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When the sins pile up

Although the impropriety World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz stands accused of today seems relatively minor, it is of a piece with the lack of ethics that marred his earlier career at the Pentagon. Leadership of any public institution or government department requires objectivity of consideration. Bending the rules to favour a loved one, as Mr. Wolfowitz has done at the Bank, or making up facts to push a pet ideological project, as he did in his role as Deputy Secretary in the U.S. Department of Defense, is surely a disqualification for anyone aspiring to command a large organisation with a multi-billion dollar budget. Simply put, the present case against Mr. Wolfowitz is that he overstepped the bounds of propriety by directly seeking a pay hike for his partner, Shaha Ali Riza, a Bank employee. In recent years, the Bank has quite rightly made a big issue of corruption, threatening to turn the loan tap off to those countries that do not follow a transparent tendering process. In the light of Mr. Wolfowitz's admission of wrongdoing, World Bank staffers say it will be harder for their country reps to demand compliance with key transparency norms. This presupposes a level of confidence in the World Bank's overall programmes that many experts, especially in Africa, Asia and Latin America, are likely to question. But there is no denying that the Bank's credibility has taken a terrible beating.

Had Mr. Wolfowitz not been part of the cabal that distorted, manipulated, and even concocted intelligence reports and threat assessments in order to justify the illegal and disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003, the impropriety he has committed as World Bank chief would have caused only a minor scandal. His touching willingness to bat for the emoluments of his partner would have obliged him to apologise for the obvious conflict of interest. It is unlikely that governments around the world, especially in Europe, would have demanded his head. To Mr. Wolfowitz, it might seem unfair that he is being made to bear the burden of sins committed in a previous life as an apparatchik of the Bush war machine. But the fact is that he owes his current appointment entirely to President George W. Bush, who foisted him on the World Bank despite deep misgivings all round. He was, in other words, a political appointee, so it is only fitting that politics should play a role in the drive to oust him. The Riza affair provides a suitable opportunity for the international community to do the right thing within the ethical framework the World Bank espouses and free it from the stigma and highly divisive effects of the Wolfowitz presidency.

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