Wolfowitz as World Bank president

Wolfowitz as World Bank president

President Bush's nomination of Paul D. Wolfowitz as World Bank president has raised predictable hackles, at home and abroad...But this hostility is mostly unjustified. Wolfowitz is the best qualified of all the recently rumored candidates for the World Bank job.

Unlike several of his predecessors, Wolfowitz would come to the World Bank presidency with real knowledge of development. He served as U.S. ambassador to Indonesia in the late 1980s, when that country was one of the World Bank's biggest clients and a poverty-reduction success story. Wolfowitz is also a persuasive communicator, an essential quality in the leader of an institution that is frequently attacked by ideologues on both the left and the right. And Wolfowitz has experience as a public- sector manager.

It's also right, though, for the World Bank to promote some democratic virtues -- openness, accountability and other anti- corruption measures -- that underpin economic development. And in the long term, economic development and the creation of a middle class do tend to foster democracy. If he can lead the World Bank successfully, Wolfowitz will ultimately be promoting the cause with which he is most identified.

-- The Washington Post, Washington DC