As he battled most of this month to keep his dignity, World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz tried to shift the debate to its obvious centre by issuing the reminder, “I am not in my previous job.” The appeal by the man who once helped dream an ambitious reordering of the world by a bold and purposeful American superpower did more than betray the tragedy of that venture being attached with a personal slip over a technicality. The appeal inadvertently showed how resistant the world — both in America and elsewhere — has shown itself to be to the moral makeover Wolfowitz so desired. And so resilient too to the neoconservative enterprise led by men like Wolfowitz. Which is why oddities of procedure at the Bank have been used to portray his morality as cynically flawed.

When Wolfowitz came to the Pentagon as deputy secretary of defence, he struck a sharp contrast to his immediate boss, Donald Rumsfeld. Wolfowitz came from a fiercely intellectual neoconservative tradition. Their agenda, once the Republicans retook power from Bill Clinton, had been set in the bracing and questioning environs of think-tanks and academia. They were going to breeze into office, losing not a day of the time allotted to them, and awe the world with their moral rationality. Long before September 11, 2001, for example, they had already planned to liberate the Middle East from the tyranny of dictators. Those attacks hastened their plans to take democracy to the oppressed. Iraq would be the start of a rapid spread of liberty. As it turned out, for reasons of nationalism and American military strategy, the Iraqis saw it less as liberation than as invasion. They did not grasp the neocons’ muscular optimism.

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