SO the wolf is in the fold. Since his inflammatory nomination last month by President Bush to be the next head of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz, the US Deputy Secretary of Defence and the Pentagon’s arch-hawk, has been caricatured, in true pantomime villain style, as “the wolf at the door”.

Now, with his appointment confirmed last week by the bank’s multinational board, the man so many love to hate has been thrust into the heart of the most important development institution.

The reaction to, first, Wolfowitz’s nomination, and then to his confirmation, from a global army of critics has been as ill-informed as it was tediously predictable. In a rush to judgement, he has been denounced on the basis of preconception.

There is no denying that President Bush’s decision to tap for the World Bank post a figure seen worldwide as a high-priest of his administration’s neoconservative cadres, and a driving force behind the war in Iraq, was a provocative move. It was, and is, a decision that underscores the White House’s disdain for diplomatic niceties.

But that is largely a matter of presentation, not substance. A more considered judgement might well be that Wolfowitz could yet prove to be the right man in the right job at the right time.

First, consider the man. For his opponents in some European chancelleries and among a strident coterie of non-governmental organisations who believe they have a monopoly of wisdom on the developing world, Wolfowitz’s appointment is a calculated slap in the face from President Bush. They have already decided that a dead-eyed ideologue has been handed the keys to the development kingdom with a mission to deliver its dissolution.

This view is nonsense. In fact, the reality is more likely the opposite.

The Bush administration may not share all of the views of NGOs and aid campaigners on the best means to tackle poverty in the developing world. But there is little doubt that Mr Bush and his administration have a commitment to the same ends as those who claim to speak for the planet’s poor.

The President is, as it happens, under considerable political pressure from the Christian element on the Republican right to take meaningful action in the Third World in general, and in Africa in particular.

More pragmatically, a White House that is so preoccupied with US national security, undoubtedly recognises the enlightened self-interest of doing all that America can to bring relief to the poverty-stricken nations that are so often the breeding grounds for terrorism.

In this context, the President’s choice of one of his chief lieutenants to run the World Bank can only be further testimony to seriousness attached to tackling the plight of the developing world. Bush could easily have alighted instead on a pygmy from amongst Washington’s apparatchiks — past Presidents have inflicted mediocrities on the Bank.

What about Wolfowitz himself? For all his depiction as a hardline hawk bent on the pursuit of American imperialism, closer examination of his credentials suggests that he may bring to the job many of the qualities essential for success.

Contrary to his image, Wolfowitz is said to be a brilliant and thoughtful intellectual, whose views are founded in an idealistic belief in freedom, democracy and free markets. As an intellectual compass for his role at the Bank, such an outlook, far from being a handicap, is what is needed in a world in which experience has shown that, the freer people are — both politically and economically — to improve their own fortunes, the sooner poverty is eliminated.

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