Bush mounts the Katrina defence for Wolfowitz.

Just as Bush once told Michael Brown in the middle of the disaster of Katrina: "Brownie, you're doing a helluva job", so now he informs his staff to say of Paul Wolfowitz, "The president has full confidence in Paul Wolfowitz", said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino; he had done "a remarkable job".

The appointment of Paul Wolfowitz as Head of the World Bank was one of Bush's most controversial ones, right alongside the appointment of John Bolton to the United Nations. Both were Bush, in effect, taking pleasure at sticking two fingers up to the rest of the world.

With the Dems success in the November mid terms, he was forced to back down on Bolton. Now, the rest of the world is seeking to force him to back down on Wolfowitz, who Europeans regard as "the administration’s best-known neoconservative and a symbol of American unilateralism and arrogance".

With the scandals of the missing emails threatening to engulf the White House, there is a feeling that Bush's power might be beginning to ebb away and that now could be the time for non-Americans to strike back against the imposition of this Iraq war architect to the World Bank.

“There is a sense that we’re finally at a moment when Bush needs the world more than the world needs Bush,” said a senior foreign official who flew into Washington recently for the annual meeting of the bank and the International Monetary Fund. “And there’s more than a little of that mixed in this whole argument over Wolfowitz’s fate.”

Leaving aside the myriad of reasons that Europeans and others might have for wanting to remove Wolfowitz based on Bush's waning power, one must never forget that he was always a dreadfully controversial choice for such a position.

“It took a huge amount of effort to quiet this down,” a member of the bank’s board of governors and an early supporter of Mr. Wolfowitz recalled Friday of the early insurrection. “And you would think, knowing that he was going into an institution that was deeply suspicious of him and the Bush administration, that he would have done everything he could to allay those concerns.”

At first, Wolfowitz did play to the crowd to an extent, making Africa and the fight against corruption central to his theme. However, it was not long before staff at the World bank began to suspect that he was putting American interests before his duty to the world's poorest nations.

Wolfowitz also faced criticism for his decision in 2005 to reject a proposed bank assistance strategy for Uzbekistan. That action came shortly after the government of Uzbekistan announced it would no longer grant U.S. military aircraft access to an airfield in Uzbekistan, thus hampering the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. At a press conference in Washington on Thursday, Wolfowitz insisted that his decision to suspend World Bank activity in Uzbekistan had nothing to do with U.S. foreign policy concerns.

"The question for the World Bank is — given the substantial human rights violations that were taking place prior to that decision — we had real concerns about whether we could get transparency about where our money was going," Wolfowitz said.

There were also complaints that he rarely consulted with the bank's staff before he made some of his most controversial decisions.

"Accusations were brought about corruption in one particular country, and when that country said, 'We want to see the evidence, we want it prosecuted if there's a problem,' that evidence was not forthcoming," Stiglitz says. He characterizes the country in question as having "strong democratic procedures" and being determined to uphold the rule of law. "It wanted to make sure it was doing the right thing," Stiglitz says, "but it was not able to defend itself against the charges."

Stiglitz would not identify the country, but other former World Bank officials say the circumstances fit what happened in India. Wolfowitz and his senior management team suspended a huge health program there in response to allegations of corruption in the contracting process. The problems had been uncovered in an earlier inquiry, and investigators found that the bank staff and the Indian government were taking corrective actions.

The suspension came as a complete surprise to Michael Carter, the World Bank country director in India. Now retired from the bank, he says there were "no consultations" over the India project between the senior bank management and the local bank staff. Carter resigned from the bank, he says, because he believed the management's approach to alleged corruption in India was "seriously flawed."

So it would appear that Wolfowitz brought the same arrogant neo-con mindset that he used to justify the Iraq war to the World Bank, and that this might be fuelling the row over him helping his girlfriend to get a new position at a greatly increased wage scale as much as anything else.

However, what cannot be denied is the irony of a man who arrived at the World Bank claiming to be fighting corruption who then finds himself admitting to aiding his girlfriend to achieve a new job at a greatly increased pay scale. Pots and kettles my friend, pots and kettles.

Bush will, of course, fight to have Wolfowitz remain in his position. However, I can't help feeling that the fate of Wolfowitz will end up saying more about how much actual power George Bush possesses than it does about anything else.

If Wolfowitz has to step down, then this will confirm George Bush's lame duck status. For it will be the moment when the rest of the world finally tells him that they won't be pushed around.

Tags: Wolfowitz, world bank, George Bush, Bolton, UN, India, Uzbekistan