The Washington Post reported Sunday on a Pentagon official in Iraq who has drawn the ire of other government officials by unilaterally reconstituting some of that country’s state-owned industries.

Paul Brinkley, a deputy undersecretary of defense, has been called a Stalinist by U.S. diplomats in Iraq. One has accused him of helping insurgents build better bombs. The State Department has even taken the unusual step of enlisting the CIA to dispute the validity of Brinkley’s work.

Brinkley’s attempt to ease unemployment among the ranks of young men with guns — estimated to be running at 60% or higher — drew this response from one irate US embassy official: “Here was this guy who parachuted in from Washington who thought he had all of the answers and that we were just a bunch of idiots sitting around in the Green Zone.”

What could possibly lead him to think that?

The story casts a little bit of light on the various ongoing power struggles within the administration. At the onset of the occupation, it was Colin Powell’s State Department battling against the dominant neoconservative crowd in the Pentagon and White House to preserve some of Iraq’s socialist institutions; now, despite the allegedly ameliorative influence of Condi Rice (or maybe that’s the alleged influence of the presumably ameliorative Rice), the State Department appears to have adopted the neoconservative Free Market Über Alles mantra.

In other news, the Condi for President movement is still alive, last seen trolling for support in South Carolina on the outskirts of yesterday’s GOP candidates debate. High on the list of reasons that Bush’s other brain should hold the office? “Rice, national security adviser before becoming secretary of state, has the foreign policy experience the next president will need.”

The rest of the sentence apparently got lost at the copy desk. It should read, “Rice, national security adviser before becoming secretary of state, has the foreign policy experience the next president will need to avoid like the plague.”

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