Redstate

It seems no good deed goes unpunished

By AcademicElephant Posted in Foreign Affairs — Comments (36) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz has resigned, effective June 30th. Thus ends the two-month lurid expose of the details of an arrangement made two years ago to move his long-term companion, Shaha ali Riza, out of his sphere of influence at the Bank. Dr. Wolfowitz has insisted on his innocence from both wrongdoing and the intent to do wrong, and was exonerated on Thursday by the very board that has insisted on his ouster. Their statement makes for interesting reading as they declare Dr. Wolfowitz "assured us that he acted ethically and in good faith in what he believed were the best interests of the institution, and we accept that. We also accept that others involved acted ethically and in good faith." The board concludes, however, that “mistakes were made” by a number of individuals at the Bank. Whether or not Dr. Wolfowitz and Ms. Riza are among these individuals is not specified.

The oddly disconnected nature of this statement betrays the fact that the board’s actions have nothing to do with its President’s ethics.

Read on...

I hear echoes here of other recent departures of executives from major institutions. At the end of last year, I reflected on the circumstances that had led to the resignations of Larry Summers, Donald Rumsfeld and John Bolton from Harvard, the Department of Defense and the United Nations, respectively:

On the surface, 2006 was a bad year for the reformers. From Cambridge to Arlington to Turtle Bay, it seems that the energetic and high-profile souls who have spent the last few years trying to reshape some of our most stagnant, bloated, hidebound--and important--institutions are on the retreat while representatives of the smug status quo are feted and lionized.

For those of us who think that such reform is vitally necessary, it's not a pretty picture. But fortunately, I believe that while this is not a pleasant time, all is not lost. In some ways, what happened to the reformers in 2006 was predictable, and a function of their being reformers. Reform is unpopular. It's painful and disruptive, and there are no guarantees of future success. The forces of entrenched entitlement are notoriously difficult to shift, and will oppose reform at every opportunity. Those who attempt it tend not to retire peacefully at the appointed moment with the gold watch. They tend to conclude their efforts in the stormy, confrontational manner that characterized their tenures.

In each case, opponents pointed to “gotcha” moments—Dr. Summers’ reflections on the possible root causes for the disproportionately low number of women in math and hard science departments, Mr. Rumsfeld’s culpability for the Iraq war that resulted in the 2006 electoral defeat for congressional Republicans and Mr. Bolton’s tendency to throw hard-edged office supplies at hapless subordinates, or what we might call his inability to play nicely with others—that spelled doom for each man’s tenure. But while these episodes provide conveniently simple justifications for their ousters that fit neatly into media sound bytes, they mask the true reasons for their departures, which seemed to me rooted in institutional resistance to their larger programs of reform. And now we have the “scandal” of Dr. Wolfowitz and Ms. Riza, which provided sufficient ammunition for the forces that were lying in wait for such an opportunity to remove him.

I wonder how long Dr. Wolfowitz expected to last at the World Bank. Like Dr. Summers, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Bolton, he hardly could have anticipated a long, untroubled appointment. After all, these are hardly babes in the woods that we’re dealing with here. Each had to know that from the get-go, the long knives would be out for them. By energetically and uncompromisingly pursuing reform, they were in a sense setting a limit to their tenures as they would inevitably provoke the wrath of the very systems they proposed to overhaul. And none could be so naïve as to think that they would have the time to fully transform their institutions under such circumstances. It seems to me that the best they could hope for would be to begin the process of fundamental cultural change that would allow future university presidents, secretaries of defense, ambassadors to the United Nations and World Bank presidents to implement additional reforms.

Dr. Wolfowitz’ plans for the World Bank were certainly ambitious. There seem to me to be only two reasons to be at the Bank: 1) because you want to use the international body to enrich yourself and enhance your personal prestige; or 2) because you really want to assist in the economic progress of developing nations. Dr. Wolfowitz has been neatly slotted into group one as on the surface, his actions vis a vis Ms. Riza suggest that from his first days at the Bank, he was using its resources to line his own pockets, or at least the pockets of those closest to him. Yet this man theoretically obsessed with his image and prestige has been famously photographed wandering around the world in holey socks (apparently darning isn’t in Ms. Riza’s job description), and I have yet to read any account of his time at the Bank that suggests he was anything but a crusader against global poverty.

And so it appears to me that the stumbling block here was not so much Dr. Wolfowitz’ethics as it was the very nature of his crusade. He arrived at the Bank with the same combination of practicality and idealism that had informed his work for the State and Defense departments. His goal in this case was to instill a sense of responsibility into those who both give and receive World Bank aid. He touched what is apparently the third rail of Bank policy and moved to cut off funding to nations who may have needed it, but who were not fulfilling their responsibilities as resources were consumed by corrupt local officials. And so loans to countries such as Cambodia and Kenya were summarily terminated.

Bank staffers were shocked, shocked that Dr. Wolfowitz used his own, imported staff to implement his reforms and failed to involve existing structures in his program. But their very outrage begs the question of how far he would have gotten if he had? How much progress could Dr. Wolfowitz have made with the established Back staff? Would they have carried out his orders to cut aid to client nations they had cultivated over their decades of service? Or would they have exploited the morass of internal checks and balances they had themselves created—of which Dr. Wolfowitz as an outsider was ignorant—to endlessly delay and ultimately scuttle his directives?

These are tough questions, but they need to be asked if we want to get to the root of why Paul Wolfowitz resigned. I have no doubt that there are many dedicated individuals working at the World Bank who are committed to the institution’s mission “of global poverty reduction and the improvement of living standards.” But the mob behavior of many on its staff who protested against Dr. Wolfowitz for Ms. Riza’s employment deal two years after the fact rings a little hollow to me. It smacks of offended dignity and the defense of entrenched personal interests—neither of which have very much to do with defeating poverty.

In a recent interview with the BBC, Mr. Bolton bluntly declared that there are "lifers" in our State Department who actively work against presidential policy with which they personally disagree. Mr. Bolton, who received precious little support from such “colleagues” during his time at the UN, makes an important point here that has ramifications for the Wolfowitz situation.

Dr. Wolfowitz discovered—indeed he probably knew going in—that the World Bank is staffed by an equivalent group of lifers whose personal interests trump the policy of their executive. He tried to change this culture for the best of all possible reasons—because it hampers the ability of the Bank to do its important job. And I would hazard the guess that if his short and stormy but substantive and meaningful stewardship of the Bank has, as Dr. Wolfowitz said in his statement, resulted in actual progress on this front, he might consider his two years there time well spent, and perhaps far more valuable than twenty business-as-usual style years at the helm. But even so, Mr. Bolton’s words point to an alarming trend that is emerging in some of our largest and most powerful domestic and international institutions. They have become just that—institutionalized—to the extent that the actual interests of the institution are trumped by the will of the established bureaucracy to perpetuate itself.

It is curious that so many accept without question the august and untouchable “cultures” of these institutions, which appear to be sacrosanct regardless of how they impede real progress. This was certainly the case with Harvard, the DoD and the UN, and coverage of the World Bank appears to be following the pattern. For example, Anne de Young of the Washington Post declared today that the reason Dr. Wolfowitz had to go was that he “just didn’t fit” in at the Bank. Ms. de Young particularly faults his desire to travel to the countries receiving Bank aid, his aggressive response to the Bank campaign against him and, above all, his use of his own staffers rather than the established Bank structure to pursue his ambitious goals of increased efficiency and internal reform. She delves into Dr. Wolfowitz’ past to selectively set the stage for what she sees as his pre-ordained failure at the Bank: he’s too wonky, too “steely” under his academic sheep’s clothing, and not a sufficiently adept manager to gracefully navigate the Bank’s Byzantine internal mechanisms.

In my opinion, Ms. de Young rather dramatically misses the point here. Personal popularity with the Bank’s staff (whose self-righteous, theatrical behavior has been nothing less than bizarre throughout this “scandal”) never seemed to me to be Dr. Wolfowitz’ goal. To wit, one of Ms. De Young’s many anonymous sources noted that “the Bank is a black hole of indolence and bureaucracy.” The source quickly follows up that that's okay, because the Bank’s staff includes some of “the best people in the world” and these paragons have been unforgivably “humiliated” by Dr. Wolfowitz’ aggressive tactics. Dr. Wolfowitz, he concludes, doesn’t “get it.” The source clearly meant that as criticism, but I think he might—however unwittingly—be on to something here.

How about this: Dr. Wolfowitz realized quickly that he didn’t want to “get” this “black hole.” He had no interest in fitting into a culture of "indolence" as even the “best people" at the Bank had proven incapable of accomplishing much in such an atmosphere. He must have known from the start that his best plan to effect real change was to try to change that culture rather than attempting to work within its moribund structure. And like Dr. Summers, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Bolton before him, he found that hell hath no fury like an institutional culture scorned. It is lamentable that his “gotcha” moment was so personal and smeared in the process the distinguished Ms. Riza, and these circumstances should alert us that there are no depths to which the powers of entrenchment will not sink to defend their entitlements. Anyone is fair game when there’s so much international prestige, not to mention money, at stake.

It will be interesting to see who is tapped to replace Dr. Wolfowitz at the World Bank. In the first heady days when the board felt it had its President, and so the administration that appointed him, on the ropes, suggestions were floated that it would use this opportunity to subvert the tradition by which the US selects the Bank president and so transform the Bank into a subsidiary of the already European-controlled International Monetary Fund. It is tempting to surmise that this was the goal of the board all along. But Dr. Wolfowitz—gasp—hired a tough lawyer and pushed back to defended not only his own interests but also those of the United States in this matter. The board proved somewhat more bark than bite as it issued its cravenly-worded statement exonerating him and retreated on the question of the Bank’s next president. Now President Bush has an opportunity here to replace Dr. Wolfowitz with someone who can drive through the hole he made in the Bank’s culture. Such a progression would be, after all, the best legacy for a reformer such as Paul Wolfowitz.