In appointing Wolfowitz to the World Bank, the US is turning the war on terror into a war on the poor, writes Curtis Doebbler* Hardly any move that American President George W Bush could make could send a stronger message to America's critics than the nomination of Mr Paul Wolfowitz to lead the World Bank. It is the clearest message yet that America's war is directed against just about everyone and especially the world's poorest and most dispossessed. The connection between economics and violence is not new and making it through the World Bank is even less surprising. The ongoing destruction of Iraq is but one example, a telling one. Wolfowitz as the Bush administration's chief hawk was allegedly livid when current World Bank President James Wolfensohn pulled his personnel out of Iraq for safety reasons. Having been pressured into rebuilding Iraq while it was still being destroyed by American soldiers and their allies, Wolfensohn at least had the courage to protect his staff. It was not merely that the World Bank was leaving Iraq that made Wolfowitz mad. It was also undoubtedly the fact that Iraq's getting billions in loans would be delayed. This in turn would deprive the United States government of another weapon that it could use for controlling the Iraqi people. Wolfowitz, one can imagine, would have no problem risking his staff to capture a few more Iraqi minds and souls. To placate his critics Wolfowitz has pointed to his stints as a dean of an American graduate school and as US ambassador to Indonesia. Both of these examples, in fact, indicate just how he plays his dangerous games. At Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) this former dean is listed as an expert in international human rights law. This is about as honest an assessment of his abilities as listing Adolf Hitler as an expert in tolerance. When I once asked the school how one becomes an expert I was told that the experts themselves decide. The United States representative to the UN Human Rights Committee does not list herself as a human rights expert, although she also teaches at SAIS, but Mr Wolfowitz thinks he deserves the honour. Perhaps he thinks he has earned it by contributing the master plan that led to an estimated 100,000 children dying in Iraq. Or was it because of the second significant contribution that he tells critics makes him prime material for the World Bank job? This is his tenure as ambassador of the United States to Indonesia. What was his most memorable contribution here? To most East Timorese it is undoubtedly the way he secured the constant flow of arms to the Indonesian government. Among other things, the arms were used to mow down East Timorese by the hundreds. Yet Wolfowitz speaks proudly of this contribution and obviously thinks it makes him a human rights expert. If his contribution to the deaths of millions of Iraqis and East Timorese is harrowing, it is worth noting that at the World Bank he could do much greater harm. While this institution already suffers from a longstanding profit- oriented constipation, it could be much worse. It could not only be an ineffective check on the excesses of the rich and a mere rhetorical tribute to combating poverty, it could actually contribute to perpetuating each of these evils. The mandate to end poverty is not one stated anywhere in the bank's constitutional documents. In fact, former World Bank Vice- President and General Legal Counsel Ibrahim Shihata expressly denied that it existed as a legal obligation. Despite this lacuna, Mr Wolfensohn tried his best to place poverty alleviation on the agenda. With more than half the people on the planet living in poverty -- on less than two euros per day -- it has been hard not to be sympathetic to these efforts. Mr Wolfowitz is not only ignorant of these efforts his sympathies have run in the opposite direction. Mr Wolfowitz, for example, has stalwartly applauded the Bush administration's attacks on the poor in America. Poor people in America have been gouged in a way that approaches evidence of a fundamental revulsion for them. Cutting health and welfare benefits ranging from food stamps to education subsidies, Bush has bludgeoned the poor to pay higher dividends to the rich. Yes, while America's poor have been getting poorer, its rich are getting richer. Many Democrats in the United States seem to have even resigned themselves to merely counting the losses of their poor constituents instead of trying to reverse them; Wolfowitz positively cheers on his cutthroat government cohorts. Driven by a crazed vision of a world in which one country, and only one country, controls all things, Wolfowitz views power like the Greek god Zeus sitting atop his mountain and hurling thunderbolts at the mere mortals below. In the confines of the Pentagon that is deadly enough, but there at least there is enough company to dilute such irrationality. Still, Mr Wolfowitz's preference for war over diplomacy in both Afghanistan and Iraq has translated into the taking of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. In circumstances where his power might be more unbridled on a day-to-day basis, countless lives may be put on the line. The World Bank is such a place. Although it is the Executive Board that exercises the highest authority over the bank, the president of the World Bank has the preponderance of daily influence. This influence can be exercised to act as a brake on the excesses of the world's rich countries and individuals or an accelerator that can push them to unstoppable deadly speeds. Current World Bank President James Wolfensohn tried to use his authority to curb the excesses of the richest countries. Indeed, he had learned the poverty alleviation "talk" so well that some observers believed that he was succeeding in encouraging the rich to help the poor. In the end, however, the rhetoric could not be turned into action and little was done to arrest the exploitation of the world's poor. Wolfensohn can at least reflect on the fact that he did not allow the bank to lead an intensification of grand injustice. Mr Wolfowitz could change all this. He will come to the Bank armed with America's war plan against the poor. It will be a plan that can be shown off proudly, even if only by indirect intentions. It will not call for direct attacks on the world's poor. Indeed, Mr Wolfowitz will continue to "talk-the-talk" like his predecessor, but he will make it clear where power lies. He will move strategically to bend the bank's nuanced perception in favour of America's laissez faire market orientation that opens up the poor to the full hurricane of impossible demands. He will use intimidation and coercion whenever needed threatening to exploit the use of force as only America can. Ultimately, Mr Wolfowitz's plans will signal clearly that America is at war with everyone who owns nothing in this world. And it will become clear that this war has been declared on these people precisely to prove that nobody really cares about them; that they are expendable. The scourge that our noble statesmen once thought they had removed from the human repertoire is being restored. "Mankind's inhumanity against mankind" is likely to replace the mantra inscribed in stone in the entrance to the World Bank's headquarters, which now reads: "We have a dream: a world free of poverty." * The writer is professor of law at An-Najah National University in Nablus, Palestine, where he teaches international human rights law.
