After bitter battle, Wolfowitz resigns from World Bank

Paul Wolfowitz has lost his battle against the "old Europeans" and has finally agreed to step down from the World Bank on 30th June. This comes after a protracted attempt by the White House to save his skin in the face of mounting worldwide opposition to him staying on.

This represents the third neo-con to go down in a blaze of his own arrogant glory as Wolfowitz joins Donald Rumsfeld and John Bolton as supremely arrogant supporters of Bush who flew too close to the sun one time too many.

Mr Wolfowitz's resignation ended a saga which convulsed the bank for weeks, opening a chasm between America and European members, after it emerged that he had engineered a $60,000 pay rise for Ms Riza in violation of bank rules. The bitterness of the dispute was exacerbated by a fierce campaign by Mr Wolfowitz to shift some of the blame for that pay rise to other officials at the bank.

In the end, he appears to have prevailed. In its statement last night, the bank's board said: "A number of mistakes were made by a number of individuals in handling the matter under consideration", and that "the bank's systems did not prove robust to the strain under which they were placed".

In return, Mr Wolfowitz said he had concluded it would be in the best interests of the bank if he stood down. "I am pleased that, after reviewing all the evidence, the executive directors of the World Bank group have accepted my assurance that I acted ethically and in good faith in what I believed were the best interests of the institution, including protecting the rights of a valued staff member," he said.

Of course there is no-one in their right mind who buys this baloney for a second as we all know that the bank's panel found that Wolfowitz had committed ethical and governance violations and that Wolfowitz was demanding that they clear him off all charges before he would resign.

Indeed, such was the level of distrust between Wolfowitz and the World bank that they insisted that he give them a written guarantee that, if they cleared him, that he would, in fact, resign. That alone speaks volumes about how trustworthy the World Bank views Paul Wolfowitz as.

The Bush White House immediately launched it's own version of events - well, they do claim to be able to create their own reality - with a Bush spokesman summing up what had taken place:

President Bush earlier in the day praised Mr. Wolfowitz at a news conference but signaled that the end was near by saying he regretted “that it’s come to this.” A White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, said, “We would have preferred that he stay at the bank, but the president reluctantly accepts his decision.”

Anyone who actually believes that Wolfowitz is leaving the World Bank because of his own decision is beyond help, no doubt enthralled to Bush's alternative universe, where victory in Iraq is just over the next hill and history will view the Bush presidency more kindly than the rest of us do.

The decision to appoint Wolfowitz to head the World Bank was another of Bush's hallmark appointments, designed to stick his finger up the world's collective ass. It was a similar appointment as to that of John Bolton to represent the US at the UN, where one couldn't help feeling that the person appointed had been done so to facilitate the President's infantile Frat Boy humour, as they were so inappropriate that one was left with no other conclusion to draw.

They were both disastrously bad choices and both ended up mangled on history's floor.

There are, at least, signs that the damage done to the World Bank has been so severe that even the Frat Boy President seems unwilling to repeat his mistake.

Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. said Thursday that he would “consult my colleagues around the world” before recommending a choice to Mr. Bush, in what seemed to be an effort to assure allies that the United States would not repeat what happened in 2005 when Mr. Bush surprised them by selecting Mr. Wolfowitz, then a deputy secretary of defense and an architect of the Iraq war.

It's odd. The rest of the world knew that Bush was making an appalling choice two years ago, but France and Germany decided not to fight him for fear of reopening old wounds over the war in Iraq.

However, as Wolfowitz crashes to the floor and the war in Iraq staggers on, it is stunning to realise that in this, as in the argument over Iraq before the invasion, Europe has always been right and this Frat Boy President has always been wrong.

For even as Wolfowitz steps down, there is much discord left at the Bank over the wording that preceded his resignation, with many thinking the Bank should not have acceded to the White House's request that he be found not guilty before he stepped down.

Also angered was the bank’s staff association, which had called for Mr. Wolfowitz’s resignation in early April. The bank’s internal blogs were filled with denunciations of the action on Thursday evening.

Late in the evening, the association issued a statement saying, “Welcome though it is, the president’s resignation is not acceptable under the present arrangement,” and that it “completely undermines the principles of good governance and the principles that the staff fight to uphold.”

Wolfowitz may be going but the damage he has wrought on this organisation will take a long time to mend. And the blame for all of this lies with the infantile man who gave Wolfowitz the appointment in the first place.

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Tags: Wolfowitz, World Bank, Bush White House