It has become axiomatic, in the reporting in Britain of the Paul Wolfowitz affair at the World Bank, that he is guilty of an appalling act of nepotism in procuring a promotion and a hefty pay rise for his girlfriend Shaha Riza. As I noted previously here, the truth seems to be, on the contrary, that Wolfowitz is more sinned against than sinning. He had sought to recuse himself from Ms Riza’s case altogether precisely because of the conflict of interest, but had been instructed to find her another job and pay her compensation — by none other than the Bank’s own ethics committee. Earlier this week, news leaked that the Bank’s committee of witch-hunters had concluded that Wolfowitz had breached his obligations in arranging for Ms Riza’s reassignment from the bank to the State Department — even though it apparently added that the advice from ethics officials at the bank was ‘less than clear and evidently subject to misinterpretation’.

Evidently.

Now a particularly well-aimed piece in the Wall Street Journal rightly cries foul, pointing out that Wolfowitz appears to be the victim of a carefully constructed smear campaign featuring, amongst others, Sir Mark Malloch Brown, a former world Bank official now positioning himself to take over Wolfowitz’s job, and the billionaire George Soros.

The involvement of Soros in this scandal is particularly interesting, since it lends credence to the impression that the attack on Wolfowitz, the (erroneously) presumed architect of the Iraq war, is a surrogate for something much bigger and more lethal— an assault upon Bush, America and the west. Soros, after all, has said publicly that the US will need a ‘de-Nazification’ program to erase the taint of the Bush Administration. It is high time that the anti-Bush, anti-western, indeed nihilistic activities of Soros — whose Open Society is, among other things, putting its gazillion-dollar funds behind the world-wide campaign to decriminalise drugs and thus enslave half the world’s young (but that’s another story altogether) — were exposed to public scrutiny.

Malloch Brown, meanwhile, a former deputy to Kofi Annan at the UN— a fact which might explain his extraordinary defence of the UN over the oil-for-food scandal — told Bank employees on Monday that with Wolfowitz in charge, the bank’s anti-poverty agenda was ‘hugely at risk’ because Europeans were balking at the financing.

Oh really. Hugely at risk, eh? Here’s why— and it’s not quite the spin that Malloch Brown appears to put on it. In Canada’s National Post, Patricia Adams says the action against Wolfowitz started shortly after a memo arrived from China warning that if the Bank continued with its (unprecedented) anti-corruption drive, the Chinese government would withdraw its business:

Prior to Wolfowitz’s arrival, the bank had never acted against a borrowing country or its officials over allegations of corruption — it limited its sanctions to contractors, and even then sanctions were a rarity, despite an estimated 20% to 30% of all World Bank lending that went missing. Wolfowitz promptly suspended or cancelled loans to Kenya, Chad, India, Bangladesh and Argentina, among others.

The bank’s board of directors, which includes representatives of the Third World countries that benefited from the bank’s largesse, erupted when he cut off funding. Wolfowitz did not back down, as seen in his plan to roll out the sanction reforms broadly to borrowing governments. The leak over Wolfowitz’s handling of his girlfriend’s compensation occurred two weeks after the e-mail from China began reverberating through the World Bank’s corridors.

Some World Bank employees are, in all likelihood, themselves on the take (dozens have been either disciplined or are under investigation), and oppose Wolfowitz for fear that they could be exposed. These are a minority. The majority are complicit in that they knew what was going on, and chose to turn a blind eye.

The real purpose of the Wolfowitz stitch-up, it would appear, is to bury his campaign against corruption at the Bank. In other words, the action against Wolfowitz itself appears to be as corrupt as it is possible to be. It absolutely stinks.

How have European governments reacted to this disgrace? True to their own sterling record in fighting corruption in all its forms and standing up for justice worldwide, they have called on Wolfowitz to resign. How have the British media reacted to this travesty? They’ve bought it, lock stock and barrel. Of course. They look at the word Wolfowitz and their brains say ‘neoconzionistconspiracybushiraqabughraibwarcriminal’.