Wolfowitz wants to bring the World Bank to Iraq

You just have to read this to believe it. h/t Jenise

From Electronic Iraq

Wolfowitz May Bring Bank Back to Iraq
Emad Mekay, Electronic Iraq, 23 February 2007

WASHINGTON (IPS) - World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz may appoint a new resident director for Iraq soon, a move that sources inside the Bank say could contradict the institution's policies on engagement in conflict-stricken areas and put his role in the 2003 U.S. invasion back into the limelight.

The move by Wolfowitz, the former number two official at the Pentagon and a main architect of the U.S.-led war, likely means the Bank would release new loans to the occupied Arab nation, despite the deteriorating security situation and recent disclosures of massive corruption in reconstruction efforts.

"This is exactly what he shouldn't be doing and what the [World Bank] board was initially afraid that he would do, which is to use the financial resources of the World Bank to take some of the heat off the U.S. Treasury and U.S. policy," Bea Edwards of the Washington-based watchdog group Government Accountability Project told IPS.

In a previous statement, Edwards argued that "Wolfowitz's apparent determination to use the World Bank to further questionable American military goals in the Middle East is a fundamental distortion of the Bank's mission, a violation of its founding Articles of Agreement, and a reckless waste of donor resources."

The Bank has a policy called Procedure 2.30 ("Development Cooperation and Conflict"), which states that to operate in a country emerging from a conflict, the Bank must first prepare a "watching brief," develop a transitional support strategy, begin transitional reconstruction, then begin post-conflict reconstruction, and finally return to normal lending.

Unlike the Bank's Interim Office for Iraq, which is based in Amman, Jordan, the soon-to-be-named country director would exclusively manage Iraq for the Bank from Baghdad, according to GAP, which first leaked the information, citing inside sources.

This same article is also being posted by the Inter Press News Service here.

This is the reason Bush wanted him in this position.