With the 10,000 member World Bank Staff Association is asking Bank President Paul Wolfowitz to step down amid charges of improperly giving pay raises to his girlfriend, a Bank employee, Wolfwitz’s role in planning and managing the invasion of Iraq at the Pentagon may come back to haunt him.
Wolfowitz once assured the U.S. Congress that Iraqi oil money would pay for the war and the planned reconstruction of Iraq:

“There’s a lot of money to pay for this that doesn’t have to be U.S. taxpayer money, and it starts with the assets of the Iraqi people…and on a rough recollection, the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 (billion) and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three year….. We’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.” [Source: House Committee on Appropriations Hearing on a Supplemental War Regulation, 3/27/03]

Almost $12 billion in Iraqi assets has been found to be left unaccounted for under supervision of the U.S.-controlled Coalition Provisional Authority — much of it arrived in $100 bills on pallets straight from the Federal Reserve in New York. (Others tell me the amount of Iraqi assets that went missing — if you inlcude oil smuggling and theft in Iraq — may be in the neighborhood of $22 billion. )
Some Wolfowiz foes at the Bank hope he is hauled before Congress sometime soon to explain his role in the Iraq war — a potential embarassment that feasibly could lead to his resigning from the Bank.
Wolfowitz is already blaming World Bank employees for making his girlfriend’s salary an issue because of his role in Iraq — and many Bank employees view him as a principal architect behind the U.S. invasion while at the Pentagon. “For those people who disagree with the things that they associate me with in my previous job, I’m not in my previous job,” Wolfowitz said in a statement. “I’m not working for the U.S. government; I’m working for this institution and its 185 shareholders.”
For more on the spending of Iraqi oil money, known as the Development Fund for Iraq, see Spending Iraqi Money from two years ago.
More on Wolfowitz at World Bank today: World Bank Staff Seek Wolfowitz’s Ouster