
being nominated by the European nations. The US
made no objection in what was interpreted as an
early preemption of a European objection when it
would come to Washington's turn to pick the World
Bank president.
The US president, by
custom, selects the president of the World Bank.
Similarly, the managing director of the IMF has
traditionally been a European, handpicked by
European governments, much to the dismay of
citizen groups and some governments in developing
countries who complain about the secretive process
of selecting leaders for these two institutions.
But some longtime critics of the bank see
a silver lining to the controversial nomination.
"If confirmed, we would no longer have to work so
hard to convince people that the World Bank is an
instrument of US foreign and economic policy,"
said Soren Ambrose, senior policy analyst with the
50 Years Is Enough Network. "Wolfowitz has no
experience in development, just a fierce
ideological dedication to hardcore neo-liberal
economics and US domination. In other words,
between exposing the true dangers of the lack of
democracy at the World Bank and putting the most
visible symbol of US imperialism in the most
prominent position in international development,
President Bush will accomplish more in
de-legitimizing the World Bank than any other
single action ever could," said Ambrose.
Defying stereotypes
Despite his
being regarded as the administration's
highest-ranking neo-conservative, Wolfowitz's
temperament and ideas often defy the stereotype.
While neo-conservatives tend to be socially
somewhat incestuous and intellectually dogmatic on
key issues, Wolfowitz is seen as intellectually
curious with a much broader array of social
contacts. His closest female companion over the
past several years has been a Tunisian-born bank
official who has fueled his interest in democratic
change in the Arab world.
As with all
neo-conservatives, Wolfowitz sees the rise of
Adolf Hitler as the defining event of the 20th
century from which critical foreign-policy lessons
- above all, the importance of overriding military
power and pre-empting threats before they fully
materialize - must be learned. The family of his
father, a Polish mathematician who immigrated to
the US in 1920, perished in the Holocaust.
As with other neo-conservatives, Wolfowitz
also believes in a "Pax Americana". His 1992 draft
of the "Defense Planning Guidance" under the then
Defense Secretary, Richard Cheney, almost got him
fired when parts of it were leaked to the New York
Times. That paper, which urged a doctrine of
pre-emption against rogue states seeking weapons
of mass destruction; the prevention of the
emergence of any potential competing regional or
global power; and "constant" US military
intervention to preserve global peace and
security, was repudiated by the administration of
Bush Senior, only to be codified by the younger
Bush in his National Security Strategy of
September 2002.
As with his fellow
neo-conservatives, Wolfowitz has special concerns
about the fate of Israel, where he spent a part of
his teenage years and which now is his sister's
home. But unlike his ideological fellow travelers,
whose politics generally identify closely with the
views of the right-wing Likud party in Israel,
Wolfowitz has long expressed sensitivity to the
plight of Palestinians, support for their national
aspirations, and opposition to the Jewish settler
movement.
Unlike many leading
neo-conservatives, including former Defense Policy
Board chairman Richard Perle, with whom he first
began working in 1970, Wolfowitz has shown little
taste for polemics or media spotlight. Wolfowitz
is considered the most idealistic of the
neo-conservatives whose support for democracy and
human rights, especially in the Arab world, is a
relatively recent development for many of them. As
assistant secretary of state for East Asian
affairs, he worked with former secretary of state
George Shultz in persuading Ronald Reagan to
abandon former Philippine dictator Ferdinand
Marcos during the "people power" uprising in 1986.
Wolfowitz later encouraged far-reaching
political reforms in South Korea that eventually
removed the military from power and was the first
US ambassador to Jakarta to meet publicly with
opposition leaders, despite the disapproval of
former president Suharto. "He is a serious and
thoughtful person who is genuinely interested in
the promotion of democracy and human rights around
the world and someone who understands that very
few interests can be advanced without paying
attention to the way people are being governed,"
said Tom Malinowski, the head of the Washington
office of Human Rights Watch.
Another
neo-conservative expressed concern that
Wolfowitz's departure from the Pentagon could
dilute the administration's proclaimed commitment
to democratic change. "The president has sent
pretty clear messages about that, but the number
of senior administration officials who truly
believe in the [democratic] tenets of the Bush
doctrine is relatively small," said Tom Donnelly,
a national security analyst at the American
Enterprise Institute. "I, for one, am a little
nervous about how policy itself may change. He
might rather have been secretary of state, but
that job was already taken. This is an
administration that has been sort of inbred and
has relatively few individuals to move around to
these jobs."
The White House had been
under growing pressure to nominate a prominent
individual to the World Bank post by the bank's
annual spring meetings next month, two months
before the scheduled departure of Wolfensohn.
According to Donnelly, "You're going to get
someone who's really devoted to the president's
agenda. The World Bank could be a useful tool of
American statecraft, that would be great."
One former official said he thought
Wolfowitz, who had wanted to be secretary of state
or defense, had finally despaired of achieving
those goals, not only because the posts are still
occupied, but also because, given Wolfowitz's
over-optimistic predictions about the aftermath of
the Iraq invasion and his part in exaggerating the
threat allegedly posed by Saddam Hussein before
the war, his confirmation by a majority of the
senate would be uncertain at best. His move to the
bank thus makes good professional sense according
to this source.
(Inter Press
Service) |
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