The guy's whistling in the wind, hoping against hope that the World Bank will somehow eclipse Iraq in the world's memory of him. It won't. We can chisel the epitaph now: "the Iraqis will welcome us as liberators". Wolfowitz should take a cue from McNamara, and start apologizing now, not thirty years on.

And the LATimes should extend its expiation services to all the other leaders who helped drag us into this disastrous war. How 'bout some journalists?

I was filing a story from the street, blocked in by peaceful protesters, when the pepper spray hit. Sure, the trade ministers standing near me were frustrated and befuddled, but did that warrant the use of chemical agents? These protesters had struck a nerve.

In November 1999, tens of thousands of people ranging from Teamsters to Earth Firsters used human barricades and marches to delay the opening session of the World Trade Organization's planned ministerial summit in the coffee capital, Seattle. This unlikely coalition of steel workers, environmentalists, performance artists and self-proclaimed anarchists had a muddled and diverse agenda, but the protest raised awareness about the issues surrounding international trade and sparked a worldwide protest against what-for lack of better term-has become known as "globalization."

The Seattle protesters could not boast of having wrecked the summit. True, it ended without agreement on a new round of negotiations-the trade officials' frustration persisted until they all went home. But this had nothing to do with the protesters: In his new book, A World Without Walls , former W.T.O. director-general Mike Moore candidly acknowledges, "We didn't need their help to fail … we did it on our own."

For Mr. Moore, who retired as director-general last year, Seattle was a "wake-up call." The former prime minister of New Zealand is at his best when he describes the bureaucratic mountains that had to be moved (he eventually moved some of them) to begin reform of the W.T.O. Along the way, he's both self-congratulatory and self-deprecating, successfully weaving in humor to spice up what might otherwise be tedious accounts of office politics.

That's the better half of the book. A World Without Walls is not completely formed: It feels as though its publication was rushed, which is unfortunate. The book feels hastily stuffed with the studies and observations of others, when Mr. Moore's own insights and experience would have served as well.

At the outset, he shows-sadly-that he's a better politician than he is an economist. He trumpets theories of economic development that are well worth discussing, but are hardly panaceas. His praise for Hernando de Soto's ideas about how extended property rights can open millions of people to capital and the markets ignores the reductionist quality of Mr. de Soto's argument, the happy myth that property rights can work miracles. Mr. Moore's own arguments (like Mr. de Soto, he favors a reduction in red tape to open markets) are presented in a more sophisticated manner and with more immediate practical application. At the end of his book, Mr. Moore recites a litany of problems facing rich nations, poor nations and the various development agencies, but he doesn't tie these pressing issues back to free trade and the W.T.O.

It's in the middle of A World Without Walls , after the theory and before the Cassandra act, that Mr. Moore shines. Here he tells the story of how he learned from Seattle and went on-despite the clamor of naysayers who thought Seattle marked the end of the W.T.O.-to lead the successful launch of a new round of "development" negotiations in Doha in 2001.

An optimist and a firm believer in the international organizations he has worked for and with, Mr. Moore argues that if free trade were to operate at full potential, countries would develop more quickly, societies would demand greater freedoms, and dictators, tyrants and terrorists-the usual list of bad guys-would lose their hold on the disenfranchised.

Although he expresses unswerving support for institutions such as the European Union and the United Nations, Mr. Moore does not believe that "global governance" means the creation of "global government." Instead, he argues for a democratic caucus in international organizations to ensure that liberal democratic ideas prevail over recalcitrance and self-interest. He agrees with critics of globalization who insist that rich countries sometimes operate under a double standard (consider the recent steel tariffs and agricultural subsidies imposed by the Bush administration).

Mr. Moore's idealism seems more in tune with the anti-globalization movement than either he or some of the more vocal activists might imagine. He proclaims that to disregard the concerns of the demonstrators "is short-sighted, dangerous, and irresponsible." But he does just that, intermittently, all the way through his book.

Early on, he notes that critics "assail the World Bank, accusing it of causing world poverty. Which is like accusing the Red Cross Society of causing world wars." Several chapters later, he notes how, in fact, parts of the developing world are poorer than they were 30 years ago-in part because of development policies of the World Bank, which the organization itself acknowledged in a report released last year.

Mr. Moore cites a report by the United Nations Development Program, which states that in sub-Saharan Africa, per capita income was around one-ninth of that in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries in 1960 and had deteriorated to around one-eighteenth by 1998. Mr. Moore also cites a Heritage Foundation study showing that 37 of the less developed countries receiving money from the World Bank are no better off than they were before they received aid, and 20 were actually worse off. Perhaps the criticisms lobbed at the world organizations are not as ludicrous as Mr. Moore sometimes pretends. Indeed, he acknowledges that many N.G.O.'s have valid complaints that deserve to reach the ears of officials at the World Bank, I.M.F. and W.T.O.

At a time when global institutions such as these seem both vitally important and uniquely threatened, Mr. Moore advocates greater education about their decisions and their interaction with civil society. A World Without Walls , especially when it's focused on the specifics of how the W.T.O. should operate-and how it actually does operate-is an admirable beginning.

Heather Bourbeau is the associate editor at Foreign Affairs . She covered the Seattle W.T.O. ministerial meeting for TheStreet.com.

Five years later, though, Mr. Wolfensohn hasn't gotten too far.

For evidence, check out the World Bank's sexy new product line: "corruption loss insurance." If your regime is so demonstrably untrustworthy that foreign investors have decamped en masse, the World Bank can help. It will lend you tens of millions of dollars, furnished by foreign taxpayers, so that you can offer investors insurance against your own perfidiousness.

The business of insuring foreign investors against sovereign acts like expropriation, change in law, currency inconvertibility and war-so-called "political risk insurance"-is not new. Private insurance companies and quasi-governmental organizations have long offered insurance against such risks, but, generally speaking, no one writes political risk coverage against sovereigns that are totally unreliable.

Enter the World Bank, with its "Leveraged Insurance Facility for Trade and Development." Uniquely, this loan program is closed to countries that behave themselves. To qualify for it, a regime must be unsavory to foreign investors. In this fractured bad-is-good universe, the government in question must first purposefully fail to provide the elemental infrastructure and protections that make foreign investors comfortable and that permit local businesses to thrive.

Does your country have clear laws defining property rights? If it does, this program is not for you. An impartial judiciary? Sorry. Honest officials? Next window, please. But, if your government and judiciary are corrupt, your country lacks a consistent body of law, the few laws you do have are applied arbitrarily, and both local and foreign businessmen quail at the thought of investing, the World Bank wants to help. It will lend good money to bad governments so those selfsame regimes can sell investors insurance against misdeeds that are totally within their own control.

Given such stringent preconditions, not just any old untrustworthy regime is good enough. To date, only Ukraine and Albania have been sufficiently unattractive to investors to qualify for programs like this. Albania is the stolen-car capital of Europe; Germans joke that, if your car is missing, you look for it not at the local pound but on the docks outside Tirana. Ukraine, of course, has similar qualifications: The International Monetary Fund is investigating Ukraine's Central Bank for misrepresenting the level of its reserves, I.M.F. money may have gone astray, and the Ukraine is restructuring its external bonds.

Consistent with those standards, the World Bank invited Kazakhstan to join the Leveraged Insurance club. It plans to lend Kazakhstan $50 million so that, if Kazakhstan continues lying to foreign investors, it has the dough to compensate them for the costs of its own corruption, arbitrary legal changes and capricious enforcement. (The loan is slated for approval by the World Bank's board in June.)

Kazakhstan seems to meet the World Bank's criteria perfectly. Transparency International, a global watchdog group, gives Kazakhstan a dismal 2.3-out of a possible 10-on its Corruption Perceptions Index. That ranks Kazakhstan as one of the most corrupt countries anywhere.

Then there's its dismal human rights record. Freedom House reports that President Nursultan Nazarbaev runs one of the most repressive regimes on earth. Mr. Nazarbaev controls the police and the judiciary and, said Freedom House, "corruption is evident at every level of the judicial system." The authorities routinely use libel laws to discourage free speech.

Some say that the World Bank would be out of business if it did not lend money to creepy regimes. Nonetheless, the ironies inherent in the World Bank's relationship with Kazakhstan abound. The bank's mission statement requires it to "encourage governments to create the legal and institutional framework for transparency, predictability and competence in the conduct of public affairs."

Instead of encouraging Kazakhstan to achieve any of those objectives, however, the World Bank has instead set about enabling Kazakhstan to avoid them. The World Bank plays no useful role when it implicitly encourages bad government and bad actors. Lots of Third World countries are struggling to implement economic and political reforms-and many are succeeding. Loans to regimes like Mr. Nazarbaev's mock those efforts and encourage other miscreants, who really need no encouragement.

Jay Newman is a money manager who specializes in foreign debt.

The Javanese make the Japanese look like Puerto Ricans. It is the world capital of self-restraint–a place where, if you can't say it with silence, you are shouting at the top of your lungs.

What happens when the restraint cracks? I also met a diplomat who had been in the country so long that he had accompanied Vice President Hubert Humphrey on a visit to Bali in the late 60's. The Balinese put on a good show–one of the upsides of a culture where no one is ever left alone–and the Vice President was enjoying the racket of his welcome. "Look at all these wonderful people!" he bubbled, making his own characteristic racket. "Mr. Vice President," his guide interjected, "eight months ago, these wonderful people killed"–however many thousands of people were killed on Bali during the last change of regime, in 1965-66. The death toll for Indonesia as a whole may have reached 750,000.

America encouraged that political changeover. The dictator who lost was Sukarno, who had been leaning toward the Communists and what used to be called Red China. The dictator who replaced him was Suharto, who yanked the country back into the non-Communist column. Considering Indonesia's size and its natural resources (it belongs to OPEC), who will say the Communists were net gainers in Southeast Asia, even though they won the Vietnam War? Suharto's coup was at least partly an American export. But the carnage was homegrown.

When the lid comes off in that part of the world, a lot boils over. Suharto and his omnivorous family may be swept away by student rioting. Or they may hang on, as Deng Xiaoping hung on when students took over Tiananmen Square, by killing several thousand of them. Either result will probably be accompanied by a bloody nationwide carnival. Victims of opportunity in Indonesia will be the country's ethnic Chinese who, like the Koreans of South Central Los Angeles, own too many stores for their own good.

This is the legitimate reason for America's prop-up-the-status-quo policy. Giving advice to foreigners has had a bad track record since Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great. We have enough problems with our own system (just ask Senator Bulworth, or better yet, look at the White House) that we should not be interfering in the systems of other people, especially when the materials are so volatile.

But there are right and wrong ways to prop up a status quo. World Bank loans are usually a wrong way. Flowing as they do from the psychology that the country receiving the loan is "too big to fail," they tend to evolve, as the World Bank's loans to Indonesia have, into gifts with fewer and fewer strings attached. If the beggar knows that the Samaritan thinks the beggar must live, why should he change his ways? Emergency bailouts teach no lesson to other countries, or to their future creditors. The only way to discipline Asian crony bankers and in-law industrialists is to make the Western banking community realize that whatever it loans them will be lost if they fool it away. No money upfront, less folly abroad. Every time the World Bank rides to the rescue, it guarantees a later and bigger rescue of the next bankruptcy.

Conspiracy theorists know why we are helping Suharto: It is the last payoff for all the campaign money that James Riady raised during the last election cycle. It is amazing how quickly even a liberal and basically nonpolitical Clinton-hater, like my wife, reached for the word Riady when talk of a World Bank loan to Indonesia graced the front pages. My wife doesn't even know Dick Bossie. I found myself in the role of Al Hunt, gaseously explaining that there were sufficient institutional and geopolitical reasons to account for the Administration's stance. These are the discussions that arise when an administration has been playing footsie with foreign contributors. Alexander Hamilton said that foreign influence was the Trojan horse of republics. It is also the Trojan horse that destroys republican trust between leaders and the led. If President Bill Clinton was grubbing for millions to buy Dick Morris' TV commercials and to buy off Webb Hubbell, who will trust him when he wants to shovel billions at tottering kleptocrats?

The Clinton-Gore campaign's Asian connection also ran to China, where we see yet another example of bad judgment. Loral Space & Communications Ltd. and the Hughes Corporation got a green light from the Clinton Administration to sell advanced missile technology to the Chinese. Now Representative Robert Barr, Republican of Georgia, has charged that fear of newly sophisticated Chinese missiles was as much behind India's recent nuclear tests as national pride, or rivalry with Pakistan. Whether the Indians feared them or not, the Pakistanis will now, of course, be driven to make a test of their own. Like a triple bank shot, the Chinese missile sale touched three countries. It's not every day that a few businessmen and a lazy White House affect 2 billion people.

Here again, it is unreasonable to look for a flat quid pro quo. American Presidents were doing Beijing unwise favors long before Bill Clinton inaugurated the Chinese primary. It is a question of seemliness and tone. Somewhere along the line, Bill Clinton should have learned to be less polite.