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second innings of George Bush Jr. at the White House
promises to be more than just a replay of the first
term, although that prospect alone would have been horrifying
enough. Re-election has legitimised for the incumbent
US President his most blatant and aggressive past actions.
But it has done even more, in terms of imbuing new energy
and confidence into the unilateralist and bullying agenda
with which the Bush administration tends to take on
all comers, both domestic and international.
Certainly,
the recent flexing of US muscles in international arenas
provides adequate intimation of the more overtly interventionist
attitude that the world is likely to see with respect
to the Bush administration even in multilateral organisations.
Only two weeks John Bolton, an established State Department
hawk and known UN-baiter was named to be the new US
Ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton reportedly
once famously declared that ''the UN Security Council
should have only one permanent member, because this
would correctly reflect the distribution of world power''
and has made no secret of his belief that the UN should
be radically restructured and ''reformed'' to make it
more acceptable to the US.
Coming close after that was another possibly even more
shocking announcement: the nomination of Paul Wolfowitz
as the Bush administration’s candidate for the President
of the World Bank. Through an unwritten ''gentleman’s
agreement'' between the big powers, the power of choosing
the World Bank President has been accorded to the US,
while the IMF boss is by the same tradition a (western)
European. However, while past choices have often been
suspect (think, for example, of Robert McNamara who
came to the job fresh from his role as US Defence Secretary
in Vietnam) none has come close to being as openly challenging
and dismissive of developing country concerns as this
one.
Quite simply, George Bush is showing the equivalent
of the symbolic finger to the rest of the world, and
indicating both his contempt for the international community
as well as his purpose of bending the major multilateral
organisations to the US will. There is no secret about
either Paul Wolfowitz’s agenda or the extent of energy
he is willing to devote to this agenda, and it is extremely
unlikely that the World Bank as an organisation can
emerge unscathed or unchanged from this particular encounter.
While Wolfowitz is ostensibly a soft-voiced academic
(he was formerly Dean of the Johns Hopkins School for
Advanced International Studies) he has for many years
been one of the most outspoken and aggressive of the
group of ''neocons'' (neo-conservatives) who have assumed
so much power in the US over the past years. He was
one of the main proponents – and chief architects –
of the US invasion of Iraq, which is something he wanted
even during the Gulf War of 1991, and which he advocated
again within days of the September 2001 attacks in New
York.
His record in the Defense Department, where he served
under Donald Rumsfeld, confirms his reputation as a
single-minded hawk whose opinions are not swerved either
by reason or by evidence. He has not only been one of
the most consistent proponents of the US invasion of
Iraq, but is also passionately pro-Israel and was one
of the early theorists of the doctrine of pre-emptive
strike rather than containment.
He has also been remarkably blatant and open about expressing
these extremely conservative and partisan views. According
to the New York Times (March 17, 2005), he once wrote
that a major lesson of the cold war for American foreign
policy was "the importance of leadership and what
it consists of: not lecturing and posturing and demanding,
but demonstrating 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."
However, all too often Wolfowitz’s arguments and judgments
have had at best a tenuous relationship with reality,
and when the reality has been awkward he has shown the
well-developed neocon capacity for fancy footwork. His
was one of the most vociferous voices insisting on the
need for war based on the ''weapons of mass destruction''
held by Saddam Hussein, yet when it became obvious that
no such weapons were to be found, he quickly changed
his tune to argue that the war was really about ''spreading
democracy in the Arab world''. In a rare moment of disclosure,
he admitted in an interview to the US magazine Vanity
Fair what most people have known all along, that the
entire official justification for war may have been
a deliberate lie. "The truth is," he said,
"that for reasons that have a lot to do with the
US government bureaucracy itself, we settled on the
one issue that everyone would agree on, which was weapons
of mass destruction as the core reason."
His
assessment of the outcome of the invasion was equally
problematic. At the peak of the war on Iraq, in a testimony
to the US Congress which was debating the issue, he
was openly critical of the then US Chief of Staff Eric
Shinseki’s estimates of the required personnel and costs
of the war. General Shinseki had estimated that a post-war
US occupation force of around 60,000 to 70,000 men could
be required, and that the operation could cost the US
between $65-95 billion.
Wolfowitz dismissed such estimates as being ''wildly
off the mark'' and instead argued that most of the costs
of continued occupation and reconstruction of Iraq would
be borne by allies or be entirely paid for by Iraqi
oil revenues. He also contended that the post-war occupation
force would require less than 10,000 men. In the event,
it is Wolfowitz’s estimates which have proved to be
completely wrong. As of March 2005 over 170,000 US military
personnel are in Iraq with another 20,000 plus stationed
in Kuwait and Qatar. A further number of around 30,000
private security workers are employed in Iraq, mainly
by multinational companies. The current estimates for
total cost for the war and reconstruction ranges from
$250 billion to $350 billion.
Some observers feel that this move has enabled President
Bush to kill two birds with one shuffle – by removing
Wolfowitz from the US establishment where he was becoming
something of a thorn in the side of the new Secretary
of State Condoleeza Rice, and where his evident lack
of realism was becoming an embarassment. Given the US
administration’s general contempt for the process of
development, it is not surprising that lack of realism
is not seen to be a problem for his new job in the World
Bank.
Aside from a brief stint as US Ambassador in Indonesia
(where he was supportive of the repressive Suharto regime)
Wolfowitz has little or no experience of ''development’
as such. Paul Krugman has pointed out, however, that
Wolfowitz has been closely associated with America's
largest foreign aid and economic development project
since the Marshall Plan – that is, the so-called ''reconstruction''
in Iraq. Unfortunately, that experience – of hasty and
often disastrous privatisations, very slow reconstruction,
poor delivery of public services, massive and continuing
unemployment and great material insecurity in addition
to physical insecurity - is likely to give little ground
for developing countries to trust his advice.
Instead, the leadership of Wolfowitz is likely to increase
substantially the already large credibility gap that
World Bank functionaries find they have to deal with
across the developing world, and therefore create more
of a backlash against its functioning. It could be argued
that this in itself is not necessarily a bad thing,
since all too often the misleading and even dangerous
policy prescriptions of the World Bank come clothed
in touchy-feely ''pro-poor'' rhetoric that conceals their
real content in pushing the interests of imperialism.
To the extent that the ''human face'' of the World Bank
has only served to mask the monstrous body and its treacherous
actions, removing the mask may not be so dreadful after
all.
But taking such a position would be to underestimate
the sheer power and energy of the neocon drive. And
there is no doubt that so far the progressive opposition
across the world has underestimated the neocons, to
its own detriment and peril. Clearly, this latest Bush
appointment implies the pursuit of US foreign policy
objectives and domination by other means. Already it
is clear that the Bush administration's approach to
development is that US-set conditions should determine
whether to reward or target particular regimes. This
will now be actively applied in the World Bank as well,
and any chance that the Bank’s policies will be influenced
by local priorities and concerns is almost certainly
squashed.
The man whom George Bush affectionately calls ''Wolfie''
may really become just that for a much wider public
– the wolf at the door of developing countries.
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