The Price Of 'We Know Best'

Real Clear Politics ^ | 2 May 2007 | David Ignatius

[Kitten Festival]

Reading some of the shrill comments posted online by World Bank staffers expressing (anonymously) their loathing for Paul Wolfowitz, you can understand why the bank president feels he has been the victim of a " smear campaign." But in taking the role of wounded victim, Wolfowitz seems blind to his own mistakes, which have had ruinous consequences for a great institution.

Wolfowitz has failed at the World Bank not because his underlings were out to get him (though many probably were) but because he treated the organization itself as an enemy. He saw its professional staff as an impediment to achieving his goals, rather than as a potential ally. Instead of heeding advice to work with the prickly international staff and win them over, he installed a palace guard of Americans who, like him, exuded the cocky "we know best" confidence of the Bush administration.

[Kitten Festival]

I agree with Ignatius

[RedStateRocker]

...Wolfowitz seemed not to understand that the bank was a proud, multinational institution — almost its own country — with its own rules and culture...

I don’t *WANT* “Proud, multinational institutions” running around trying to run the world. Close the damned thing down; if I didn’t vote for the leadership of it then it is the enemy.

[iopscusa]

I agree with Wolfowitz, destroy this idiot organization, the World Bank, asap! The WB has it’s own Culture of Corruption, similar to the other prickly org, the UN.

[Kitten Festival]

The whole thing is, he doesn’t want to destroy the organization. He just doesn’t know how not to. That said, he’s not a good libertarian freemarketer, all he’d bring are tired old Keynesian ideas from the 1950s with a different staff. That’s why I don’t think he’s the right man for the job, he doesn’t understand economics.

[Tallguy]

How else can you reform an entrenched bureaucracy? The diversion of World Bank funds has created a lot of mega-rich third world dictators. Sounds to me the the organization needed to return to its charter.