We learned a couple of weeks ago that the Bush administration is in the midst of building the biggest, most expensive embassy on earth, right in the heart of Baghdad. It’s slated to be a 104-acre compound — roughly 80 football fields — that will be one of the few major projects the administration has undertaken in Iraq that is on schedule and within budget.
But there’s a catch. It doesn’t matter how colossal an embassy is if you can’t fill it with quality employees.
Ryan C. Crocker, the new U.S. ambassador to Iraq, bluntly told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in a cable dated May 31 that the embassy in Baghdad — the largest and most expensive U.S. embassy — lacks enough well-qualified staff members and that its security rules are too restrictive for Foreign Service officers to do their jobs.
“Simply put, we cannot do the nation’s most important work if we do not have the Department’s best people,” Crocker said in the memo. […]
“He’s panicking,” said one government official who recently returned from Baghdad, adding that Crocker is carrying a heavy workload as the United States presses the Iraqi government to meet political benchmarks.
That same official told the WaPo that too many staffers assigned to the embassy are “too young for the job,” or are not qualified.
As awful as this is, let’s not forget that the Bush gang set this dynamic up on purpose. They insisted on having a team of young and unqualified far-right activists treat Iraq like a Heritage Foundation Camp. They, predictably, screwed up royally, and now Crocker is wondering why experienced experts are hesitant to fly into a civil war to clean up the mess.
Yeah, it’s quite a mystery.
It’s been a while, but I still believe one of the more breathtaking reports in recent memory came from Rajiv Chandrasekaran last September on how the Bush gang chose Americans to fill key government posts in Iraq.
After the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government in April 2003, the opportunity to participate in the U.S.-led effort to reconstruct Iraq attracted all manner of Americans — restless professionals, Arabic-speaking academics, development specialists and war-zone adventurers. But before they could go to Baghdad, they had to get past Jim O’Beirne’s office in the Pentagon.
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.
O’Beirne, married to prominent far-right commentator Kate O’Beirne, sought resumes from the offices of Republican congressmen, conservative think tanks, and GOP activists. Though this may seem like a bad joke, O’Beirne intentionally discarded applications from the most qualified people — those with Arabic language skills and/or postwar rebuilding experience, for example — when he decided they may not be ideological enough. O’Beirne labeled one applicant “an ideal candidate” because he’d worked on the Bush recount in Florida in 2000.
The result was predictably ridiculous. As Chandrasekaran explained, “A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance — but had applied for a White House job — was sent to reopen Baghdad’s stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget, even though they didn’t have a background in accounting.”
Of course, these ideologues did exactly what they were expected to do.
Many of the basic tasks Americans struggle to accomplish today in Iraq — training the army, vetting the police, increasing electricity generation — could have been performed far more effectively in 2003 by the CPA.
But many CPA staff members were more interested in other things: in instituting a flat tax, in selling off government assets, in ending food rations and otherwise fashioning a new nation that looked a lot like the United States. Many of them spent their days cloistered in the Green Zone, a walled-off enclave in central Baghdad with towering palms, posh villas, well-stocked bars and resort-size swimming pools.
Eventually, the CPA’s headquarters in Hussein’s marble-walled former Republican Palace began to resemble a campaign headquarters. Bush-praising bumper-stickers and mouse pads abound, and “Bush-Cheney 2004” T-shirts were the most common pieces of clothing. “I’m not here for the Iraqis,” one staffer noted to a reporter over lunch. “I’m here for George Bush.”
This is a) another example of why one should hesitate when Republicans insist that they deserve to be taken seriously on foreign policy; and b) a classic example of “you reap what you sow.”