A Very Expensive Fumble In The Stationery Cupboard

I must say I’m enjoying seeing loyal Bushie and PNAC zealot Paul Wolfowitz left twisting in the wind at the World Bank over giving a job and pay rises to his mistress.

So far so typically corrupt, or at least that’s how this is being framed by the major media.

But it’s not as though his relationship with Shaha Riza wasn’t known about when he took the job and she’s hardly some brainless bit of arm candy. World bank employees complained at the time of his appointment in 2005:

From Inside the WB: Discontent over Riza We hear from Bank insiders that Shaha Ali Riza, whom Paul Wolfowitz has been dating for a couple of years, is not popular with her colleagues. As acting manager for External Relations and Outreach in the Middle East/North Africa region of the World Bank, she is to some degree the institution’s public face on that region.

Her personnel file at the Bank reportedly contains several complaints about her job performance as well as about a certain “lack of people skills.” This, we are told, is part of what is behind the World Bank Staff Association’s relatively more open disagreement with the U.S.’s choice.

The WBSA raised loud complaints a few years ago when Wolfensohn named Nick Stern as Chief Economist. Several staffers pointed out the Bank’s strict anti-nepotism laws should have prevented that move, since Stern’s brother was on staff at the Bank. Their complaints were never addressed seriously.

It should be noted that at least one civil society organization believes that Riza is one of the most effective gender experts working at the Bank.

But what’s not being reported is just how closely his Riza is connected in neocon and Bush/Cheney circles – she’s held some very powerful positions in the White House working alongside Liz Cheney on mid-east polcy and is closely connected to the total fuckup that is the Iraq invasion and occupation. No wonder she’s been called the most powerful Moslem in Washington.

A perfect match for Wolfowitz, himself instrumental in the Iraq debacle – truly these two are a poisonous pair.

2005:

Shaha Ali Riza, lately in the news as World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz’s Saudi-born girlfriend, has been assigned to the U.S. State Department. The move, which has not been announced by either huge agency controlled by the Bush regime, means that she’ll be working with Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz Cheney, a top official in the key Near East Affairs bureau.

That’s the word from one of my moles in the World Bank. This significant assignment — a hardened link between the money of the World Bank, which is supposed to focus on poverty, and the neocons’ aims of trying to salvage their privatization plans for Iraq — has not be reported anywhere else, to my knowledge, and I see no word of it on the World Bank website either.

This new loan by the World Bank is strictly from hunger, and it’s sure to do nothing to help us in the Arab world. Wolfowitz’s girlfriend and Cheney’s daughter, in charge together of the U.S. State Department’s Near East bureau? [My emphasis] W.B. Staffer One, as I’ve referred to this particular source, copied me on a September 16 internal memo from Christiaan J. Poortman, the W.B.’s vice president for Middle East and North Africa (MENA, in bank parlance), that says in part:

The Bank has received a request from the US State Department for the secondment of Shaha Riza — on external service — to the Near East Affairs Office of Partnership Initiative. In accepting this assignment Shaha will be responsible for setting up and managing an International Multilateral Foundation that will support reform in the MENA region.

I have agreed to this request which will allow Shaha to continue her work with civil society, complementing our own work on the reform agenda of our partners in the region. Shaha’s assignment will be effective September 19, 2005. Please join me in wishing Shaha the best in her new assignment.

Yeah, Poortman “agreed to this request.” At least it gets Riza out of the office. Wolfowitz got a grand sendoff by the Pentagon in late April, when he left to take over the World Bank. Maybe co-workers had cake for Riza, but maybe not. A similar public pronouncement of a new post didn’t happen for Riza, whose job at the World Bank — basically, head flack for the MENA office — caused plenty of grumbling about nepotism by other W.B. staffers.

More…

It’s not the nepotism that’s most important here, or the minor scandal of venality in office. That’s hardly anything new for Republicans.

What is important is the way all this corrupt manoeuvring has tied World Bank lending policy to White House foreign policy like a horse to a buggy. Where the neocons drive, Wolfowitz and the bank follow – Bushco, by using Wolfowitz’ besottedness with his girlfriend, has managed to subvert the bank’s putative independence and to the great consternation of international development NGOs and governments worldwide the World Bank (not that the it was exactly a fair insitution to begin with) from being previously just US-inclined, has now become the de facto banking arm of Bushco neoconnery and imperial expansion.

This is a lot more important than than just a quick bit of illicit nookie over the desk.