Everybody's Out of Step But Paul

To the deluge of postmortems about Paul Wolfowitz, let me add this: by so royally screwing up his own career at the World Bank, he did serious harm to at least two good causes that he purports to support. One is the matter of cleaning up corruption in third world lending. The other is the matter of shaking up the leviathan bureaucracy at the bank itself.

Wolfowitz made corruption in lending his signature issue. Sebastian Mallaby has the right take (link):

Wolfowitz mishandled this challenge so badly that it poisoned his tenure, and the bank's next president will be tempted to avoid it. But the challenge of corruption and, more broadly, of weak institutions in developing nations must not be neglected.

Except that it’s more than just “avoid.” The point is that Wolfowitz made it harder for his successor to tackle corruption, because he has tarred the issue with his own brush. IOW, he’s done the impossible: he’s made fighting corruption look bad.

Re the issue of bureaucracy, Steven R. Weisman’s postmortem in the Times this morning is on point (link). It makes the case that it was bureaucratic blowback, much more than Iraq, that finally brought him down. Anyone who ever watched Sir Humphrey hornswoggle a minister can readily believe this is true (link).

The Wall Street Journal picks up on the same theme. The Journal rightly says (link):

If there is a silver lining here, it is that the public has been able to get a glimpse of how the World Bank works and what it actually accomplishes. Among other lowlights, we've recently been reminded that the bank annually pushes billions in loans to countries like China and Mexico that can easily get credit in private capital markets. We've seen that many of those loans go to projects in places like India or Kenya that are riddled by corruption; the bank may have lost as much as $8 billion to corruption in 25 years of lending to the Suharto regime in Indonesia. We've also learned that the bank funds literally hundreds of projects from Albania to Niger that were ill-conceived and proved to be failures.

We've seen that senior bank personnel, such as former Indonesia country director Dennis de Tray, openly argue that corruption is no big deal and should not get in the way of the bank's "helping people."

This is pretty much dead on. But who is responsible for leaving this mess just as he found it? The question ought to answer himself. Wolfowitz failed here for the same reason he failed at the Pentagon: he screams and hollers. He kicks and yells. Then when he has made an unholy mess of things, he blames everybody else.

There is one important difference between Wolfowitz at the Pentagon and Wolfowitz at the World Bank. That is: the Iraq War never should have been fought. The World Bank really does need to be reformed. Still, in each case, the bad guys have won a round because of the stupidity and incompetence of the supposed good guy himself.

Fn: I might have written the same piece, had I taken the time and trouble, about John Bolton at the UN.