I remember hearing that Guantanamo Bay and the war on terror were allowing Vladimir Putin to terrorize Chechnya. ~Isaac Chotiner

Obviously, saying that would be silly, but the point of saying something like that would be to argue that whatever human rights violations were being committed in the name of the “war on terror” undermine the credibility of the U.S. government to criticise Russian conduct in Chechnya.  That would be a true statement.  (Not that I think pestering the Russians about fighting terrorists and insurgents in their own country should one of our top priorities in foreign policy.)  This is rather like saying that embarking on preventive wars to stop future, potential threats invites other states to do the same–it is true.  In so doing, Washington does not “allow” China to launch a “preventive war” against Taiwan, but it severely undermines its ability to condemn that invasion and rally international opinion against future wars that are essentially wars of aggression.  This is why people argue against setting bad precedents, because they, well, set bad precedents that others can invoke as justifications for their own bad behaviour later. 

There is no question of actually “allowing” or “disallowing,” however, since Russians had been fighting in Chechnya for years before there was a “war on terror.”  Also, Washington doesn’t actually rule the world, but there is a hegemonist assumption behind all of this talk of “allowing” this or that to take place in the world.  Stupid interventionists use this language of “permitting” and “allowing” all the time when they are complaining about inaction in the face of this or that crisis.  Why has the West “allowed” the situation in Darfur to unfold as it has?  Why does the West “allow” the Burmese regime to abuse its people?  And so on.  To speak of allowing or permitting is to claim the power and right to stop it, whether by force of example or by action.

This came up, bizarrely, in the context of complaining about how poor Wolfowitz has been treated in some commentary and press reports, which cast the scandal with his girlfriend’s raise as an obstacle to advancing an anti-corruption and anti-poverty agenda.  The anti-corruption part is easy to understand, while the other one makes sense if you understand that Wolfowitz has been so politically damaged that he cannot continue to function effectively.  Think of him as international lending’s answer to Alberto Gonzales: he may not have actually done anything illegal or even necessarily technically wrong or unethical, but at this point keeping him at Justice is ridiculous.  So long as a politically damaged person is at the head of an organisation, that organisation doesn’t function as well as it could or should.  Just ask the other President.

Kirchick takes an even more odd view, linking critics of Wolfowitz with a view that, for liberals, there should be “no friends to the right.”  For this critique to make sense, Wolfowitz would have to have been a pretty good World Bank President, which, as Yglesias points out, Mallaby (not one normally to be confused with a half-crazed Kossack) is explicitly denying.  Then there is the political reality that the Europeans and Asians don’t like Wolfowitz, while he has a cheering section from the African delegations who like that he has sent them great big wodges of cash.  This is a bad dynamic in any kind of banking (even development lending): the depositors hate you, but the borrowers love you.  You have messed up somewhere.  It means that the people who put up a lot of the money dislike the head of the bank, and they are willing to pull their money out of the bank as a result.  If the World Bank disappeared tomorrow, the world would probably be a better place in certain respects, but for those who actually want the thing to function “properly” (whatever that would look like) the need to get rid of Wolfowitz appears to be both vital and perfectly obvious.