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UNITED NATIONS - / www.MaximsNews.com@U.N./
- 11 May 2007 –
"People who never called for Kofi Annan to resign amid the $12.8bn
oil-for-food scandal are calling for Wolfowitz's head over a $60,000
raise," complains semi-reformed neoconservative David Brooks in an
otherwise canny assessment of the World Bank president's problems.
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In an oddly
reversed way he has a point - many of those who lined up to demand Kofi Annan's
resignation have been equally fervently defending Paul Wolfowitz's limpet-like
adhesion to his World Bank title.
And of course the answer to Brooks' petulant challenge is that Annan's alleged
guilt consisted of not checking out more thoroughly what use his son was making
of his name, whereas Wolfowitz is charged with being directly responsible for
shovelling his girlfriend oodles of cash.
For someone who
set out his stall as opposing corruption in the developing world, it takes some
legendary chutzpah to hang on.
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It is
also worth noting that this side of the event horizon, not one member state of
the United Nations, nor one senior official, called for Annan to go, whereas it
seems that the few defenders that Wolfowitz has in the World Bank are the
officials he directly appointed and governments such as Canada and Japan,
worried about the White House reaction.
But we expect no less from the Bush appointee whose CV includes engineering a
disastrous war and occupation of Iraq that has been paid for with Chinese loans
to the US treasury, but whose conscience bade him, while he was at the Pentagon,
to withdraw and destroy 600,000 army berets which were made in China.
This hypocrisy is sadly not unique.
The
Europeans joined with the Americans last week to thwart the further
investigation by Unesco into yet another Bush appointee to go off the straight
and narrow road of probity.
Following
the hasty departure of former Republican congressman Peter Smith, after auditors
had found him steering contracts to Navigant, a UN-based consultancy with few
apparent qualifications for them, the non-aligned members urged Unesco to
"take appropriate disciplinary action," against Smith and to reinstate
the whistleblowers he had transferred.
Basically, the Europeans and the Japanese conspired to get Smith off the hook
without further investigation, even though Bush had sent him to
"reform" the organisation.
If
Smith had been from a politically incorrect third world country, the Manhattan
district attorney would be issuing Interpol warrants and the Wall Street Journal
editorialising about the inequities of the unreformable UN system.
Of course, the World Bank is in a funny position compared with two decades ago,
when it and the IMF engendered more insurrections than the Third International
with their attempts to force neoliberalism on an unwilling world.
Wolfowitz's
predecessor James Wolfensohn made some fairly convincing attempts to turn the
bank around, and in effect stole the UN Development Programme's thunder as the
caring, sharing world agency.
By
all accounts, this turnaround did not convince all his managers, however, which
is what makes the bank staff revolt against Wolfowitz so surprising.
Overlooking the little peccadillo of engineering a new Vietnam in the desert,
his professed policies at the bank were not that shockingly different, even if,
to pay off the White House for his own appointment, he employed American
conservatives who imposed their own eccentric anti-birth-control agendas.
And while one can only applaud cutting programmes in Uzbekistan, one can indeed
reasonably doubt whether it was Islam Karimov's tyranny, or his quit order to
the US bases, that prompted Wolfowitz's unilateral decision.
For all his manifold faults, one can only applaud someone who went to the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and told thousands of rabid
pro-Israelis that they should think about the plight of the Palestinians.
Indeed,
having a girlfriend at the World Bank of Muslim origin is a testament to a lack
of prejudice in these difficult times.
The pattern here is as much arrogance as bravery, a refusal to listen to
advice.
A
footnote for those on the left is that Wolfowitiz played a catalytic role in
convincing Christopher Hitchens to become a neo-neocon and sign up for the Bush
crusade.
But
he never went to so far as to get Hitchens a job at the bank, so there were
clearly some limits to his chutzpah.
But
his refusal to take the hint offered by most of the bank's members and
management suggests that those limits are not very constraining.
IanWilliams@MaximsNews.com
Labels: Bush,
Wolfowitz
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