Since I live on the top floor of a high-rise building in Cleveland Park, in downtown Washington, I can easily see the headquarters of the World Bank, located just a few blocks from the White House and the Treasury Department.
The location is not of little significance, because the World Bank, nominally an international institution, is viewed by the outside world, with considerable justification, as a branch of the US Treasury and as a vehicle for the White House to further the interests of American foreign policy.
Last week, President Bush nominated Paul Wolfowitz, the administration’s leading neoconservative and chief architect of the Iraq war, to replace the outgoing Australian-born James Wolfenson as head of an institution that acts as the developing world’s lender.
Whereas Wolfenson had devoted his career to creating bridges between North and South, Wolfowitz is not only a contentious neocon widely mistrusted by countries in Europe and the Third World, but he lacks banking and development experience. Lest we forget, he was the economic genius who predicted that Iraqi reconstruction would pay for itself with Iraqi oil revenue, and the prescient analyst who was convinced that the people of Iraq would line their streets to greet American soldiers with flowers.
Nation magazine put it succinctly last week when it opined: “Wolfowitz’s achievement as a warmonger may say little about his views on international development, but his record on Iraq is one of miscalculation and exaggeration.
And the poor of the world deserve a World Bank president with better judgment.”
In short, Wolfowitz has a serious credibility problem, and sensitivities abroad are inflamed about the choice.
European countries control about 30 percent of the votes on the World Bank’s board, but by tradition, the United States, the largest shareholder, selects the president while Europeans choose the head of the International Monetary Fund. Though, theoretically, opponents on the board would be able to fight the nomination if they choose to, it is doubtful that this will happen, since no US choice for bank president has ever been opposed.
Were he to be approved, as appears likely, Wolfowitz would assume control of an institution that lends $20 billion a year to poor countries, and get to play an important role in pressuring governments in those countries to get with it, shaping their policies by setting conditions on the disbursement of funds.
Meanwhile, a three-hour ride on the Metroliner from Washington will get you to New York, where the headquarters of the United Nations are located. And for American ambassador to this other international body, President Bush a week earlier made yet another bizarre choice — John Bolton, a man so contemptuous of the UN that in 1994 he declared: “There’s no such thing as the United Nations, and if the UN building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”
Bolton is not smart enough to be a neocon ideologue (egregious though neoconservatism is, there is intellectual method to its madness) but that does not make him any less of an unrepentant hawk and unilateralist who believes, as the neocons do, that the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world should resemble that between a hammer and a nail.
In a profile on the bumbling, pugnacious Bolton recently, Newsday reported: “At a meeting of diplomats in Europe before the Iraq war, according to one ambassador who attended, Bolton was so outrageous in his opinions about Iraq that the normally staid diplomats were openly rolling their eyes in disbelief.”
And at one time, to show his devotion to Israel, Bolton proudly proclaimed: “One highlight of my professional career was the 1991 successful effort to repeal the General Assembly’s 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism.”
So why has the administration gone out of its way to undermine trans-Atlantic good will, that began to develop tentatively in recent weeks through President Bush’s visit to Europe, by choosing such divisive figures?
Like the nomination of Wolfowitz, who has earned the outrage of the very nations with whom he will work at the World Bank, that of Bolton is no less than a slap on the face of the international community. By tapping these two weirdoes for the World Bank and the UN — the one an outspoken interventionist who once wrote that the importance of leadership is not to “lecture and posture” but to demonstrate that “your friends will be protected and taken care of, that your enemies will be punished, and that those who refuse to support you will regret having done so,” and the other a bumbling, inarticulate hot-head who doesn’t disguise his contempt for the UN — President Bush wants to etch on the world his administration’s neoconservative philosophy, assert discipline on recalcitrant nations, much in the manner of a boss on the job, and, as leader of the only big power in these unipolar times, show us all lowly folks a bit of American steel.
It is now known that though Bush’s initial plan to invade Iraq was based on the assumption that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, the president later came to embrace the more ambitious view of Wolfowitz that Iraq, under US tutelage, could be a beachhead to the regrouping of the geopolitics of the entire Middle East, making the region “safe for Israel.”
After all, Wolfowitz and the other neocons in the administration were known as the American Likudniks, so protective of Israeli interests that they considered Ariel Sharon “soft on the Arabs” and often referred to the West Bank and Gaza as “the disputed territories.”
Wolfowitz left his mark on American foreign policy by becoming the chief architect of the Iraq war, and now, as the New York Times reported last week, “he embarks on a second act in a theater where the battles will doubtless be different but the policy wars will go on.”
As for the lightweight John Bolton, a former State Department arms control chief, well, about two years ago in Seoul, on the eve of six-nation talks about North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, he undiplomatically denounced North Korean leader Kim Jong Il as a “tyrannical dictator.” Not to be outdone, the Pyongyang government then turned around and called him “human scum” and refused to accept him as a member of the US negotiating team.
By choosing those two nutcases to speak for the United States at the World Bank and the United Nations, President Bush is not reaching out to the international community but insuring instead that these “policy wars” will indeed go on. Not good news at all for world peace, multilateralism and international understanding.
As for the World Bank, I’ll continue to see it from my window looking south from the top floor of my high-rise, but I wonder if I should not in future columns refer to it as the American Bank. And next time I visit New York, it could be that the UN building there may, just may — you never know — have already had its top ten floors demolished.
