WP,pg1: Wolfowitz Strives To Quell Criticism: Bolstering Image [View All]

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Wolfowitz Strives To Quell Criticism
World Bank Nominee Bolstering Image

By Paul Blustein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 21, 2005; Page A01


He has telephoned Bono, the Irish rock star who champions the cause of Africa's poor. He has granted interviews to French newspapers, planned visits to European officials and praised his prospective staffers.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, the man tapped by President Bush to become president of the World Bank, is energetically reaching out to his critics in the hope of persuading them that he would do a lot better at heading the bank than they might think. He appears to be making progress. But as the neoconservative hawk best known as the brains behind the war in Iraq, he has his job cut out for him.

Since the announcement Wednesday, Bush's choice of Wolfowitz has drawn opposition from many quarters, mostly focusing on the fear that the move marked a plan to use the World Bank's antipoverty aid to reward Washington's friends, punish its enemies and advance the Bush administration's ideological agenda, especially in the Middle East. The bank lends about $20 billion a year to developing countries for projects ranging from roads to schools to HIV/AIDS programs.

"The world would view a bank directed by Mr. Wolfowitz as no more than an instrument of U.S. power and U.S. priorities," Britain's Financial Times wrote in an editorial, warning that the credibility of the bank's advice to poor countries would be undermined. With anti-globalization activists in an uproar over the nomination, predictions abounded that demonstrations against the bank, which have subsided in the past couple of years, would erupt anew. "We'll finally be able to use the word 'imperialism' about bank policy without raising eyebrows," chortled Soren Ambrose, an activist with the coalition 50 Years Is Enough Network, a critic of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund....


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52375-2005Mar20.html