The Brief, Broken Presidency of Paul Wolfowitz

Abstract

As spring came to Washington in 2005, the World Bank once again was a cynosure of controversy, indeed outrage. The outrage was directed not at the Bank per se, but at U.S. President George W. Bush’s nominee to replace James Wolfensohn, none other than Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, a major architect of the Iraq war. It was, according to the London-based World Development Movement, a “truly terrifying appointment.”¹ Some 1,650 NGOs around the world protested the nomination, and internal polls of Bank employees found 90 percent opposed to the prospect of Wolfowitz as their new boss.² Wolfowitz seemed to personify the unilateral arrogance of the George W. Bush administration; among other things, under his aegis the U.S. Defense Department had banned countries that opposed the Iraq war (many of them U.S. allies) from bidding for contracts for Iraqi reconstruction.³ Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz, who had served under Wolfensohn as the Bank’s chief economist, feared that the Wolfowitz appointment would again make the Bank a “hated organization,” and potentially lead to “street violence and demonstrations” against its policies.⁴