Jim Miles: Good-bye Wolfowitz – A Retrospective

One of the most influential figures in the current American government is Paul Wolfowitz with a history that takes him back more than a generation to the Reagan era and the renewed militarism of the United States and its emphasis on nuclear armaments. Wolfowitz is a Jewish neocon, with strong ties to the Israeli government and the Jewish lobby in America. He is a student of Wohlstetter, one of the early academic formulators of a policy supporting the use of nuclear weapons in an increasingly antagonistic and imperative political foreign policy. Like most of the other neocons who are adamant war hawks, he has not seen any active service, nor did he have to invent any excuses to avoid it. That is one of the fuller ironies of the current crop of American militarists – perhaps if they had actually suffered through the horrors of warfare they might not be so fond of promulgating it. More so, given their supposed intellect, it is an intellect blinded by narrow egotism and ignorant hubris that their way is the only way. Wolfowitz appears to fit this description remarkably well.

One might correct me by saying the Wolfowitz is no longer in the current government, that he has moved on, up, over to the World Bank. Given the structure of the World Bank and its voting power dependent on the size of the participating country’s economic support, the U.S. has an effective veto over any decisions by the World Bank. That makes it little more than another agency of the American government operating not in the military theatre, but in that other theatre of the absurd, that of economics. Instead of reading this piece of history forward, let’s read it backwards, beginning with the World Bank, where his current problems of personal corruption have led to “hissing and booing World Bank staff”[italics in original][1] when he tried to apologize to them for the very acts he had condemned in others. An examination of Wolfowitz’s role within the World Bank makes a good starting point of his ‘chicken-hawk’ career.

Wolfowitz’s appointment was considered bluntly by John Perkins, the ‘economic hit man’ who revealed his inside story of corporate duplicity in setting governments up far a financial fall into debt. Stating what should be fairly obvious, but not recognized by such in the regular media, “Wolfowitz’s appointment left no doubt – if ever any existed – that it is not a world bank. It is a U.S. bank. The president of the United states chooses its president and controls its major decisions.”[2] The most recent achievement for Wolfowitz has been as the “major architect and symbol of the Bush Administration's war in Iraq,” along with his other credentials, his “contempt for multilateral institutions and general disregard for world public opinion.”[3] Assessing his role in the Iraqi war, “Wolfowitz’s handiwork as much as the president’s,” Andrew Bacevich indicates that he has unleashed “a dangerous combination of hubris and naïveté…exacting an ever mounting cost.”[4] These are not recommendations that I would want to see on anyone’s resume who is contemplating a position with the World Bank. The bank and its associated institutes (IMF, WTO, OECD et al) have failed, but both the bank and its new leader, also a failure, refuse to see that, delving further into rhetoric and misrepresented statistics.

His early speeches represent the bland undefined jargon that is ever present in material put out by these global institutions, extolling virtues of capitalist free markets without ever defining the reality of the term and what it means to the way the world is truly governed, not the way the way they say it should be governed. Speaking on the Middle East governments, he academically chastised them:

Middle East countries need to adopt structural reforms across a wide enough front and at a rapid enough pace to create new engines of growth to replace oil. Oil is not the engine of sustainable growth. The real engine of growth is the ability and creativity of people and a policy environment that allows them to apply that energy and talent to provide a better future for themselves, for their children, and for their countries.

It all sounded well and good along with his insistence, using the mantra so common to the WTO and World Bank, that their problems stem from “institutions that lack transparency and accountability,” and that they could be solved by “three fundamental shifts in their economy: from public sector to private sector dominance, from closed to open economies and from excessive reliance on oil to more stable and diversified economies.”

True to his word, Wolfowitz had been a long time instigator of the war with Iraq, having helped formulate those plans well before Bush ever came to power. Using Bechtel, and Kellogg, Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton and familiar to many of the unelected Bush cabinet and advisory groups, Iraq is certainly being privatised. Iran is close to being next. The move away from oil will of course be aided by the requirement of Iraq to pay for its own reconstruction as the Americans, if they leave, or even if they do not, will not pay for the rebuilding of all the infrastructure they have destroyed. As for the earlier comment on oil not being the engine of sustainable growth, perhaps he had better take that hypocritical and ignorant message back home to his own government to give it some serious consideration. By this time I am sure that most Arabic peoples, along with the Iranians, are well aware of the economic, political, and social disasters that follow on the development of an oil economy.

Wolfowitz ended his speech with the phrase “If they take these steps today, when times are good, they will emerge stronger in the long run.”[5] When times are good??? That comment hardly needs comment and I will not provide it with one.

More specifically on Palestine, Wolfowitz phrases comments as if there is nothing really bad going on, that problems are political in nature, that corruption is the problem, “I would like to stress that corruption is not just a problem for developing countries,” but also for his own country, “the United States, [has] a responsibility to police such actions with greater vigour and hold private firms accountable if they export corruption to emerging economies.” Asked how the World Bank had assisted the Palestinians, he replied, “our role over the last 10 years has been working to try to improve the life and conditions of ordinary Palestinians, and I personally believe strongly that that is an effort that can contribute to hopefully eventually resolving the difficult political issues that are the underlying causes of this conflict. The recent elections in the West Bank and Gaza have presented something of a dilemma.”[6] Ah, yes, the dilemma of democracy and how to avoid its message that American power is neither wanted nor needed.

The previous ten years have seen nothing but blanket U.S. acceptance of the delays and stalls and intransigence of the Israeli government that has allowed them to make more and more incursions into Palestinian territory and destroy Palestinian life, including all of its economic aspects. Certainly the elections are a ‘dilemma’, one of the more transparent[7] and democratic and open elections the Middle East has ever seen, subsequently denied validity by the Americans, Canadians, and the British, along with other renewed puppet governments in Europe, because it did not fit into their long range plans to allow Israel to do what it wants. The dilemma is one of catching American rhetoric at variance with its real wants and desires, the rhetoric of freedom and democracy not wanting to admit that in a free and democratic election elements hostile to America and Israel gained power.

The underlying motive of hegemonic control of the Middle East is spiced with systemic and personal conceit and ignorance that allows American political figures to make statements as meaningless as Wolfowitz on Palestine.

Out of Africa

For reasons unstated and perhaps unfathomable, Paul Wolfowitz has been championing the cause of the World Bank in Africa, having visited over a dozen countries there within his first year. Could it be that he has been placed in a non-transparent organization so that the public – at least those that are aware of his Department of Defense record of entering Iraq and his overall war hawk tendencies – will perhaps forget or modify or forgive the bad aftertaste of the Iraqi insurgency, enabling him to re-enter public office in the future? Could it be that he is truly bi-polar and needs to reconcile his own inner conflict between advocating war and slaughter in one area with words of peace and culture and progress in another? Or has he been shunted into a role where he can be as equally effective in supporting world hegemony through economic interventions rather than military interventions? Perhaps the next presidential election in the U.S. will reveal the answer to Wolfowitz’s continuing role but until then it seems Africa (among others) has to suffer from his ministrations for the duration.

When questioned about the World Bank’s record as to “why there is still so much poverty after 60 years of the World Bank’s existence” Wolfowitz responded with a number of statistics that superficially argue for the effectiveness of the World Bank. Unfortunately, while what he said was true for a correlation, it was not true for cause and effect.

His first response was “Over the past 40 years, life expectancy in developing countries has risen by 20 years-about as much as was achieved in all of human history prior to the mid-20th century.” This information can be checked out and verified, but it also reveals that over the past 40 years global life expectancy has also risen about twenty years, in the rich countries as well as the poor countries. That makes it highly doubtful that the World Bank has been responsible for the increase, which is more likely due to other agencies - education and information programs, and/or agricultural advances, medical advances, or simply better transportation and communication.

His next argument was that “Over the past 30 years, adult illiteracy in the developing world has been nearly halved to 25%.” Once again this information is verifiable, and once again it also reveals that globalilliteracy has diminished by the same amount, indicating that Canada and the U.S. and other G-8 countries are following the same path as the nondeveloping world. And finally again, while the correlation may be strong there are many other possible and more probable reasons why illiteracy has fallen other than through the ministrations of the World Bank.

The statistics that do relate with cause and effect is the literacy rate of women in relation to the economic health of a country. In a major study “Growing Public - Social Spending and Economic Growth Since the Eighteenth Century”, the author Peter Lindert discovered that, statistically, contrary to what the free market capitalist think tanks will tell you, there is no support “that higher taxes and transfers [welfare, education, child support, maternity leave] reduce productivity” but that “the fairest statistical tests of this argument find no cost at all” and “within the range of true historical experience, there is no clear net GDP cost of higher social transfers.”[8] In other words, social benefits generally help, and at worst in a purely economic sense do not have any negative affects.

With all the emphasis on downsizing government and reducing social expenditures to get the economy rolling, and then from debt pressures forcing education and health services to be reduced, and that combined with reductions in taxes, the World Bank and its affiliates – the WTO, OECD, NAFTA et al – are working against what the long historical record shows us as working. What about that literacy rate? In states that support women with generous child benefits, maternity leave, and retraining, along with a strong educational background, there is a net positive effect on the economy, not just in the short term, but “it seems likely that this return can be cumulative over decades and generations.”[9] The latter only makes common sense as educated and supported women will be productive throughout their lives as well as raising children that are also well educated and therefore better prepared to participate in the economy of their state.

It also follows that an educated female population would also increase life expectancy as they would then be much better informed about nutrition, child care, and general health issues, as well as being able to make better decisions within these topics. While illiteracy is dropping globally, the numbers in Africa are still dismal with many African countries having literacy rates well below sixty per cent, bottoming out in Niger with fourteen per cent.[10] Yet in his recent speeches Wolfowitz continues to extol the virtues of open market capitalism and small government, factors that have led to some very negative results in Africa as elsewhere.

Wolfowitz’s third argument trying to support the World Bank’s record is “Over the past 20 years, the absolute number of people living on less than one dollar a day has begun to fall for the first time, even as the world's population has grown by 1.6 billion people.” This is a specious argument on two counts. First of all, who set the dollar a day limit as defining absolute poverty? More than likely it was some IMF or World Bank bureaucrat who would not be able to survive on less then a couple of hundred dollars a day. To place an arbitrary marker like that as a guideline suits only the statisticians and those blinded by their numbers. Numbers that small, just as numbers very large, those that comprise the world’s billionaires, truly have no significance for the average person. That dollar a day is also by necessity a figure not adjusted for inflation – perhaps today’s dollar adjusted amount needs to be twice that amount if not significantly more – and behold, the UN Human Resources Development report indicates that for what was a dollar in 1990, it is now “$4 a day … adjusted for purchasing power parity.”[11] Africa continues to have a significantly high percentage of people earning less than this poverty wage.

Secondly, the majority of the people that have risen out of poverty have been in India and China, where there is a local home grown economic surge that has not relied on the dictates of the World Bank (although as seen previously, it does have some serious local impacts). Containing more than a third of the world’s population, the involvement of these two countries would significantly skew any statistical measurement used. This has been accompanied by an increase in those suffering from poverty in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa, mostly as a result of IMF/World Bank imposed deregulation and restructuring requirements for business loans.[12] Certainly the GDP has been rising in many of those areas, but that only shows that a few are getting very rich and many, many more are slowly sinking.

That leads directly to Wolfowitz’s final argument supporting the World Bank, “Over the last decade, growth in the developing world has outpaced that in developed countries, helping to provide jobs and boost revenues poor countries' governments need to provide essential services.” China and India, as seen above, are a major component of this growth in the developing world, while other areas are suffering from increased poverty. Much of the income that has boosted the growth statistics comes from natural resources, “the doubling in world prices for all commodities since 2003 -- especially petroleum, copper, silver, zinc, nickel, and the like -- that the developing nations traditionally export. While there will be fluctuations in this upsurge, there is also reason to think it may endure because rapid economic growth in China, India, and elsewhere has created a burgeoning demand that did not exist before, when the balance-of-trade systematically favored the rich nations.”[13]

Another factor is the trade relationship between the developing countries, “as early as 2003 developing countries were already the source of 37 percent of the foreign direct investment in other developing nations. China accounts for a great part of this growth.”[14] It does not appear that the World Bank can take too much credit for this growth. The wealth generated by this growth hardly stays in the country of origin – while it may count within their statistical analysis as it passes by, the money is largely accumulated by the trans-national corporations and very little of it finds its way to those “essential services” left undefined by Wolfowitz. The current 2006 surge in oil prices and the related huge profits made by the petroleum industry provide good evidence of that.

This relates to back to Africa, whose “share of world trade declined from 6 per cent in 1980 to less than 2 per cent in 2002. Africa is the only region of the developing world where food production fell over the past 20 years.”[15] In contrast to Wolfowitz’s wonderful statistics above, life expectancy, especially in sub-Saharan Africa has fallen dramatically, in large part due to AIDS, but that again is another economic statistic as much as it is a medical one. The GDP per capita in five out of nine of the states in the report declined over the same period. Those that have increased recently did so because of conditions as mentioned above, the rising price of commodities, as indicated by Zambia’s economy in which “copper mines are reopening as mineral prices push higher.”[16] Not quite the pretty picture that Wolfowitz tries to paint.

Generally, the world’s major financial institutions, the World Bank included under the lead of Paul Wolfowitz, have created numerous disasters around the world yet refuse to see that it is as a result of their efforts, calling for more and more liberalization and more and more deregulation. Unfortunately, the contrary appears to be more evident, as “financial liberalization has produced a monster, and resolving the many problems that have emerged is scarcely possible for those who deplore controls on those who seek to make money.”[17]

After all that, perhaps it is Wolfowitz’s abilities at making war that have led directly to his appointment at the World Bank, as wars are very profitable for those corporations that are on the U.S. government’s list of favourites. Perhaps “it makes perfect sense to have Wolfowitz at the World Bank. He's terrific at doing wars, and wars are much more profitable than nickel-and-dime industrial projects. That's the way the world works. Always has been.”[18] As seen by Maude Barlow, the chairperson for the Council of Canadians, “Wolfowitz is the perfect man for the job. He embodies the Bush administration’s unilateralism and contempt for international law. We can expect to see his neoconservative views reflected in World Bank policies and applied…to the conditions attached to World Bank loans in Third World countries.”[19] Or, as Noam Chomsky sees it, “he can do much less damage in the World Bank than in the Pentagon.”[20]

Wolfowitz still insists that he is a man of peace, as at a recent event in Freetown, Sierra Leone he said, “I think peace is perhaps the most valuable national resource. It’s certainly more valuable than oil or diamonds.”[21] Wolfowitz was second in command under Dick Cheney in the Department of Defence during Bush II’s first government. While he was within the Bush administration, Wolfowitz was the grand theorist of military strategy, providing the intellectual impetus behind the “full spectrum dominance” and the unilateral pre-emptive first use of nuclear weapons. His record for peace is non-existent before he hit the World Bank and as the leopard cannot change his spots, neither can Wolfowitz change his politics that go back many decades to his days in university.

On the Inside

Wolfowitz’ career has long been within the government, working within the Pentagon through the 1970s, where his strong anti-communist views led to a large over-estimate of Soviet capabilities in ‘worst-case scenarios’. During the eighties, he moved over to the Republican camp where in 1983 he took over as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. During that time he oversaw three dictators in South Korea, the Philippines and Indonesia and he “played a key role in defining US policy toward South Korea and the Philippines at a time of intense repression and growing opposition to authoritarian rule.”[22] He claimed that his plan was to get rid of the dictatorships, but as usual with American foreign policy, it was a matter of hanging on to old reliable tyrants until their grip on the country was no longer tenable and then switching support to someone new. “Wolfowitz was rewriting history, implying that the Filipino people, like the South Koreans, ignored two decades of massive US military and financial support for Marcos. In both countries, US policy toward these dictators (which in Korea would include Park Chung-hee, Chun's assassinated predecessor) only began to weaken when US officials decided that their continued hold on power would lead to further instability, thus threatening US "interests".” His attempts to “whitewash the likes of Chun, Marcos, Suharto, and Wiranto illustrate the bankruptcy of US foreign policy from Reagan to Bush. Americans concerned about what is being done abroad in their names need to watch Wolfowitz' every move, from Korea to Iraq to Colombia.”[23] In Indonesia, “he was one of the strongest and most vocal supporters of one of the worst murderers and tyrants of the late 20th century…the murderous…aggressor Suharto.” As for his influence on the World Bank to date, Chomsky says, “there’s no indication of any shift in World Bank policy that I’ve seen, and I wouldn’t particularly expect any.”[24]

Well before the 9/11 tragedy, the knowledge was already available and self-evident that Wolfowitz was an advocate of nuclear war with interests against the soon to be “axis of evil”. After Reagan and Bush I, Wolfowitz was temporarily out of Washington, spending some time again in academia, where he authored the “Project for a New American Century” letter to President Clinton which among other things identified Iraq and Saddam Hussein as major obstacles to American hegemony, although put into different terms. Wolfowitz and the other neocon signatories to the letter advocated, “The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.”[25] With the renewed Bush II administration, and his close relationships with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfield, he came back to directly influence the corridors of power in the White House.

During his educational years, he received his education under the tutelage of Albert Wohlstetter, a disciple of Leo Strauss. Wohlstetter could be designated as Wolfowitz’ strategist, from which Wolfowitz gained powerful positions that enabled Wohlstetter’s ideas to become plans of action. Wohlstetter’s influence did not wane because of that. Wohlstetter’s intellect worked on the idea of superior technology allowing a “form of highly discriminate nonnuclear warfare.” Part of this involved being an “ardent advocate of ballistic missile defenses.”[26] The theoretical application of deterrence changed such that it “had now collapsed into warfighting. The two had become indistinguishable.”[27] The first war in Iraq, its quick military success, its lack of political success in that Hussein remained in power, “sitting on the world’s second largest pool of low-cost oil”, took Wohlstetter even further to the current position of preventative war: “by their very existence dictatorship constituted an unacceptable threat[italics in original]”[28] During the 1990s, this position had no real impact, simmering behind the scenes, until the opportune moment came from the 9/11 World Trade Tower attacks. After that “the Pentagon shifted from the business of theorizing about war to the business of actually waging it.” The U.S. was no longer bound by conventional military theory and could now advocate unilateral action against a series of ‘rogue’ states that irritated more than threatened them, but provided the excuse to proceed with their new methodology.

Wolfowitz has a Ph.D. in political science (of which there is very little to be scientific about), and being in familiar territory with Cheney and Ashcroft, has “no experience of either war or the military.”[29] From this educational background he has a “wide ranging network of travellers and sympathisers, commonly referred to in Washington as the “Wolfowitz cabal.”” Although denied by Wolfowitz and his entourage, the idea is supported in a study of Strauss that says Wolfowitz studied with the Strauss cabal, “This [denial] is a little disingenuous, for if he ate lightly of the main dish, there were others on the table.” Those others include Wohlstetter who made his reputation “by advocating limited use of nuclear weapons” with Wolfowitz following on that “suggesting that the Pax Americana is dependent on the willingness and ability to use nuclear weapons”[30] Never mind the irony of the Latin ‘pax’ in association with nuclear war (which also recalls the ballistic missile dubbed the ‘Peacemaker’), Wolfowitz, in association with others, is the author of the American pre-emptive strike policy, “turning the iron laws of necessity in nuclear strategy into foreign policy” creating a “quagmire” of “endless war across a vast stretch of the earth—a war from which extrication will be next to impossible.”[31] That impossibility obviously delights the corporations that feed off government military largesse and delights the politicians who find a welcoming revolving door to their boardrooms.

Along with the exhortations for global hegemony, Wolfowitz, as a fully educated member of the neocon group, uses the “export of American values as the main prop and justification for an American global mission.”[32] This fills the second wing of the American eagle, the values of democracy being paramount, with the always underlying theme of Christian supremacy. “The Presbyterian cant of Woodrow Wilson” and its “enlightened self-interest under which free markets and democracy shall flourish” rides along with the “big stick” of Theodore Roosevelt, now seen as global military supremacy under the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons.[33]

As a member of the neocons, Wolfowitz was ushered into power in the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfield as Undersecretary of defence for policy. His role arises frequently in James Carroll’s excellent history of the Pentagon, House of War. His defence policy centred on the role of nuclear weapons in the American arsenal. Previous to this role Paul Nitze, the arms negotiator under Nixon in 1969 (SALT I) brought Wolfowitz into the discussions (along with Richard Perle) in what “amounted to a baptism in defense policy” where they saw the rationale supporting the ABM agreement “because it protected the U.S. advantage in the next round of offensive weapons development. [italics in original]”[34] Wolfowitz helped create the myths of the missile gap, nuclear superiority, and “predicted that Moscow was aiming for first strike capability.”[35] Always looking for the advantage against the Soviets, Rumsfield’s move to the Pentagon with Wolfowitz would “ultimately accomplish the restoration of America’s overwhelming military dominance, a supremacy unapologetically based on nuclear weapons.”[36] Wolfowitz served in the Bush I government (he served in all governments from Nixon through to the present except Clinton’s) but would reveal his misperceptions in warning that glasnost was just another example of “Soviet chicanery” two days before Gorbachev let the Berlin Wall crumble: “Wolfowitz had missed the significance of what Gorbachev was doing.”[37] History, as previously seen by Fukuyama, had come to an end.

After the first Iraq war, Wolfowitz penned a Defence Planning Guide (1992) that denied other nations the aspirations to “protect their legitimate interests” and to “discourage them from challenging our leadership” by maintaining the “mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring” to a larger role.[38] Wolfowitz had been “indiscreet” but his message carried through to the younger Bush regime.

Combined with the rationalizing intellect for the irrational use of nuclear weapons, Wolfowitz carries his Jewish heritage, and his acknowledged interest in a strong Jewish state. In a pro-Israeli rally speech, Wolfowitz closed by praying, “May God bless America, may God bless Israel, and may God bless all the peacemakers in the world.”[39] . Too many ironies and hypocrisies abound in all these characters about their professions for peace and their advocacy of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear) and terror (missiles and bombs) that they hardly need to be pointed out. While he is “circumspect in public….it is clear that at bottom Israel is a major interest and may be the principal reason for his near obsession with the effort…to dump Saddam Hussein, remake the Iraqi government in an American image and then further redraw the Middle East by accomplishing the same goals in Syria, Iran and perhaps other countries.”

Israel’s true enemy is Syria, not that Hussein would have been very friendly, but the Israelis are still engaged with the Syrians in the Golan Heights, valued for it militarily advantageous position as well as its access to water supplies. There are dissenting opinions as the “neoconservative clique [think cabal] seeks to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interest” seeing that “Israel’s enemy remains Syria, but the road to Damascus runs through Baghdad.”[40] Current events with Hezbollah in Lebanon and the renewed Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon in the summer of 2006 may yet prove this statement to be foresightful.

Paul Wolfowitz carries the strongest of the worst – a sanctimonious conservative worldview couched in the wonderful terms of peace and democracy accompanying the hawkish pre-emptive nuclear capability that he is author of, both directed at the preservation of Israel. We may be lucky that he resigned from government; we may be luckier than we know that he is know ‘in-progress’ of creating his own retirement from the World Bank; because it is unfortunate that his World Bank position of influence and power also has a global reach, and while not militaristic on the surface, still works within the values of an American global hegemony.

Footnotes:

[1] “Notes and Quotes”, Asia Times on Line, April 14, 2007. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page.html

[2] Perkins, John. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Plume Book, Penguin Group, N.Y. 2004. p. 275

[3] Weisbrot, Mark. “Development, Debt and Obedience to Empire, The World Bank: a Bigger Problem Than Wolfowitz”, Counterpunch, March 19-20, 2005. www.counterpunch.org/weisbrot03192005.html

[4] Bacevich, Andrew J. “Trigger Man - In Paul Wolfowitz, messianic vision meets faith in the efficacy of force.” The American Conservative, June 6, 2005. www.amconmag.com/2005_06_06/article1.html

[5] Wolfowitz, Paul. “Germany and the Middle East: Change and Opportunities” Keynote, Main Session on Cooperation and Development June 1, 2006. http://web.worldbank.org

[6] Wolfowitz, Paul. Press Conference – Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan. May 29, 2006, Mita Conference Hall, Tokyo. http://web.worldbank.org.

[7] visible for all to see, “easily understood; free from affectation or disguise” – much unlike the secret negotiations and tribunals of the WTO and IMF, the World Bank’s cohorts in collusion - or “fraudulent secret understanding” - of governance.

[8] Lindert, Peter. Growing Public – Social Sending and Economic Growth Since the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004. p.227.

[9] Ibid, p. 256

[10] http://hdr.undp.org/statistics/data/indicators.cfm?x=23&y=1&z=1

[11] http://hdr.undp.org/statistics/data/indicators.cfm?x=23&y=1&z=1

[12] see Bellows, Chua, Gibbons et al, Grandin, Johnson, Stiglitz for various references on this idea.

[13] Kolko, Gabriel. “The Demons of Greed are Loose – Why a Global Economic Deluge Looms.” Counterpunch, June 15, 2006. http://www.counterpunch.org/kolko06152006.html >

[14] Ibid.

[15] Nolen, Stephanie. “The African state: an AIDS survivor”, The Globe and Mail, Toronto, Thursday, August 10, 2006

[16] Ibid.

[17] Kolko, Ibid.

[18] Wanniski, Jude. “A Perfect Fit Wolfowitz at the World Bank.” Counterpunch, March 17, 2005. http://www.counterpunch.org/wanniski03172005.html

[19] Barlow, Maude. too close for comfort – Canada’s Future within Fortress North America. McCLelland & Stewart, Toronto, 2005. p. 244.

[20] Chomsky, Noam. “On Capitalism, Europe, and the World Bank,” Znet. April 2, 2007. http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=10&ItemID=12475

[21] Wolfowitz, Paul. Cited at http://web.worldbank.org . July 21, 2006.

[22] Shorrock, Tim. Paul Wolfowitz: A man to keep a close eye on. Asia Times, March 21, 2001. http://www.atimes.com/se-asia/CC21Ae01.html

[23] Ibid.

[24] Chomsky, ibid

[25] Wolfowitz, Paul, et al. Correspondence to the Honorable William J. Clinton, January 26, 1998. http://www.theindyvoice.com/pnac/

[26] Bacevich, Andre J. The New American Militarism – How Americans are Seduced by War. Oxford University Press, N.Y., 2005. p. 162,

[27] Ibid, p. 163

[28] Ibid, p. 165

[29] Johnson, Chalmers Sorrows of Empire Metropolitan Books NY 2004.

[30] Norton, Anne Leo Strauss and the Politics of the American Empire Yale University, 2004.

[31] Husain, Khurram “Neocons, the Men Behind the Curtain” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Nov/Dec 2003.

[32] Khurram, ibid.

[33] Tabb, William K. “The Two Wings of the Eagle” Pox Americana Ed. Foster and McChesney Monthly Review Press, NY, 2004.

[34] Carroll, James. House of War – The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power . Houghton Mifflin Company, N.Y. 2006. p. 346

[35] Ibid, p. 412.

[36] Ibid, p. 360

[37] Ibid, p. 428

[38] Bacevich, Andrew J. American Empire – The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy . Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2002. p. 44.

[39] Wolfowitz cited in www.nclci.org/washrally-Wolfowitz.htm

[40] Buchanan, Patrick J. “Whose War?” The American Conservative, March 24, 2003.

Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and a regular contributor/columnist of opinion pieces and book reviews to Palestine Chronicles. His interest in this topic stems originally from an environmental perspective, which encompasses the militarization and economic subjugation of the global community and its commodification by corporate governance and by the American government.

Published articles and book reviews may be viewed on the Palestine Chronicle website:

www.palestinechronicle.com
or at:
www.jim.secretcove.ca/index.Publications.html

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