Posted on 03/27/2005 6:16:06 PM PST by TheConservativeCitizen
Never before in human history has a seemingly legitimate left-of-center political persuasion been so consistently and overtly opposed to the interests of the enslaved, the downtrodden, or the weak as are today’s Western Left. If one goes back to the Cold War when the left spent equal energy lying about communism’s crimes and attacking anti-communists, and combines that with today’s petulant and immoral rejection of human dignity and freedom, the 60 year history of the contemporary Western left wing is one of degeneracy unmatched by all but the most clearly loathsome evil regimes of the 20th century.
Unmoved by their obvious error in opposing Arab freedom, they have now turned their guns on the boldest nomination to the World Bank in a generation, Paul Wolfowitz. Since the temper tantrums concerning Wolfowitz’s nomination have erupted, it is instructive to note that not a single attack on him has even sought to be a serious appraisal of his qualifications. Not one.
Instead the invective has hewed to the line that since Wolfowitz supported a foreign policy that has humiliated leftist pretense, he must be unfit for the World Bank. The only "complaint" lodged against him has been that he believed in the liberation of enslaved people and that this alone might cause the more selfish governments who chose profits over freedom to dislike him.
Everybody from US congressmen to European pundits have leapt to offer their ill-informed criticism of Wolfowitz, only to have their already extreme position further isolated when countries that had actually worked with Wolfowitz, instead of simply reading ignorant hate literature about his "neocon" conspiracies, enthusiastically backed the bid. Nancy Pelosi may find the nomination "hard to understand," but London, Ottawa, Berlin, and Paris quickly announced that they could fathom it just fine.
No such foreign support, however, is likely to cool the ardor of such luminaries of the left as Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Stiglitz. Stiglitz recklessly warned of a violent response to Wolfowitz: "This is an act of provocation by America," he said. "The World Bank will once again become a hate figure. This could bring street protests and violence across the developing world." That Stiglitz is the former chief economist of the World Bank tells us much about how such an important international organization has slipped into corruption and incompetence. Unable to cite any evidence to buttress his claims against Wolfowitz, Stiglitz settles for outright fiction. He suggests that the World bank will "become an explicit instrument of US foreign policy." and says "it will presumably take a lead role in Iraqi reconstruction, for instance. That would jeopardize its role as a multilateral development body." No evidence whatsoever exists to support such outlandish claims, and serious international observers can recognize them as patently false.
As for Sachs, an adviser to the UN, he rushed to slander Wolfowitz to the very World Bank staff he will soon manage, saying in a speech to the body that the former Pentagon official has “no experience in development and absolutely no clarity of what it means.” Sachs is badly misinformed. Wolfowitz was ambassador to the Philippines, where he remains a hero for his efforts to help the people, and to Indonesia, during which time the nation achieved what the Washington Post has called “a poverty-reduction success story.” And he has of course recently helped engineer a policy to free 55 million slaves from oppression and unleash prosperity-creating freedom in one of the poorest regions on earth. Perhaps more to the point, he has done infinitely more for the poor and the suffering than the self-styled advocates for the underclass Jeffrey Sachs or Joseph Stiglitz have ever done.
Of course, almost none of the leftist critics of the nomination can name any previous World Bank presidents, nor have they cared. But now that Bush --- the most internationally idealistic President since Wilson --- has backed up his lofty rhetoric with a bold, solid appointment, the left suddenly professes concern about the Bank again. In reality, they are concerned only that the Wolfowitz reign will be a dramatic success. As with Arab democratization, their fears are not of failure, but of success. For if the neoconservative vision can prove to be as effective at the most international-minded organizations as it has proven in the Middle East, then the Left will have nothing whatever to offer --- and their slide into the abyss will be all but complete.
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