THE WOLFOWITZ ENDGAME. More indication that Paul Wolfowitz's goose is cooked at the World Bank; the board will hear Wolfowitz's testimony tomorrow and make a decision on Wednesday. Meanwhile, if you can get past the utterly glaring and completely unspoken flip-floppery it represents on his part, Sebastian Mallaby's punchy column on Wolfowitz and the bank is definitely worth a look. The former Wolfowitz defender finally calls for him to resign. But more importantly, he makes good points about the one supposed substantive claim advanced in defense of Wolfowitz's tenure: his zealous anti-corruption approach to development. The thing is, Wolfowitz was hardly a pioneer in addressing corruption issues as a major tenet of development; his outlook on it was simplistic, poorly worked out, and unsystematic; and he implemented anti-corruption policies in a spectacularly ineffective and counterproductive way. Read Mallaby on this -- he's much meaner than I am.
--Sam Rosenfeld
