From a NY Times review of a PBS documentary on the Bush administrations preparations for post-war Iraq:

Certainly some of the staff members seemed a bit underqualified. Colonel Hammes recalls that the person given the job of planning for prisons and police was 25 and that this was his first job after college. He didn’t worry about having a staff of only four, the young appointee said, because they were all his fraternity brothers. Colonel Hammes describes the overall effort as “heroic amateurism.”

That description is one of the nicer things anyone in this film has to say.

Via Cato’s Jerry Taylor, who writes:

This is jaw dropping stuff. If I were a Congressman and this information had crossed my desk back in 2003, I would have submitted articles of impeachment of President Bush right then and there. This is criminal negligence and incompetence so amazing that words can’t do the matter justice.

Taylor, incidentally, initially supported the war.

Ah, but wait. There’s more. From the Washington Post:

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 .

Many of those chosen by O’Beirne’s office to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq’s government from April 2003 to June 2004, lacked vital skills and experience. 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.

[...]

Twenty-four-year-old Jay Hallen was restless. He had graduated from Yale two years earlier, and he didn’t much like his job at a commercial real-estate firm. His passion was the Middle East, and although he had never been there, he was intrigued enough to take Arabic classes and read histories of the region in his spare time.

He had mixed feelings about the war in Iraq, but he viewed the American occupation as a ripe opportunity. In the summer of 2003, he sent an e-mail to Reuben Jeffrey III, whom he had met when applying for a White House job a year earlier. Hallen had a simple query for Jeffrey, who was working as an adviser to Bremer: Might there be any job openings in Baghdad?

[...]

Three weeks later, Hallen got a call from the Pentagon. The CPA wanted him in Baghdad. Pronto. Could he be ready in three to four weeks?

The day he arrived in Baghdad, he met with Thomas C. Foley, the CPA official in charge of privatizing state-owned enterprises. (Foley, a major Republican Party donor, went to Harvard Business School with President Bush.) Hallen was shocked to learn that Foley wanted him to take charge of reopening the stock exchange.

“Are you sure?” Hallen said to Foley. “I don’t have a finance background.”

It’s fine, Foley replied.

Bother. Sounds to me like a party that’s not quite “ready to govern.” And that, um, would be this country. Never mind someone else’s.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 23rd, 2006 at 12:53 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.