April 17 (Bloomberg) -- Paul Wolfowitz, president of the World Bank and one of the architects of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, said the lender may return overseas employees to the war-torn country to aid in the rebuilding process.
"One of the things we are looking at it is whether we will be more effective if we had a presence in Iraq,"" Wolfowitz, 62, said in an interview on April 13 at the end of an eight day trip to Indonesia and East Timor. "It's a difficult environment to operate at all so the disbursement rate is pretty low.""
The World Bank, which runs its Iraqi operations from Amman, would be returning to a country where the threat of civil war between Shiites and Sunnis is increasing amid faltering efforts to form a government more than four months after elections. The United Nations and the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority estimated in 2003 Iraq's reconstruction costs through 2007 would be about $56 billion.
The World Bank has yet to disburse a $500 million loan to Iraq, its first for 33 years, in the absence of a government able to sign the loan agreement, said Ziad Badr, the lender's head for Iraq, who is based in Amman.
Former World Bank President James Wolfensohn relocated his employees in Iraq to Jordan after an August 2003 bombing near the bank's Baghdad headquarters killed at least 22 people. The bank has a consultant and about a dozen Iraqis working in the country, Badr said.
Rising Violence
Violence has worsened in the 20 months since the pullout. As many as 38,594 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the U.S. invasion to remove Saddam Hussein, Iraqbodycount.net, a research group based in the U.K., said in the latest tally on its Web site. The daily rate of civilian deaths increased to 36 a day in the third year of the occupation from 20 in the first, Iraqbodycount.net said in a release on March 9.
As deputy defense secretary, Wolfowitz advocated toppling Hussein. He argued that the U.S. would be greeted as a liberator and helped U.S. President George W. Bush craft a rationale for the invasion, based on intelligence reports that Iraq had weapons of mass destructions. The U.S. hasn't found such weapons.
Seven former U.S. military commanders have called for the resignation of Wolfowitz's former boss Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. They contend Rumsfeld mismanaged the military's post- invasion operations and ignored the advice of field commanders. Bush says Rumsfeld has his ``full support.''
Dangerous Locations
U.S. military deaths, including Department of Defense contractors, in Iraq totaled 2,644, according to a Pentagon tally on April 13. Four Marines were killed due to ``enemy action'' in the Iraq's western al-Anbar province, the U.S. Military said in an e-mailed statement sent late last night.
Before sending anyone to such a dangerous location, the World Bank needs to determine its objectives, said Edwin Truman, former assistant secretary for international affairs at the U.S. Treasury Department and now a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics, a research group based in Washington.
``One needs to worry about whether there is substance here or symbolism,'' Truman said. ``If it is essential to the World Bank pursuing its mission in Iraq, or whether you just want to show the World Bank flag and bolster the shaky political situation there.''
If the bank has large-scale rebuilding and poverty reduction plans, such as building hospitals and roads, it would need to have people on the ground to monitor the operations.
The bank will discuss the plan to deploy people in Iraq in the next couple of weeks, Wolfowitz said.
Ensuring Support
Before sending workers to Iraq, Wolfowitz should ensure he has support from the World Bank's board of directors, Truman said. Because of his role in the march to war, critics will be monitoring his actions closely, he said.
``Given his past, if things blow up, he needs shared responsibility,'' Truman said. ``If I were running the World Bank, I would not want to make that decision on my own. I would want it to be a collective decision.''
A Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll found mounting skepticism about the Iraqi conflict, with 38 percent of Americans saying it was worth fighting compared with 58 percent who said it was not. The poll surveyed 1,357 American adults by telephone between April 8 and 11 and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
The World Bank's lending program to Iraq has also been delayed because of the four month deadlock over forming a new government.
Failing to Agree
Iraqis have been unable to agree on their next prime minister. Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari was named by the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite Muslim group that won most seats in the election, to take the post after he beat his nearest rival, Vice President Adel Abdel Mahdi, by a single vote in a February ballot.
Kurdish, Sunni and some Shiite leaders oppose Jaafari, and have asked him to withdraw his candidacy, arguing he hasn't been able to contain the insurgency and is too sectarian for a nation trying to avoid a civil war.
The bank has so far been administering two trust funds for the country. The bank's affiliated organization, the International Monetary Fund, on Dec. 23 approved a one-year $685 million lending program with Iraq, the first loan of its kind to the nation.
The IMF lent Iraq $436 million in 2004 as emergency aid following the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
The Washington-based lender will also weigh the incidence of corruption before lending money to Iraq. The nation was ranked 137th along with Indonesia with a score of 2.2 in Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index for 2005. Its score was unchanged from 2003, the year the U.S. invaded the nation. A score of 10 indicates no corruption.
"We need to have more assurance" about the government's anti-corruption stance before lending money, Wolfowitz said.