I just got back last night from a couple of days in Washington DC, where I was part of an editorial committee working on the third revision to the NISO Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections.
While there, I was also able to visit my friends Gordon, Jamie and Darby, and was introduced to an employee of the World Bank who told me that they were all hoping that Wolfowitz would go. She also told me a funny story that when Wolfowitz first took over as President of the bank, he was given a facsimile of an 18th Century map of Iraq with the locations of WMD’s (Weapons of Mass Destruction) marked on it!
I asked her if she thought the World Bank was a force for good, or a force for evil. She said she thought that, although many mistakes have been made, overall she thought it was a force for good (although obviously as an employee she’s not going to have a completely unbiased opinion!).
I’m extremely happy the Wolfowitz has been forced to resign. Apart from the fact that he had no credibility whatsoever in my book, I’m delighted to see that, one by one, the neocon architects of the current disastrous U.S. imperialism are beginning to discover that eventually their misdeeds catch up with them, and they can’t do whatever the hell they feel like after all.