In hindsight, why was Paul Wolfowitz nominated to be President of World Bank?

kentuck

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Sun Feb-11-07 02:33 PM
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In hindsight, why was Paul Wolfowitz nominated to be President of World Bank?

a little history from a Google search:

http://search.isp.netscape.com/nsisp/boomframe.jsp?query=Paul+Wolfowitz&page=1&offset=0&result_url=redir%3Fsrc%3Dwebsearch%26requestId%3Ded7703a796f4c72%26clickedItemRank%3D1%26userQuery%3DPaul%2BWolfowitz%26clickedItemURN%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fen.wikipedia.org%252Fwiki%252FPaul_Wolfowitz%26invocationType%3D-%26fromPage%3DNSISPTop%26amp%3BampTest%3D1&remove_url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FPaul_Wolfowitz

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Early life and education

Paul Wolfowitz was born to a Jewish family in the university town of Ithaca, New York, to parents Jacob Wolfowitz and Lillian Dundes. He was their second child. His father was a Professor of Mathematics at Cornell University.

Jacob Wolfowitz was a Polish national of Jewish descent whose parents fled to the United States in 1920 to escape persecution. Many of Wolfowitz�s relatives left behind in Poland were to die in the Holocaust. James Mann, in Rise of the Vulcans, says that Jacob Wolfowitz "was a committed Zionist throughout his life and, in later years he would be pleased that his son Paul, would be the chief Architect responsible for invasion of Iraq, and was also active in organizing protests against Soviet repression of dissidents and minorities."

Jacob Wolfowitz took his family with him when he taught sabbatical semesters at UCLA and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and in 1957, at the age of fourteen, Paul Wolfowitz spent a year living in Israel while his father was teaching at The Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa; Wolfowitz�s sister would later emigrate permanently to Israel. In 1961, Wolfowitz graduated from Ithaca High School, where he had worked on the Tattler student newspaper. Wolfowitz was excused from military service in the Vietnam War through student deferments in order to pursue his academic studies.

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President of the World Bank

In January 2005 Wolfowitz was nominated to be President of the World Bank. The nomination brought praise and criticism from leaders worldwide<18>. Nobel Prize winner and former chief economist for the world bank Joseph Stiglitz said

"The World Bank will once again become a hate figure. This could bring street protests and violence across the developing world."<19>

In a speech at the U.N. Economic and Social Council Economist Jeffrey Sachs was quite vocal in his opposition to Wolfowitz.

"It's time for other candidates to come forward that have experience in development. This is a position on which hundreds of millions of people depend for their lives," he said. "Let's have a proper leadership of professionalism."<20>

The Wall Street Journal commented:

"Mr. Wolfowitz is willing to speak the truth to power. He saw earlier than most, and spoke publicly about, the need for dictators to plan democratic transitions. It is the world's dictators who are the chief causes of world poverty. If anyone can stand up to the Robert Mugabes of the world, it must be the man who stood up to Saddam Hussein."<21>

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Many Bank staff believe that major changes, however, are imminent. These could include a shift from loans to grants, administrative budget cuts, and a greater emphasis on democratization. All these are consistent with the Bush administration's agenda for the World Bank. The challenge he faces is to effectively lead an organization where the vast majority of staff intensely dislike his role in the Iraq war.

However, recent developments suggest that furthering a neoconservative agenda might be back on his mind. In the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Annual Meetings in Singapore in 2006, Wolfowitz took the opportunity to accuse Singapore of being an authoritarian state and managed to compel the host government to reverse a policy on barring certain activists into the country.