A few articles on Wolfowitz

I'm linking here a few articles on Wolfowitz I don't want to lose track of. (Update, I'll probably add a few more over time. Also, see things in the comments, such as the FT document of Danino's statement.)

David Ignatius, Washington Post, May 2, 2007, here, endorsing the lynching on the grounds not that the scandal was a scandal but that Wolfowitz brought it on himself by being a neocon ... fairly typical of Ignatius, I guess, chanelling the spirit of the Bank's high-toned mobocracy but not admitting it, and endorsing the idea that the only way to "reform" the World Bank is to do ... what the senior professional staff wanted all along. Ignatius wraps this in the "more in sorrow than anger," but aimed at declaring Wolfowitz's departure a done deal. What Ignatius describes as the intellectual arrogance of the Bank staff would be better described as its own very special internal culture of impunity. (Oh well, catty but true, Ignatius' new novel is not very good, either - I read a big chunk of it hanging out at Barnes & Noble over the weekend but realized I'd never manage to get all the way through it. Cover photo is great, though.)

Bret Stephens in the WSJ, here, May 1, 2007, noting that Wolfowitz followed the advice of the Bank's very own ethics committee - and that the Bank has a long history of special deals and conflicts of interest and all sorts of sorry stuff.

My own view is that Wolfowitz ought to call for full disclosure by all Bank personnel of all contracts and compensation arrangements, and that in the interests of complete transparency, they should all be posted as a matter of policy to the internet. That would reveal, I am quite certain, an amazing number of special arrangements, private deals, inequities in compensation. (I would make this a requirement of nonprofit corporate governance across the board.)

Indeed, my experience of nonprofit organizations - many of which have long traditions of lack of transparency in such matters despite the issues of public trust - suggests that organizations where employees cut many special deals have a particular tendency to shaft the women in the organization. For what it's worth, my experience in the nonprofit world suggests that maximum transparency tends to favor gender equity. And that secretive organizations like the World Bank often conceal considerable gender inequity through lack of transparency.

No doubt the staff kicking and screaming surrounding a call for compensation transparency at the Bank would make it impossible to implement. So I would urge Wolfowitz to announce his own, personal transparency - let him post his tax returns and any contracts and arrangements on the web - and call for voluntary compliance by people of integrity at the Bank. Grandfather the existing staff, while calling on them to do as Ban Ki Moon has done - and Annan never did - and make a completely transparent financial disclosure. Let's see who is willing to go public and who not.

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial in yesterday's April 30, 2007 paper dissecting the trail of bad faith at the Bank, and the members of its ethics committee in particular, here.

The Washington Post has a story on Wolfowitz's defense of himself by staff writer Karen DeYoung, here, that actually shows that a reporter has read the documents produced by the Bank's ethics committee. It is a cut above the rest of the reporting, particularly the execrable work done at the Financial Times.

Andrew Young has an op-ed supporting Wolfowitz in yesterday's April 30, 2007 Washington Post, here. I don't suppose it will sway any Euro-grandees of the Bank, but perhaps it will give the White House some backbone, or anyway some cover to support Wolfowitz.

***
The Right Man for the World Bank

By Andrew Young

Monday, April 30, 2007; A15
Wash Post

"Daddy King" -- the Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. -- was always reminding us that "hate is too great a burden to bear." Even after a childhood of racist oppression and the cruel assassination of both his son Martin by white men and his wife by a deranged black man as she sat at the organ of Ebenezer Baptist Church playing the Lord's Prayer, he daily affirmed that we must never stoop to hate.

Yet I came closer to hating Paul Wolfowitz than I ever came to hating Bull Connor, the Ku Klux Klan or the killers of Martin Luther King Jr.

You see, I saw Wolfowitz as the neocon policy wonk who led us into a war in Iraq but who had never even been in a street fight himself. My personal fantasy was to catch him alone and give him a good thrashing.

It seems our European friends are now indulging my fantasy. But I've come to realize how wrong that impulse is and how right Archbishop Desmond Tutu is when he says there's "no future without forgiveness."

I've also come to believe that the impatience of Wolfowitz and others with Saddam Hussein's violence grew from a more massive destruction than the world could ignore -- Hussein's murder of more than a million Shiites, Kurds, Kuwaitis and Iranians, even without possessing atomic weapons. I was in Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion of 1990. I saw the horror and bloodshed of their occupation, and I knew Hussein had to be restrained. I may disagree with the means that were used, but not with the problem.

At the World Bank, however, an aggressive impatience with the evils of disease and poverty is exactly what is needed.

I first spent time with Paul Wolfowitz in Anacostia in 2005, when I participated in a program of the Operation Hope financial literacy initiative. In reading the program notes, I discovered that his PhD from the University of Chicago concerned the politics and economics of water resources management and that George Shultz had been his mentor at the State Department. When he was Treasury secretary, Shultz took me on my first trip to Africa as a congressional delegate to a World Bank gathering in Nairobi. Shultz also opened the diplomatic dialogue with the African National Congress at a time when much of Europe and America wrote off Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki as hopeless communist terrorists.

I therefore decided to work with Paul Wolfowitz as a brother, and I have not been disappointed. We were together in Nigeria in 2006 for a Leon H. Sullivan Summit. I saw his effectiveness and warmth at work in a setting of 12 heads of state and 2,000 delegates from 22 countries.

His commitment and aggressiveness in promoting African development, as well as his abhorrence of needless bureaucratic "CYA" behavior, have been welcomed by those who love Africa and the developing world as well as by those willing to admit the complicity of the haves in the crisis of the have-nots.

It is my sincere hope that our European friends and allies can make the distinction between the U.S. Defense Department and the World Bank. While we still abhor the mismanagement and hubris of the Iraq invasion, we can share an aggressive impatience with poverty, disease, illiteracy and bureaucratic nitpicking and get on with our efforts to prevent the future wars and environmental crises.

France, Norway and the Netherlands have always been at the forefront of this struggle. I'm hopeful they will see the greater good of working together at the World Bank on these present evils and allow history, the World Court or the United Nations to judge Wolfowitz on his role in our previous conflicts.

We must get beyond the current crisis at the World Bank, a careful examination of which will show that Wolfowitz was operating in what he felt was the best interest of the institution and with the guidance of its ethics committee.

This crisis also should not redound to the detriment of Wolfowitz's companion, Shaha Riza, a British Muslim woman who is an admired World Bank professional and a champion of human rights in the Muslim world.

I am a Protestant Christian minister, a product of America's excessive Puritanism. I've always looked to Europe for sophistication, temperance and the tolerance the world needs to survive. It is my appeal that we offer Paul Wolfowitz the same chance to learn from the misjudgments of the past and move on together to construct a more just, prosperous and nonviolent world.

Andrew Young has served as executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as mayor of Atlanta and as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. He is co-chairman of Good Works International, a consulting firm offering advice in emerging markets in the Caribbean and Africa.