For weeks now, Paul Wolfowitz has been following the patented Bush administration script for dealing with scandal: just ignore it, pretend you've done nothing wrong, and wait for people to lose interest. For a few days there, it looked like it might work. Wolfowitz announced that he was going to stay, Bush Xeroxed the standard memo of support, and the Mighty Wurlitzer whipped up a tune to explain away the peach job and plump raise given Wolfie's girlfriend.
But the World Bank is not the Justice Department, or the Defense Department, or any of the other branches of government where the administration could employ CIA-approved non-torture techniques to get employees to go along with embattled Bush appointees. There's a new report out to highlight Wolfowitz's ethical lapses, and it's turning out to be a lot harder to lean on the World Bank's international crew than it was on Rumsfeld's military. The Bush administration can tell the World Bank employees to sit down and shut up, but those employees -- and the governments who sent them -- don't have to listen. However, they are prepared to be generous.
Leading governments of Europe, mounting a new campaign to push Paul D. Wolfowitz from his job as World Bank president, signaled Monday that they were willing to let the United States choose the bank’s next chief, but only if Mr. Wolfowitz stepped down soon, European officials said.
See? Wolfie can go on his own time. So long as that time is soon.
Day by day, the "mastermind" behind the war in Iraq is moving further out on the plank, and now it appears that even the professional deniers at the Bush administration may have to face this little slice of reality. Wolfowitz's chief aide resigned yesterday, tossing praise to the bank's staff -- and none to Wolfowitz -- as he departed. It seems clear that Wolfowitz will soon have to face one of those things with which this administration is so unfamiliar: an exit strategy.
However, all is not bleak in Bush country, since the deal proposed for getting Wolfowitz to the door includes giving George W a do-over. If he acts quickly, Bush gets to pick a replacement for the world's most famous user of the spit-comb.
Hey, what's Michael Brown up to these days? The World Bank is all about helping poor people, and Brown's got such good experience in that area.