Headline! Read all about it! European politicians get their socks in a knot about an older, not-so-sexy guy trying to impress his mistress.
The Globe? Or the Inquirer? In any case, do you really believe it? Of course, not.
Paul Wolfowitz' problem with the board of the World Bank has far less to do with the package deal he cut for his girlfriend than with what he's been doing at the World Bank. Any observer of Bush "politics as usual" could predict that the real controversy involved a fundamentalist attitude toward the third world, an effort to funnel contracts to friends, and...Iraq.
Read a bit farther for a few details.
Wolfowitz came to the bank with an attitude. There were good countries and bad. The bad ones were rife with corruption, and like the good neocon he was, he was going to punish them.
Bank officials, who had been working toward a reasonable anti-corruption policy for a decade, reacted with predicatable umbrage.
Anticorruption efforts are an essential part of development finance," said Roberto Dañino, a senior vice president of the bank until early this year. "But getting rid of corruption is not a silver bullet. The bank should not overemphasize its anticorruption agenda at the expense of other policies required for development.
Bank officials called his attitude "messianic." (Deja vu all over again?)
On the surface, fighting corruption seems like a good thing. But like most Bushite morality, appearances are deceiving.
He said it arose from a range of issues, including fears that Wolfowitz and his aides were trying to impose Bush administration ideas on family planning and climate change at the bank and worries over a possible conflict of interest in the bank's hiring of a Washington law firm, Williams & Connolly, to investigate leaks.
He suspended a billion dollar program for family planning in India (evidentally pushing abstinence only!) The Board stepped in. Then they "handcuffed" his ability to do more mischief by changing their policies and procedures.
But the "straw" that broke the Board's collective tolerance seems to be a proposed move to funnel World Bank funds into Iraq. He planned to station a full time director for those funds in Baghdad. According to a Bank Director in February:
Wolfowitz's apparent determination to use the World Bank to urther questionable military goals in the Middle East is a fundamental distortion of the Bank's mission.
According to Whistleblower.org this would have been a new source of funds for the contractors doing "dubious" reconstruction projects there--the Bushies.
So it's not hard to imagine the glee with which bank board members received the news that Wolfowitz had violated his own contract. It's harder to imagine that this aspect of the controversy has received virtually no coverage in MSM.