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Paul Wolfowitz has marked his first day as the new head of the World Bank by reaffirming his plan to focus primarily on reducing poverty in Africa. In addition, he intends to tackle corruption and make poor countries feel more involved in the decision making process at the global lender. Mr Wolfowitz added that although Africa would be his main focus, he would not forget other developing regions. Some have attacked his appointment because of his role in the Iraq War. Previously the US Deputy Defence Secretary and a key "hawk" in George W Bush's administration, he was one of...

``I can't tell you,'' Paul Wolfowitz says with justifiable asperity, ``how much I resent being called a Wilsonian.'' As he retires as deputy secretary of defense and becomes head of the World Bank, the man most responsible for the doctrinal justification of the Iraq War, and who has been characterized as representing Woodrow Wilson's utopian, rather than the realist, strain in American foreign policy, begs to differ. The question, he says, is who has been realistic for almost four decades. The sprouting of freedom through the fissures in the concrete of dictatorships began, he recalls, in Greece, Spain and Portugal...

IT WAS ONLY 7:15 a.m. on October 26, 2003, and Paul Wolfowitz was already thinking about Saddam Hussein. The deputy secretary of defense had been awake for just over an hour when he and two civilian Pentagon advisers walked into a large office for a briefing on electricity.Wolfowitz wasn't happy. The office was in one of Saddam's opulent palaces. Six months after the fall of Baghdad, there were still three-story busts of the former Iraqi leader perched atop the four corners of the massive structure. Virtually all of the images of the deposed dictator throughout Iraq had been defaced or...

breaking...

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...

President Bush's nomination of Paul Wolfowitz to lead the World Bank is an inspired choice. It suggests that the president's commitment to spreading democracy is not merely rhetorical. It shows also that he recognizes that democracy involves more than the ballot box. Institutional reforms that encourage development of markets, the rule of law, protection of human and property rights, and openness to trade -- all these sustain democracy by giving people opportunity, hope and higher living standards.Competitive markets and rule of law help to reduce corruption, a problem everywhere but especially acute in developing countries. World Bank estimates suggest...

Embattled Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, nominated by President Bush to head the World Bank, has received some welcome support from an unlikely source, Democratic Sen. Joe Biden. Wolfowitz's nomination by Bush was greeted with disdain by much of Europe, Africa and Asia. But Biden, who is known in some circles as somewhat of a foreign policy wonk, thinks the Pentagon's second-in-command is a good pick. "I think it's a good choice," Biden told London's Sunday Herald newspaper. "He's a democracy builder. He's a nation builder, unlike [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld and others." Biden has been a regular critic of...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS & TARIQ ALIdebate the Iraq War Tariq Ali is author of Bush in Babylon: The Recolonization of Iraq, and editor of the New Left Review. Christopher Hitchens's latest book is called, Blood, Class, and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship. This interview is published with the permission of Democracy Now.* * * * * * * * * * AMY GOODMAN: We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Why don't we start off with Christopher Hitchens. Your assessment, Christopher, right now, of what's happening in Iraq. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I think that the United States and coalition forces are not...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...

The Bush administration has been carrying out secret reconnaissance missions to learn about nuclear, chemical and missile sites in Iran in preparation for possible airstrikes there, journalist Seymour Hersh said Sunday. The effort has been under way at least since last summer, Hersh said on CNN's "Late Edition." In an interview on the same program, White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett said the story was "riddled with inaccuracies." "I don't believe that some of the conclusions he's drawing are based on fact," Bartlett said. He said his information on Iran came from "inside" sources who divulged it in the hope...

President Bush met with NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer in the Oval Office, and nominated Alberto Gonzales, currently the White House counsel, to succeed John Ashcroft as US Attorney General. President's Veterans' Day Proclamation [Veterans' Day is tomorrow] Enjoy your visit to Sanity Island!

HEADLINE: CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; How Books Have Shaped U.S. Policy BYLINE: By MICHIKO KAKUTANI BODY: President Bush has never been known as a bookworm. An instinctive politician who goes with his gut, he has usually left the heavy reading in the family to his wife, Laura, a former librarian. He is "often uncurious and as a result ill informed," his former speechwriter, David Frum, wrote in a memoir this year, adding that "conspicuous intelligence seemed actively unwelcome in the Bush White House." It is curious then that books by historians, philosophers and policy analysts have played a significant role in shaping...

French connection armed Saddam By Bill Gertz THE WASHINGTON TIMES The United States stood by for years as supposed allies helped its enemies obtain the world's most dangerous weapons, reveals Bill Gertz, defense and national security reporter for The Washington Times, in the new book "Treachery" (Crown Forum). In this excerpt, he details France's persistence in arming Saddam Hussein. First of three excerpts New intelligence revealing how long France continued to supply and arm Saddam Hussein's regime infuriated U.S. officials as the nation prepared for military action against Iraq. The intelligence reports showing French assistance to Saddam ongoing in the...

On May 13, 2004, Senator Edward Kennedy berated Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz at the Senate Armed Services Committee, condemning "disaster after disaster" in U.S. Iraq policy. Well before the Abu Ghraib revelations, Kennedy has sought to transform Iraqi freedom from a philosophical and strategic issue into a partisan debate, without regard either to reality or result. On April 6, Kennedy called Iraq "George Bush's Vietnam." On March 5, 2004, Senator Edward Kennedy, speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations, took the president to task for allegedly exaggerating the threat posed by Iraq: "The evidence so far leads to...

Our plan for security and democracy after June 30. After a suicide car bombing killed Iraqi Interim Governing Council President Izzedine Salim and eight others on May 17, one Iraqi put that act of terror into a larger perspective for those who wonder if democracy can work in Iraq. His name is Omar, one of the new Iraqi "bloggers," and he wrote on his Web log: "We cannot … protect every single person, including our leaders and the higher officials who make favorite targets for the terrorists — but we can make their attempts go in vain by making our...

IN the middle of the worst month for US forces in Iraq, with the city of Fallujah under siege, with rebel Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr grandly receiving envoys for negotiations, the US position in Iraq looks desperate, perhaps doomed. But there is a core of faith in the Bush administration - determination more than optimism, though irreducible optimism is a part of it - that the US-led coalition will prevail in Iraq. And I am sitting in the office of Optimism Central, here in the Pentagon where Paul Wolfowitz, the US Deputy Secretary of Defence, chief intellectual architect of the...

Ex-General to Oversee Guantanamo Trials Dec 30, 3:02 PM (ET) By ROBERT BURNS WASHINGTON (AP) - A retired Army general will oversee military tribunals for suspected terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, including approving charges, the Pentagon said Tuesday. Chosen for the job was John D. Altenburg, Jr., who retired as a two-star general in 2002. His last military assignment was assistant judge advocate general for the Department of the Army. None of the 660 suspected terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay has been charged, and although the Pentagon has not said when it expects to begin military trials, the first...

Iraq reconstruction on hold December 29, 2003BY ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST Advertisement A pall was cast over Christmas for disappointed U.S. government civilians in Baghdad when they received word two weeks ago that the $18.6 billion for Iraq's reconstruction rushed through Congress in November was indefinitely on hold. They have been told not to issue ''requests for proposal,'' which surely will extend the promised Feb. 1 date for contract awards.No announcement of the slowdown has been made, though the Pentagon has confirmed published reports. The closely held decision to hold up the process was made in Washington, with no explanation...

Bush's WMD Interception Initiative 'Accelerating' By Patrick Goodenough CNSNews.com Pacific Rim Bureau Chief December 18, 2003 Pacific Rim Bureau (CNSNews.com) - President Bush's initiative aimed at intercepting and seizing non-conventional weapons in transit is steadily winning more international support, with another five countries in Asia and the West joining the original line-up of 11. Two days of talks on the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) in Washington ended with participating nations agreeing to hold six more joint exercises during the first half of next year. Joining the 11-nation core group at the "operational experts" meeting were Turkey, Singapore, Canada, Denmark and...