Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational Wolfowitz

The Wall Street Journal waxes See-Dubyan about the plotting against Paul Wolfowitz within the World Bank:

The forces of the World Bank status quo are now making their power play, demanding that the bank's board ask him to resign over an ethics flap involving his girlfriend. The dispute is so trivial that it betrays that this fracas has little to do with Mr. Wolfowitz's ethics. The real fight here is over his attempt to make the bank and its borrowers more accountable for results, especially by exposing and punishing corruption....

Who could be against fighting corruption? Well, for starters, a global poverty industry that thinks "governance" is a distraction from the only real measure of development, which is how much money "rich" nations choose to redistribute to poor ones. Never mind that many of these countries stay poor year after year precisely because they squander or steal foreign aid.

They don't mention who's behind this, but in my first post on the flap I linked to Fox News' analysis of World Bank internal documents identifying the malcontents--at least at the level of nations rebelling against his anticorruption agenda. And speaking of Fox News, they're back with the smoking gun document again:

The documents also show that the ethics committee was sensitive to the need to compensate Riza for her trouble, which she hardly brought on herself. In a memo from Melkert to Wolfowitz on July 27, 2005, the ethics committee chairman proposed “that management [Wolfowitz] provide some form of additional personal benefit to offset the negative career impact of the staff member [Riza]…Possible benefits include promotion, or additional salary increase.”

In fact, Wolfowitz helped Riza to get both items – a promotion and a salary hike – and it’s the amount of the salary hike that is most in question today.

But FOX News’ examination of the documents shows that in many ways, Wolfowitz was left to himself to decide what would make sense— despite the fact that he had initially asked to be recused from any such involvement.

It's long, yes, but it gets even better:

Finally, in January 2006—some 14 months before the scandal exploded this week— the ethics committee had another opportunity to revisit the issue. An anonymous whistle-blower calling himself John Smith wrote a lengthy letter to the committee taking exception to Riza’s deal in great and accurate detail.

The ethics committee, led by Melkert, met on the subject with the bank’s anti-corruption unit – which investigates internal wrongdoing. According to the documents examined by FOX News, after what Melkert called a “careful review,” the committee decided that the case had been resolved back in autumn 2005 and didn’t “warrant any further attention.” Case closed – again.

Good for Fox News and reporter Richard Behar--despite the network's reputation for shout shows, they're going in depth with real reporting here on something that matters.