We’ve known for several years that the Bush administration’s criminal negligence in creating and overseeing the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq from April 2003 to June 2004, is as painful a story as any told about Bush’s presidency. And yet, new head-shaking details keep emerging that makes one wonder how, exactly, these guys could be so spectacularly stupid.
The Washington Post ran a stunning, must-read item on yesterday’s front page from Rajiv Chandrasekaran, excerpted from his new book, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City.” In particular, Chandrasekaran explained 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 right-wing 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.”
Again, some of this we’ve heard before, but perhaps not quite with this level of detail. Nevertheless, the story is, once more, a breathtaking example of the administration’s incompetence, recklessness, stupidity, and willingness to put politics above literally every other possible concern.
Digby captured the politics of all of this perfectly:
The Republicans are telling us that they should be re-elected because the Democrats aren’t serious about national security and only they can be trusted to keep the terrorists from killing us in our beds.
But the way the administration went about creating the CPA illustrates everything you need to know about the childlike sciolism of these so-called grown-ups. They insisted on invading a well contained country of 25 million people, ripped its society to shreds, and then put a bunch of low level cronies and inexperienced schoolkids in charge of creating a Club for Growth wet dream in the desert. And they spent billions and billions of dollars failing to do anything but lay the groundwork for civil war. I don’t know if it’s possible to screw up on a grander scale than that.
The fact that the administration, to this day, characterizes itself as reliable and trustworthy on the future of Iraq is perhaps the most absurd joke I have ever heard.