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04/04/2006:

"Wolfowitz looks at opening World Bank Iraq office"

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz is considering expanding bank operations in Iraq, which would put his agency at the center of rebuilding from a war he helped plan as the Pentagon's former No. 2 official.

Senior bank officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because no final decision had been made, said key donor countries including Britain, Japan, Germany and Denmark are pressuring Wolfowitz to establish a Baghdad office.

The development agency has not had a Iraq office since an August 19, 2003, bombing at U.N. headquarters in Iraq killed a bank employee. A consultant, with a staff of seven Iraqis, is paid by the World Bank looks after its affairs in Iraq.

No World Bank staff would be forced to accept an Iraq assignment, the officials said.

In recent weeks, Wolfowitz sent a fact-finding mission to Iraq, and he was now examining security matters and several reconstruction-related issues, officials said.

The possibility of a new World Bank office revives attention to Wolfowitz's role as an architect of the Iraq war. Many critics have accused the Bush administration and the Pentagon in particular of failing to plan for a post-invasion Iraq, as violence rages three years after Saddam Hussein's ouster.

Michael O'Hanlon, a reconstruction expert at Washington's Brookings Institute, said Wolfowitz's history with Iraq "complicates everything."

"He is a very smart man," O'Hanlon said, "but he is also obviously very controversial in his basic support of the Iraq invasion."

Wolfowitz's predecessor as World Bank president, Jim Wolfensohn, resisted pressure from U.S. lawmakers to return bank reconstruction experts to Iraq after the 2003 bombing.
news.yahoo.com