Evidence of Things in the Offing?

The indication late yesterday that beleaguered World Bank president, Paul D. Wolfowitz and his handlers in the Bush White House are about to throw in the towel in their hard-nosed drive to help him retain his job may have come as a surprise to only the most ardent of his fellow neo-conservatives, and of course the editors of The Wall Street Journal who claim that he is a victim of European conspiracy to assume control of the Bank. What seemed like a sudden change in the combative tone that characterized Mr. Wolfowitz’s engagement with the Bank since the scandal over his role in the transfer of his girlfriend from the Bank to the US State Department and the run-away salary scale that she was awarded was indicative that together with his handlers, was reported to have even robbed some members of the Bank’s board of directors sorely because of his refusal to admit that his role in the affair qualified as conflict of interest. Even then, his plea to the Bank's board of directors is somehow humbling: "I implore each of you to be fair in making your decisions, because your decisions will not only affect my life, it will affect how this institution is viewed in the United States and the world". So is the admission by the White House "that he made mistakes". They are now striving to exploit their only option, i.e. negotiate his exit from the Bank by asking that he be exonerated of any wrong-doing by the board in exchange for his voluntary resignation. Whether or not this demand will be acceptable to the board is still uncertain.

It’s rather sad that Mr. Wolfowitz and the Bush White House seem oblivious of the issues that underlay the problem that they are dealing with at the Bank. Their antecedents had alienated many people in the world long before Mr. Wolfowitz was appointed to head the Bank. Those antecedents were to the degree that Mr. Wolfowitz wasn’t much liked when he arrived the Bank as president two years ago. His arrogant and high-handed style of administration compounded and even sealed his fate at the Bank subsequently.

The tendency in the ranks of US neo-conservatives who hold considerable sway in the policies of the Bush White House to be selective in their perception of global realities seems to be part of their greatest undoing in their unparalleled determination to dominate world events. It’s therefore fascinating that they still believe that the character of the alliance that the US entered with West European states at the end of World War II when the latter’s economies were in tatters, and presided over throughout the course of the Cold War when the fear of soviet invasion pervaded Western Europe would remain the same in the post-Cold War era. For one, Europeans have come into their own economically. Also, the threat that the Soviet Union represented to them has completely disappeared. Why then must they subscribe to America’s arrogant world leadership especially when it tends towards robbing their citizens of their desire to reap the dividends of peace by plunging them into a cycle of endless international hostility?

Some people attribute the continuing difficulties being experienced by the Bush White House in most of their domestic and foreign policy engagements to incompetence. At the same time, it is not very difficult to discern that it is the same lack of wholesome calculation that got the Bush White House into Iraq that is also responsible for their troubles at the World Bank. It seems increasingly clear as the days roll by that the only way that they will get out of the difficult situation that Iraq has become for them is the way that the situation in the World Bank is compelling them currently to follow, i.e. bow to the reality of humility and the recognition that the rest of the actors in the global arena deserve to be acknowledged.