WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 — In his first 15 months as president of the World Bank, Paul D. Wolfowitz has made the fight against corruption in poor countries a hallmark issue, waging an aggressive campaign that has led to the suspension of hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and contracts to nations including India, Chad, Kenya, Congo, Ethiopia and Bangladesh.

It is a new incarnation for Mr. Wolfowitz, a neoconservative intellectual who was a primary architect of the Iraq war during four years as deputy secretary of defense.

At the World Bank, Mr. Wolfowitz, 62, has maintained an assertive but soft-spoken style, saying recently that the bank’s mission was “to send children to school, to help mothers be healthier, to provide jobs for poor people — not to have resources siphoned off into the hands of the corrupt and greedy.”

In recent months, however, his campaign has run into a host of critics, both at the bank and among financial officials outside the United States, who say that developing countries are being threatened with arbitrary punishment in a way that jeopardizes the bank’s longtime mission to reduce poverty.