In September, Rajiv Chandrasekaran wrote what may be the most telling article about the Bush administration’s handling of reconstruction in Iraq to date. Chandrasekaran explained that after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government in April 2003, the Bush gang decided to put a bunch of right-wing ideologues in charge of rebuilding Iraq, while ignoring qualified, knowledgeable experts.
Applicants were asked whether they supported Roe v. Wade. 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, despite having no experience managing the finances of a large organization.
The disaster we see in Iraq now was cultivated by the ridiculous decisions the Bush gang made then. “We didn’t tap — and it should have started from the White House on down — just didn’t tap the right people to do this job,” said Frederick Smith, who served as the deputy director of the CPA’s Washington office. “It was a tough, tough job. Instead we got people who went out there because of their political leanings.”
After their colossal screw-up, the administration vowed to improve the process of finding more qualified personnel. But as Chandrasekaran explained today, that’s proven problematic as well.
In Diyala, the vast province northeast of Baghdad where Sunnis and Shiites are battling for primacy with mortars and nighttime abductions, the U.S. government has contracted the job of promoting democracy to a Pakistani citizen who has never lived or worked in a democracy.
The management of reconstruction projects in the province has been assigned to a Border Patrol commander with no reconstruction experience. The task of communicating with the embassy in Baghdad has been handed off to a man with no background in drafting diplomatic cables. The post of agriculture adviser has gone unfilled because the U.S. Department of Agriculture has provided just one of the six farming experts the State Department asked for a year ago.
“The people our government has sent to Iraq are all dedicated, well-meaning people, but are they really the right people — the best people — for the job?” asked Kiki Skagen Munshi, a retired U.S. Foreign Service officer who, until last month, headed the team in Diyala that included the Pakistani democracy educator and the Border Patrol commander. “If you can’t get experts, it’s really hard to do an expert job.”
You don’t say.
Almost four years after the United States set about trying to rebuild Iraq, the job remains overwhelmingly unfinished. The provincial reconstruction teams like those in Diyala are often understaffed and underqualified — and almost unable to work outside the military outposts where they are hunkered down for security reasons. Today, there are just 10 of the 30-person teams operating in all of Iraq.
President Bush proposed last month to double the number of teams, saying such civilians are central to American efforts to “pursue reconciliation, strengthen the moderates and speed the transition to Iraqi self-reliance.”
But the new plan is running into what Munshi and several officials familiar with their work described as the problems that have plagued the U.S. government effort from the start: Turf wars between federal agencies. Outright refusal to fill certain vital posts by some departments. A State Department in charge of the teams that just doesn’t have any agronomists, engineers, police officers or technicians of its own to send to Iraq. “No foreign service in the world has those people,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice complained.
The mind reels.