The World Bank found its president, Paul D. Wolfowitz, overcompensated his girlfriend, Shaha Ali Riza, and then misled it and the public.

Now they must decide what to do with him

They should fire him if he won't resign.

It won't be easy.  Wolfowitz wants the Bank to withdraw its findings of fact, and then he'll think about leaving.

"He sounds like Tony Soprano," a British columnist wrote of World Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz's angry threats to "fxxx with" World Bank senior staff members.

But to me, Wolfowitz sounds like Richard Nixon.

The difference is that Nixon cared about democracy and America, whereas Wolfowitz cares only about himself and the Republican Party.

But there are similarities.  Both Nixon and Wolfowitz were complex persons—foul-mouthed, combative, but also very intelligent, well-educated men, capable of great vision, great wit, disarming exuberance, and charm.

Wolfowitz reportedly named those he planned to "fxxx" to the Bank's human resources director, who unobtrusively wrote everything down.

Unlike the Bank's director, Nixon's loyal secretary, Rosemary Woods, managed to accidentally on purpose erase crucial minutes of damning conversations that Nixon pathologically recorded.  Nixon thought this infamous gap would somehow make it impossible to determine whether he'd lied.  But by then, people had heard so much of Nixon threatening to "fxxx" this or that person that they didn't need to hear the missing words to fill in the infamous blank.

They knew Nixon lied.  So he resigned.

And by resigning, Nixon showed not fear, but that he understood and respected something important about America and democracy—indeed, about civilization--that Wolfowitz clearly does not yet understand.

Call it "the sanctity of the moral law."

That's what Hans Morgenthau, a political scientist who'd fled Nazi Germany and found safe haven at Columbia University, called it when he wrote in 1959 to Columbia students who were distressed when Columbia forced Charles Van Doren, a popular professor, to resign for cheating on a television game show.

All men, and all civilization, are guided by a universal moral law, Morgenthau explained.  This is why "we can not only understand the moral relevance of the Ten Commandments originating in a social environment and circumstances quite different from ours, but also make them the foundation for our moral life."  This is why we find "the moral ideas of Plato and Pascal, of Buddha and Thomas Aquinas…similarly acceptable to our intellectual understanding and moral sense."

Is not this search for commonality the Bank's core mission?

But let's extrapolate: The White House asks: Should not Wolfowitz's confession, or his claim to have made a mistake, exonerate him?

No.  Wolfowitz admitted overcompensating Riza only after realizing the Board had acquired evidence against him, was going to proceed with investigating him, and his other arguments were failing.  So Wolfowitz's "confession" is not worth much.

As for Wolfowitz's contention that he's learned his lesson and won't do it again, so what?  "[I]t is nowhere written that a man is entitled to his first murder, his first fraud, or his first lie," Morgenthau observed.

Like Van Doren, Wolfowitz was a professional educator, which compounds his actions.

He was a professor and dean at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies for almost a decade, and kept an active hand in academics by sending his various contacts to teach at SAIS even after he joined the current Bush administration.  He also brought SAIS professors into his World Bank orbit as highly paid staff and consultants.

Wolfowitz himself compartmentalized his conduct by distinguishing between "old jobs" like being a teacher or the Iraq War's architect,

and "new jobs" like being Bank president.    But a teacher "is

foremost the guardian and augmentor of a permanent treasure,"

Morgenthau explained.  His honesty "is not a part-time job to be performed during certain hours without relation with what goes on before and after."

As for Bennett and the White House's contention that the World Bank "acted," as Morgenthau observed of Van Doren, "with undue haste" in investigating Wolfowitz, this argument is "at odds with the obvious facts." Although the Bank initially found no wrongdoing, it looked again, and found evidence that Wolfowitz not only acted wrongfully, but hid his wrongdoing and made misleading statements about it—which is likely why they mistakenly exonerated him the first time.

"We don't consider" Wolfowitz's actions "a firing offense," smirked White House spokesman Tony Snow.

Well, of course they wouldn't--there is apparently no "firing offense"

imaginable unless a senate election's immediately on the horizon.

Nixon failed to follow the moral law, but he understood and appreciated it.  In the end, he redeemed himself in the eyes of many.

The Bank should do what America would have done in 1974, had Nixon not resigned.  It should fire Wolfowitz, and let the chips fall where they may.

by Sarah Whalen, a contributing columnist