Incompetence in Iraq
By Anthony | October 25th, 2006 | 1:02 amEd Brayton highlights some choice portions of review of a PBS documentary and a Washington Post article, detailing the horrible lack of qualifications possessed by many of the people the Bush administration sent to rebuild post-war Iraq.
In case after case, the ticket to Iraq seemed to be loyalty to the Republican party, rather than any experience with the job they were being sent to do:
To pass muster with O’Beirne, a political appointee who screens prospective political appointees for Defense Department posts, applicants didn’t need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration. O’Beirne’s staff posed blunt questions to some candidates about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade .
This has consequences of course:
The decision to send the loyal and the willing instead of the best and the brightest is now regarded by many people involved in the 3 1/2 -year effort to stabilize and rebuild Iraq as one of the Bush administration’s gravest errors. Many of those selected because of their political fidelity spent their time trying to impose a conservative agenda on the postwar occupation, which sidetracked more important reconstruction efforts and squandered goodwill among the Iraqi people, according to many people who participated in the reconstruction effort.
Read the whole thing – there’s much more.
