Iran Daily - Is Wolfowitz a Threat?

Iran Daily: "Is Wolfowitz a Threat?

By Azam Mohebbi

Political and economic analysts contend that the appointment of Paul Wolfowitz to World Bank (WB) presidency is meant chiefly to punish the Europeans, stressing that the development could also pose a threat to political and economic equations involving independent states, like Iran.
This group of experts believes that the US undersecretary of defense was appointed to head the most powerful global economic body as part of Washington’s policies to show the Europeans who the boss is.
“I think this initiative comes as part of US efforts to show its hostilities to France and Germany, in particular,“ said Mehdi Taqavi, an economic analyst.
He told Iran Daily that the US could use other mechanisms for exerting pressures on Iran, stressing that while Wolfowitz has already taken a sharper snipe at Iran than his predecessors, the operators of the US foreign policy perform almost in the same way.
“It really doesn’t matter for Iran who the WTO chief is and which political line of thoughts he follows,“ he said, adding that the Islamic state has to strengthen first and foremost its international trade interaction.
On Iran’s debts to the World Bank, the expert said that the Islamic Republic is only indebted to Japan and some European countries and that it has never received loans from the US.
He said Iran has so far received a few hundred million dollars worth of WB loans, adding that the financial facilities have been used mainly to rehabilitate waste water management systems.
Taqavi says Iran’s bid on start of its WTO negotiations has already been rejected 22 times before Wolfowitz took office last month.
He called on senior officials of the country to help improve economic and political interaction with powerful countries, adding, however, that there would always be a price to pay for establishing closer ties with such countries.
Another expert, Zahra Hajj Mohammad Kashi, told Iran Daily that the WTO appointment serves as a threat to the global economy. “A sworn enemy of the Islamic Republic is now going to run global trade,“ she said, adding that all international economic and political equations would be affected by this decision.
The nomination surprised the international community as Wolfowitz was seen by many as an architect of the Iraq war and his hard-line foreign policy stance has made him a target of critics at home and abroad.
The appointment of Wolfowitz to WB presidency is unlikely to have a major impact on the bank’s outlook as the bank has never had a non-US chief.
The World Bank has approved the nomination of the US deputy defense secretary to be its next president, succeeding James Wolfensohn starting from June 1.
Wolfowitz, 61, was nominated by US President George W. Bush."