After an agonising and argumentative few weeks, the stubborn and self-righteous Paul Wolfowitz has bowed to the inevitable and resigned as World Bank president, effective at the end of next month. Yet his resignation should be the beginning - not the end - of the affair, otherwise the already grave wounds inflicted on the bank may prove fatal.
Sadly, all the evidence is that the small-minded politicians running this fragile planet do not realise what is at stake. It is time for US President George W. Bush, as he enters his dying-duck days, to stop seeing the world in terms of black and white, good and evil, and think of a successor to Dr Wolfowitz in terms of one of the biggest practical and moral problems the world faces. What should be done about the uneven state of affairs in which the rich inhabitants of industrialised countries gobble up 85 per cent of the world's wealth, leaving the bottom 40 per cent of the population with barely enough to survive?
It is time for China, and India too, to assert themselves and make their voices heard. They have begun to show immense growth rates and have lessons for the rest of the world - just as they need the advice of the bank about how to overcome intractable problems, some of which have been caused by their expansion, others because the growth has not spread evenly.
It is time for Japan and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, if they want to be part and partner in the modern world, to stop cringing behind the US. Indeed, it says a lot about Mr Abe's blinkered world vision that he regards it as more important and urgent to change Japan's constitution, to get rid of its no-war clause, than to demand a say in the choice of the bank's president to reflect the nation's economic standing.
It is time for Britain's finance minister Gordon Brown to practise what he has long preached, about the need for a new global financial architecture. Mr Brown has been strangely silent about Dr Wolfowitz, just as Prime Minister Tony Blair shamefully acquiesced in Mr Bush's choice of Dr Wolfowitz to move from Iraq hawk to leader of the world's biggest development bank.
Who cares if the bank lives or dies? That is a reasonable question. Its demise would release a few hectares of prime area in downtown Washington. It would throw 20,000 or more people out of work across the world - economists, agronomists, environmentalists, social scientists, educators, along with hundreds of time-servers masquerading as human-resources and ethics specialists.