Maybe a week or two ago I mentioned a New York Review of Books essay by Peter Galbraith in which he explored some of the ways that the US invasion of Iraq wandered off course (other than the most obvious one, which is that the muttonheads did it).
(The entire October 7 preview of the magazine is filled with very fine essays on Iraq. The NYRB has surpassed most news magazines in its critical coverage, all the while managing to review books at the same time).
One of the circumstances Galbraith noted is that, so far as anyone can tell, the Coalition Provisional Authority—the Viceroy’s office— was never operating at more than perhaps half strength; it was meant to be staffed by some 3,500 employees, but was often operating with half that number or fewer. One of the consequences was that the CPA was constantly scrambling for bodies, and one of the consequences of that was a certain lack of experience in critical areas of administration.
He mentioned in passing a Washington Post article regarding some young CPA recruits who got their jobs via email without ever having applied for them, and wound up administering the money the CPA was trying to spend in Iraq. Even at this late date, the Post article warrants a read; it is astounding, in its content and in that it wasn’t followed by a blizzard of stories about the CPA and its somewhat haphazard approach to governance. The article is headlined, “In Iraq, the Job Opportunity of a Lifetime: Managing a $13 Billion Budget With No Experience.”
That was the detail that caught Galbraith’s eye.
When the U.S. government went looking for people to help rebuild Iraq, they had responded to the call. They supported the war effort and President Bush. Many had strong Republican credentials. They were in their twenties or early thirties and had no foreign service experience. On that first day, Oct. 1, they knew so little about how things worked that they waited hours at the airport for a ride that was never coming. They finally discovered the shuttle bus out of the airport but got off at the wrong stop.Occupied Iraq was just as Simone Ledeen had imagined — ornate mosques, soldiers in formation, sand blowing everywhere, “just like on TV.” The 28-year-old daughter of neoconservative pundit Michael Ledeen and a recently minted MBA, she had arrived on a military transport plane with the others and was eager to get to work.
They had been hired to perform a low-level task: collecting and organizing statistics, surveys and wish lists from the Iraqi ministries for a report that would be presented to potential donors at the end of the month. But as suicide bombs and rocket attacks became almost daily occurrences, more and more senior staffers defected. In short order, six of the new young hires found themselves managing the country’s $13 billion budget, making decisions affecting millions of Iraqis.
And this is the detail that stunned him.
For months they wondered what they had in common, how their names had come to the attention of the Pentagon, until one day they figured it out: They had all posted their resumes at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank.
Even though I know full well what a horrid, bloody farce this adventure has been and continues to be, I still get hypnotized by people who behave as if there’s some question, or none at all, about whether or not things are going well enough that Bush* should be rehired for another four years. If this debacle had been reported well from the first, the number of people who approve of Bush*’s job performance could be counted by hand instead of estimated by percentage.
What reminded me of this was my little Michael Ledeen binge a couple of posts ago. I wonder if he was forwarding to his daughter any of the advice he got from the dead but still paranoid James Jesus Angleton.
