Can Wolfowitz win the peace? This question is very premature while the board is considering whether to dismiss Wolfowitz. But how long will that take and, if he wins the battle to stay on as president, what then? A posting on the IHT blog reminded me that Wolfowitz wars tend to drag on longer than he predicts. And that he's not very good at winning the peace. The Tribune's Managing Globalization blog accuses the World Bank president of using the same (failing) strategy at the Bank that the US administration did with Ba'athist forces in Iraq.

Daniel Altman's neat argument: "Wolfowitz seems to have made the same mistake that the American-led coalition may have made when it took over the security forces in Iraq four years ago. As some veterans of those early days in Baghdad now say, the United States and its allies should have filtered unrepentant Ba’athist officers out of the forces, leaving the structure intact, rather than disbanding the forces entirely and filtering supposedly sympathetic officers back in. When Wolfowitz began his anti-corruption and reform drive at the World Bank, he began by trusting almost no one, creating a close-knit team of his own advisers that practically became a parallel executive. That move alienated his staff, and now they want him out".

A convincing point. The senior management departures and hirings under Wolfowitz (see previous posts '3 out of 5 Wolfowitz top appointments linked to Bush administration's Iraq strategy' and 'Broader allegations on pay deals for Wolfowitz's friends at the Bank') are in fact much more of a scandal than the Riza affair). The World Bank is, after all, supposed to be a multilateral institution operating in an even-handed, non-political manner.

Alex Wilks ~ April 16, 2007

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