(Fwd) Village Voice on Wolfowitz

[Patrick Bond <pbond@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0511,vest,62250,6.html

Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolfowitz
He Bungled Iraq, the Pentagon, and East Timor. Look Out, World Bank-Here He
Comes
by Jason Vest
March 18th, 2005 1:15 AM

To some, Paul Wolfowitz's nomination to be president of the World Bank is
yet another sign of neoconservative political hegemony; to others, it smacks
of a setback for the neocons, as it means one of their top (though least
doctrinaire) defense intellectuals will, for the first time in his career,
be using balance sheets, not bullets, as instruments for realizing
formidable political vision.

How well he'll do is anyone's guess. There were, however, a few comments of
optimistic or deferential cast in Tuesday's papers regarding the deputy
secretary of defense that bear commenting on, in the service of divining
what we're likely to see from the architect of "free and democratic
Iraq"-which a report released yesterday by the anti-corruption group
Transparency International reveals is reeling with corruption and graft,
thanks in part to the poor planning and practices of the U.S.-led invasion
and occupation that was Wolfowitz's baby.

"He helped manage a large organization. The World Bank's a large
organization; the Pentagon's a large organization. He's been involved in the
management of that organization." George W. Bush, March 16

Ah, but how well has he helped manage it? Late last year the Government
Accountability Office (Congress's investigative arm) released a report on
how effectively and efficiently the Pentagon's "transformation" of the armed
services-an effort running to the hundreds of billions of dollars-has been
going. The report pointedly noted an "absence of clear leadership and
accountability" at the Pentagon's top tier-not exactly a ringing
endorsement.

Citing the deputy secretary and Secretary Donald Rumsfeld specifically, the
report concluded the Wolfowitz and other top Department of Defense officials
haven't done a stellar job of "maintain[ing] the oversight, focus and
momentum needed to resolve the weaknesses in DOD's business operations." The
result, concluded the GAO, has been a "lack of transparency and appropriate
accountability across all of DOD's major business areas [that] results in
billions of dollars in annual wasted resources in a time of increasing
fiscal constraint."

That was just with regard to "transformation." About this time last year,
Comptroller General David M. Walker (the GAO's chief) gave Congress a verbal
update on a critical 2002 GAO report about across-the-board Pentagon
financial management problems. Since 2002, Walker said, things hadn't got
much better. The principal reasons included a "lack of sustained top-level
leadership and management accountability for correcting problems".

While Walker did give Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz points for at least talking
about addressing these problems, he added that they've been heavy on talk
and light on walk, and he called for a much higher level of "direct, active
support and involvement of Secretary and Deputy Secretary...in achieving
shared, agency-wide outcomes and successes." Walker noted that these were
not trivial matters, and that the current Pentagon leadership's lack of
attention to them has helped enable a continuing "existence of pervasive
weaknesses in DOD's financial management" that has "hindered operational
efficiency, adversely affected mission performance and left the department
vulnerable to fraud, waste and abuse."

Walker went on to cite some examples of what poor financial and operational
management atop the Pentagon has wrought-examples that would not seem to
portend well for a Wolfowitz-run World Bank. Among the dubious financial and
accounting achievements that have occurred on Wolfowitz's watch:

Weak Iraq-related distribution and accountability processes that have
screwed both the American solider and American taxpayer. "These weaknesses,"
he revealed, "resulted in (1) supply shortages, (2) backlogs of material
delivered in theater but not delivered to the requesting activity, (3) a
discrepancy of $1.2 billion between the amount of material shipped and that
acknowledged by the activity as received, (4) cannibalization of vehicles,
and (5) duplicate supply requisitions."

Helping defense contractors abuse the federal tax system with impunity.
"Under the Debt Collection Act of 1996, DOD is responsible-working with the
Treasury Department-for offsetting payments made to contractors to collect
funds owed, such as unpaid federal taxes," Walker said. "However, we found
that DOD had collected only $687,000 of unpaid taxes over the last six
years. We estimated that at least $100 million could be collected annually
from DOD contractors through effective implementation of levy and debt
collection programs."

Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction constructive material from
DOD's own inventory. "Using a fictitious company and fictitious individual
identities," Walker reported, "we were able to purchase a large number of
new and usable equipment items over the Internet from DOD," including "a
bacteriological incubator, a centrifuge, and other items that could be used
to produce biological warfare agents."

Putting civilians in danger by neglecting environmental responsibilities.
"DOD continues to lack a complete inventory of contaminated and real
property sites, which affects not only DOD's ability to assess the potential
environmental impact and to plan, estimate costs, and fund cleanup
activities, but also its ability to minimize the risk of civilian exposure
to unexploded ordnance," Walker reported. "The risk of such exposure is
expected to grow with the increase in development and recreational
activities on land once used by the military for munitions-related
activities."

Letting insurers bilk the Pentagon. "Tens of millions of dollars are not
being collected each year by military treatment facilities from third-party
insurers because key information required to effectively bill and collect
from third-party insurers is often not properly collected, recorded or used
by military treatment facilities."

"Before I have my own vision, I need to do a lot of listening."-Wolfowitz to
the Financial Times, March 17

Some at the Pentagon who read this line think it possible Wolfowitz is
actually learning from his mistakes. And that is possible-but not likely.
"If this guy ignored some of the best advice from the most informed and
experienced experts and scholars in and out of the military, what makes
anyone think he's going to do anything differently at the World Bank?" asked
one senior military officer whose experiences with Wolfowitz have not made
him a fan of the departing deputy secretary.

Having dismissed with impunity everything from the troop requirement
estimates for Iraq of then Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki, to
realistic cost estimates for the Iraq venture, to the prescient observations
of various war colleges' scholars; having blamed reporters in the line of
fire for post-war problems in Iraq; having asserted as of summer 2004 that
the situation in Iraq is "not an insurgency" when troops on the ground had
been properly calling it such for a year...well, you get the idea.

"It wouldn't surprise me," said the officer, "if he sets up his own little
Office of Special Plans over there at the Bank."

He said he had learned some lessons from missteps made in Indonesia, when
the bank was financing huge projects in a country that at the time was run
by a dictator, Suharto...The bank, he said, "did some wonderful work in
Indonesia, but "it didn't do enough to empower those advocating'" better
development strategies against the government...

"[an associate] expected Mr. Wolfowitz would continue the anticorruption
efforts of the departing president, James D. Wolfensohn, and demand fresh
accountability from governments that receive aid. "Corruption was high on
Wolfensohn's agenda, and Wolfowitz has been very, very impressed by that,"
the associate said. "One of his first passions was development, and when he
was ambassador to Indonesia in the Reagan years, he was out there with the
chicken farmers, and he's kind of made for this job in some ways."-New York
Times, March 17

Though doubtless some would like to think of Wolfowitz as a populist
diplomat out sprinkling feed in solidarity with the poultry yeomen of
Sumatra-as well as being a once and future champion of anti-corruption and
fiscal accountability-his activities in the mid-to-late '90s in support of
klepto-cratic Indonesia at least temper that image a touch. Indeed, though
Wolfowitz was chomping at the bit to effect the speedy regime change of
Saddam Hussein-a dictator with a penchant for corruption and human rights
violations on a mass scale-when it came to Indonesia, Wolfowitz was quite
happy to encourage a go-slow-and-gentle approach to dealing with Suharto.

In 1994, the constellation of American corporate interests that had long
been doing business with Indonesia formed the U.S.-Indonesia Society.
According to a 1996 Journal of Commerce article, while the group did no
actual lobbying, its funding came from "major U.S. oil, mining, financial
services and pharmaceutical companies with strong economic or political
connections to Indonesia." The Society's constituent companies, the paper
reported, "share a deep interest in maintaining smooth ties with the Suharto
government in Jakarta."

To this end, the Society cast itself as the distributor of "authoritative
and nonpartisan" information on Indonesia, doing everything from offering
U.S. congressional staff carefully guided tours of the country to
distributing "informational materials" to everyone from schoolchildren to
businessmen. In a seminal 1996 Progressive article, Eyal Press quoted the
distinguished Northwestern University Indonesia expert Jeffrey Winters as
calling the Society's materials "outrageous." One "guide" in particular,
Press noted, was devoted to "bolster[ing] the myth that Suharto has
orchestrated an economic miracle in Indonesia, modernizing the country while
lifting the masses out of poverty." Another booklet published under the
Society's aegis characterized charges of corruption and authoritarianism as
"exaggerated," omitting any mention of dubious labor practices or human
rights abuses.

Given the Society's prime movers, this was hardly surprising. Among the
group's underwriters was Texas energy magnate Roy Huffington, who in the
early '80's decided to help pal Suharto with unruly elements in East Timor
and Aceh by sending Suharto large consignments of cattle prods and other
torture gear. Another active corporate member was Freeport McMoran, the
multinational mining giant that wrought such environmental devastation in
Irian Jaya-on, say, the scale of Saddam Hussein's destruction of the Marsh
Arabs native habitat-that the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC)
pulled the company's political risk insurance. (In 1998 the Wall Street
Journal described Freeport's Indonesian operations as "a study in how
multinational companies adapted to the crony capitalism" of the Suharto
epoch.)

The Society's Board of Trustees included Sumitro Djojohadkkusumo, a Suharto
crony whose son Prabowo Subianto was not only married to one of Suharto's
daughters, but also commanded the notorious human-rights violating Kopassus
special forces unit. And sitting at the same table as Sumitro at Board of
Trustees meetings was the board's co-chair-Paul Wolfowitz.

Wolfowitz was also on hand for a December 10, 1996, National Press Club
forum, in which Suharto's man in Washington, Arifin Siregar, endeavored to
make the case that human rights violations in Indonesia-and in particular
East Timor-were a thing of the past. (The Indonesian army's murderous 1999
operations in East Timor proved they were not.) When they were asked by an
audience member how the United States could positively and proactively
influence Indonesia's political and economic betterment, Wolfowitz struck a
decidedly non-interventionist tone: "I think the important point is that
it's Indonesians who decide what goes on in Indonesia," he said. "But I
think as long as we have good relations, they have been very open to hearing
the American point of view. And I think your question was how can the United
States influence. I don't think it's fair to ask the Indonesian ambassador
how we can influence. But I would just say I think we have a very important
influence, and I think we've exercised it quite effectively."

On the profit-over-everything-else front, Wolfowitz was certainly right; as
Abigail Abrash of Harvard Law School's Human Rights Program noted in a 2000
report, "in general, U.S. support-bilaterally through the Export-Import Bank
and multilaterally through the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and
International Monetary Fund-for socially and environmentally harmful
economic activities and social programs...has contributed to severe human
rights abuses." But for Wolfowitz, "democracy" will always trump human
rights, as the case of Indonesia's General Wiranto makes clear.

In 2003, the U.N.'s Serious Crimes Unit, in conjunction with the government
of recently-independent East Timor, issued indictments against nearly 300
current and former Indonesian military officers for war crimes committed in
East Timor in 1999. Among them is Wiranto, former chief of staff of the
Indonesian army-and a man Wolfowitz lauded in 2000 as a good steward of
"democratic reform" in Indonesia for his stabilizing role in the waning days
of Suharto's regime. In a 2000 television interview, Wolfowitz did wanly
concede that Wiranto (who's indictment runs to 92 pages) "may have done
something bad in East Timor or failed to stop something bad going in East
Timor," and that he "should be given a fair trial on these charges in East
Timor." But not only has the democratic government of Indonesia so beloved
by Wolfowitz failed to hold Wiranto accountable, it has also bullied the
young government of East Timor into not submitting the warrant for Wiranto's
arrest to INTERPOL-thus allowing Wiranto freedom to do everything from
traveling to seeking Indonesia's presidency, which he did unsuccessfully
last year.

No word yet on whether or not a Wolfowitz-run World Bank will alter its debt
collection policies to include extraordinary renditions or audits at the Abu
Ghraib branch.

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