Paul Wolfowitz may have to choose between Shaha Ali Riza’s affections and his sense of duty. She is a gender specialist employed by the World Bank as an acting manager for external relations and outreach, he has been nominated as the Bank’s new President, the world’s biggest boondoggle is full of quasi-jobs like hers, and he must nerve himself to take an axe to them, whatever this may mean for relationships on his domestic hearth. He is the Pentagon’s scholarly super-hawk, who put his shirt on Ahmed Chalabi (now scratched) for the Iraq Stakes and, when ambassador in Indonesia, urged his hosts to stand no nonsense from East Timor. His appointment is seen as a consolation prize for him (he may have hoped to succeed Colin Powell) and as a token of the Bush administration’s no-nonsense attitude to foreigners in general and Old Europe in particular. There, it went down like a bad oyster. Ministers gulped, but seemed to be ready to swallow it and to make the best terms that they could. They had a deal to preserve. By convention, they pick their man for the International Monetary Fund and leave the Bank to the Americans. This successfully leaves out the rest of the world, including (of course) the Bank’s customers, and can even be helpful, since part of the job has always been to wheedle some more money out of Congress. Mr Wolfowitz and his political masters may not quite see it that way.
Thinifer, fattypuff
They would be right to believe that the Bank needs an overhaul. Of the financial twins conceived, six decades ago, at Bretton Woods, the Fund has always been more of a thinifer, but the Bank is a natural fattypuff. Its report boasts of the 8,000 genderists, outreachers and others now employed at its head office, and of its hundred other offices thoughout the world.
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