George Bush's nomination of Paul Wolfowitz to be the next head of the World Bank has caused more than a little consternation.

Personally, I can't see what all the fuss is about. The World Bank and Mr Wolfowitz seem to me to be perfectly suited to each other. The way in which the story is being reported in many places would suggest that Mr Wolfowitz's appointment will introduce a worm into a paradise of Third World development enthusiasts. In reality the World Bank is already a fairly big can of worms. Let's consider the fears of Mr Wolfowitz's detractors in more detail:

Firstly, there is the fear that he may impose a neo-liberal trade and fiscal agenda on the Third World, forcing countries into large scale privatisation, making them liberalise trade such that local businesses can no longer compete, and scaling back 'big government' measures such as social insurance and healthcare policies. The only problem with this fear is that the World Bank have been proponents of such policies for decades, forcing the hands of needy countries into becoming guinea pigs in the most extreme of economic experiments.

In the wake of the fall of the Iron Curtain, plane-loads of eager World Bank sponsored economists set up shop in the Eastern Bloc, plying their snake oil policies in the hope of finally seeing what all of those formulas on the Economics Department blackboard would turn into in the real world. The answer was economic disaster, poverty and hunger for millions and the ruin of the nascent post-Soviet private sector. A similar nightmare has been wrought in Sub-Saharan Africa. Johann Hari gives the following example:-

...in Zambia, the World Bank demanded that the state stop paying for health and education out of general taxation. As aid agencies had warned, infant mortality -- a neat euphemism for the number of dead babies -- piled ever upward. Average life expectancy fell from 54 to 40. Of course, there were other factors in this expanding Zambian graveyard, but few experts deny the bank played a key role.

And -- even though the bank claims periodically to have learned from these deadly mistakes -- the policies continue, barely altered, today. The bank has shown time and again that it is more interested in debt repayment, neoliberal ideology and opportunities for transnational corporations than in ending poverty. This isn't because its executives are personally malicious; many of them honestly believe that short-term austerity leads to long-term gain. They continue to believe this because they are marinated in a hard-line ideology that is impervious to evidence.

This is not a purely anecdotal case. According to The Center For Economic Justice, between 1960 and 1980, before the World Bank introduced its neo-Liberal prescriptions, average incomes in Africa increased by 34% in Africa and 73% in Latin America. In the 25 years since the "structural adjustment" policies started being actively implemented in 1980, there has been a fall of 20% in Africa and a rise of only 7% in Latin America.

Another accusation pointed at Mr Wolfowitz is that he will continue in the grand tradition of his previous employer, and exploit his new position to find opportunities to promote American business, particularly in the fields of energy and defence. Once again, the activities of Mr Wolfowitz's predecessors will make it difficult for him to make a name for himself in this area. Johann Hari again:

In 2000, after megatons of pressure from democratic movements in the developing world and their left-wing supporters in the West, the World Bank was finally forced to undertake a review of its energy policies. It did its best to rig it, putting Emil Salim in charge. Salim was the former energy minister of the corporation-loving Indonesian dictator Gen. Suharto, and he was even serving on the board of a coal company at the time he was appointed. But -- to everyone's astonishment -- Salim concluded that supporting oil and gas projects doesn't help poverty, damages the environment disastrously and should be stopped altogether by 2008.

The bank's response? It simply ignored its own report. Nadia Martinez, an expert on the World Bank with the Institute for Policy Studies, believes this scandal reveals the true nature of the bank today. "The World Bank has repeatedly proved itself to be more concerned with the needs of oil companies than with the impoverished people it officially serves. It will not distinguish its goals and standards from the likes of Halliburton, ExxonMobil, Shell and other profit-driven institutions."

The bank feebly responds by saying that developing countries need more energy, but it knows perfectly well that 82 percent of the oil and gas being mined by its projects is going straight to the United States and Europe.

Finally, one has to look at Mr Wolfowitz's role in the promotion and planning of the Iraq War as evidence of his militaristic rather than economic attitude towards solving problems. Certainly he has more experience in making poor people history rather than making poverty history, as tens of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians would testify. However, I'm not sure his role in the planning of the Iraq invasion and his 'misunderestimations' of the bloody aftermath are so relevant to his suitability for this appointment. My view is that he is a radical who will take radical steps to change things. I think his primary professional goal is to use American power to bring democracy and freedom to the world (yes, I honestly do!). In the World Bank, the power at his command will be economic power. How much worse a job can he do with these tools than his forebears who have broken plenty of eggs but ended up with no omelettes.

Similarly, his lack of experience seems to be a red herring. According to World Bank historian Sebastian Mallaby, Wolfowitz is, in a historical context, one of the more suitable candidates for the job:-

"I can tell you with some confidence that this guy has more experience in development than just about any other World Bank president when he first started. Some of the people who have been picked by the United States in the past have been totally, utterly unqualified, had no knowledge whatsoever of development."

As a final thought however, the long term solution is surely to end the outmoded, 'white men's club' method of choosing leaders of the IMF and the World Bank. Under the current system it is a pipe dream to think of Bush nominating someone with radically different views to himself, and the relative merits of the Wolfowitz nomination need to be considered in this context. However, a broader selection system could yield any number of more suitable candidates. Jesse Jackson has suggested that the developing nations nominate their own candidate this weekend as a protest against the Euro-US monopoly. Such measures should be taken, and be taken seriously by those currently pulling the strings. To assert the right to invade other sovereign countries in the name of democracy while retaining autocratic control of the international financial aid organisations stinks not only of hypocrisy, but of corruption too. If Paul Wolfowitz is serious about global democracy and freedom, the first thing he will do upon taking up his new role will be to ensure that the selection process for his successor is made to be transparent, independent and open to candidates from all countries.