Anwar Ibrahim & Paul Wolfowitz

Last year, when American arch neo-con Paul Wolfowitz was put up by President Bush to be the president of the World Bank, his candidacy was questioned by European governments and aid groups concerned by his support for the US-led war in Iraq.

In fact, Wolfowitz had played a role that was more than mere “support” for the war. He was the chief architect of the US invasion of Iraq, purportedly to seize its oil assets and position America in that energy-rich region to dominate and control the area for the US strategic interests. But many believe the war was more for Israel’s interests rather than American, a suspicion that has come to fruition today when we see the US destroying instead what interests it had had in the region for the last 80 years.

The US government 9/11 Report showed that Paul Wolfowitz had urged the US to attack Iraq after the 9/11 incident when clearly no such evidence of Iraqi involvement existed. The Report continued with the observation that there was no credible evidence supporting Paul Wolfowitz’s argument that Iraq was involved in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre.

Wolfowitz was obviously eager for the US to attack and occupy an already weak Iraq, that suffered more than 10 years of crippling US-led sanction leading to several hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children dying of dseases and malnurition. The invasion plan was hardly surprising as Wolfowitz has been a member of the ultra right-wing American think-tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which has urged and strived for US world hegemony. Part of the plan called for the domination of the Middle East region.

And Anwar Ibrahim had backed his candidature for the presidency of the World Bank.

Anwar had said in an interview in Hong Kong on March 18 last year: “I certainly would welcome him to the bank. He passionately believes in freedom and understands the issues of poverty, environment degradation, living conditions and health issues which (are) very much a World Bank agenda.''

This is really unexpected when American Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank, who is considered one of the most influential economic thinkers, had resoundingly condemned the appointment of Paul Wolfowitz as the president of the World Bank. Even the Bank’s staff had raised their opposition to Wolfowitz’s appointment.

I didn’t realise Anwar Ibrahim was so thick with Paul Wolfowitz, one of America’s foremost hawks against Iraq.