Is the World hungry for the Wolf?

Paul Wolfowitz, Bush's assistant secretary of defense, is his choice to lead the World Bank. I want to laugh. Let me be clear: if he'd chosen Bill Clinton or, God help us, Jimmy Carter it would still have been laughable. An acquaintance who used to work for the federal government once told me that the World Bank is the most corrupt organization in the world, responsible for saddling the Third World with debts it knows those countries can never repay.

With Wolfie -- as hawkish as they come -- helming the Bank, I suspect that the administration's predilection for quasi-imperalist gestures will keep the developing world from ever clawing out of the economic mire.