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Asia Times March 17, 2005 Another Wolf for Russia By John Helmer MOSCOW - And the Academy Award for the best fascist dictator goes to - Adolf Hitler! Woody Allen cracked that joke once at the expense of the US habit of making awards out of self-congratulation of the least worthy type. Were anyone to dare in the same spirit, they might award the new US nominee to head the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz, the title of the worst American ever to hold such an international post. But wait a minute. Wolfowitz is hardly an American at all, having spent much of his time as a career Washington warmonger under investigation by US counter-intelligence and security agencies as an agent for a foreign power, for whose benefit he is suspected of supplying intelligence, cash, weapons, and other favors. In US law books, these may be crimes against the state, possibly espionage, even treason, but not crimes against humanity, for which Wolfowitz has encouraged his favorite small state to commit and encouraged his addled (if not yet treasonous) president to commit in the first of the great Middle Eastern wars. For Russia, against whom Wolfowitz has been waging war since he got out of short pants, the nomination of Wolfowitz as president of the World Bank presents something of a dilemma, and something of an opportunity. Borrow from a war criminal? During the first post-Soviet decade, the World Bank under James Wolfensohn was one of the many instruments the United States, as the World Bank's dominant shareholder, used to destroy the economic foundations of its rival superpower; pay stipends to Russian quislings; oblige the Russian government to incur sizable debts for the privilege of being advised to dismantle its systems of command and control; and transfer the nation's most valuable resources into the hands of a dozen individuals eager to betray their country for personal profit. Not without reason was Wolfensohn's favorite Russian Victor Chernomyrdin - the prime minister who enriched himself through creating Russia's largest company, Gazprom. Wolfensohn was waging war by other means: Chernomyrdin was his collaborator; and the Russian treasury paid in full - principal and interest - for its defeat. This arrangement couldn't last. And indeed, when the revival of the feeble Russian state began to challenge the value and terms of the World Bank's operations in Russia, Wolfensohn decided to commission an assessment of the effectiveness of the programs he himself had promoted in Russia. Wolfensohn could have engaged Joseph Stiglitz, the World Bank's chief economist and Nobel Prize winner. But by the time Russia had grown skeptical of Wolfensohn, and called a halt to new borrowings from him, Stiglitz had become a ferocious critic of everything Wolfensohn had done, or tried to do. Wolfensohn preferred to hand the assessment job to a minor academic who had enriched himself selling Russians the very advice Wolfensohn asked him to evaluate. The hungry fox invited to call the roll in the henhouse was a US-employed Swede named Anders Aslund. "We don't necessarily take his advice," commented Julian Schweitzer, the World Bank's Moscow representative at the time, about Aslund's appointment. Aslund's defense of everything Wolfensohn had done in Russia did not encourage the Kremlin to resume borrowing. Instead, it resolved to pay Wolfensohn off, a task that the Russian Treasury completed just a few months ago. From Wolfensohn's point of view, the evaluation may have helped salve the wounds Stiglitz had inflicted on him and the institution. More practically, it encouraged him to try evading the Kremlin's veto on borrowing, and recruit thin Chernomyrdins in the Russian provinces - provincial governors, local warlords, and corporate magnates - as keen to leverage themselves with the World Bank as the fat Chernomyrdin, and president Boris Yeltsin, had been 10 years before. With tactics like these, Wolfensohn has hung on for another four years after the Aslund report, but in Moscow he has remained a has-been, the banker no one wants to borrow from. Wolfowitz's nomination - if it is ratified by the World Bank board - ought to remove any possibility that Russia, now a greater oil power than Wolfensohn or Wolfowitz have thought possible, would borrow itself, or recommend that anyone else should. The dilemma posed by the Wolfowitz nomination turns out to be an opportunity for President Vladimir Putin to conclude that, from Russian experience, the World Bank does more damage than good, and should be isolated and ignored by those countries and economies most in need of development financing. This should not be interpreted as anti-Americanism. If the Federal Bureau of Investigation were permitted to disclose all it knows, Wolfowitz may not be the American he claims to be. And with a record like his, it may be a violation of the US statutes to borrow from Wolfowitz. In US jurisprudence, it is not just immoral to make covenants with war criminals, it is criminal. * * * John Helmer is the doyen of the foreign press corps in Russia. He first set up his Moscow bureau in 1989, and he specializes in the coverage of Russian business. US reviews of Western reporting from Russia have rated him at the top of the profession.