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.

But Wolfowitz, when he exited the Pentagon for the World Bank, recalled to many the career shift of Robert McNamara, but not its spirit. He came driven by that same spirit of transformation and re-ordering. Corruption was to be tackled, and vested interests in poverty eradication were to be brought to account. As it turned out, a very small detail — in fact, a very silly oversight — expelled the largeness of that vision from the Bank on Washington, DC’s H Street.