Friends Of Wolfowitz

We've met his accusers. Who are Paul Wolfowitz' friends? As reported by Bambang Harymurti, himself an Indonesian journalist imprisoned for his anti-corruption reporting. His piece in the WSJ is here (subs. only). Nuhu Ribadu:

I am quite confident that Mr. Wolfowitz can [handle the challenge], based on how he handled "odious debt" at the World Bank -- the situation in which loans are made with the knowledge that a big chunk of the money will probably be stolen. He did not give in to the pressure from the left to write off odious debt, and he did not give in to the pressure from the right in the opposite direction. His answer was to increase the corruption-prevention and asset-recovery capabilities of poor countries.He has found many champions in this endeavor. Nuhu Ribadu, the chairman of the Economic and Financial Crime Commission of Nigeria, is one.
Under his leadership, and with $5 million of assistance from the World Bank, his commission has been able to recover $5 billion worth of stolen assets, and to prevent further aid money from being corrupted. It is not by coincidence that Mr. Ribadu has publicly stated his support for Mr. Wolfowitz to remain the president of the World Bank.

Here, for what it's worth, is what is alleged to be the leaked content of an email from the Bank's Brazil director, John Briscoe, about why he did not sign a letter calling for Wolfie to be canned. And here, in an editorial unfavorable to Wolfie, is more on Ribadu's defense of same.

Andrew Young wrote a spirited defense of Wolfowitz, posted here previously. Here's an interview he did with Judy Woodruff where he's even tougher:

[About Shaha Riza]This is a professional woman who was at the World Bank six or eight years before Wolfowitz got there. She was a ranking member. She's a British woman, who's a Muslim, who's fluent in Arabic, and in almost any corporation in the world she could make a half-a-million dollars. She's at the bank because of her competence.
Paul Wolfowitz coming created a conflict, which he went to the ethics committee to try to solve. The ethics committee would not let him recuse himself, so they put him in this trick. And now they want to use this trick to undermine his leadership.
I think what they're doing is undermining the credibility, and particularly the Dutch. They have a reputation for tolerance, for generosity, for forgiveness, and an expansive view of the world that I've always admired. They were very helpful to us in Atlanta. They were very helpful in the Holocaust, and now, for them to be caught in this bureaucratic crap, is embarrassing to me.

He goes on:

I think who's on trial here is not Paul Wolfowitz, but that board. In a world where tolerance is required, where women in the Islamic world are the hope of the entire planet, for them to take their prejudices -- which I agree with -- against him on the war in Iraq and resurrect it to try to put it into the World Bank political scene is, in many ways, obscene.

[snip]

Paul Wolfowitz and Riza Shaha have tremendous things to offer the world. And I think, right now, staid bureaucrats who've been there 25 years bungling in the bank are trying to make him a scapegoat.

He's just warming up:

For me, this is more like the scandal in the United Nations, where when Europe began to feel the influence of new coalitions in the third world threatening their dominance, they sought to get rid of the people who were pulling together these new coalitions.
I think the threat is that Paul Wolfowitz is pulling together a third world coalition that, while it doesn't have the money, it controls the markets of the future. And the old colonial routines of running Africa from Europe will no longer apply under Wolfowitz.

He keeps going!

Private American banks are now beginning to wake up to realize the African market. We might not need the World Bank, if it continues like it is. It takes so long for them to approve and evaluate projects. And the people who are approving and evaluating projects have never done projects themselves.
And when you bring a sense of competence and an urgency to the World Bank, those bureaucrats are going to kick, as they did when I did it in Atlanta. But I had a constituency of people who stuck behind me, and we were able to make the government and the private sector work together. And we shook it up.
Wolfowitz was shaking up the World Bank in a way that it needed shaking; for its own good, it needed shaking.

Euroelites: always keeping the brown men down (just as the Pope --B16 --always says. I threw that in just for you, Alex). Meanwhile, this story is typical of the way today's proceedings are playing in the MSM today. They're saying the White House has abandoned Wolfie. I don't read it that way, but we'll see.