Politics Trumped Competence When Selecting Staff to Rebuild Iraq

[Lemur]

Pannonian, you're about half-right on several fronts. Neither Bremer nor Garner could have done much of anything about looting -- civilian staffers sent the military lists of sites that should be protected. Nobody on the military side of things could ever say what heppened to those lists. And you can't blame it on not enough troops -- there were whoe companies without orders once Baghdad fell.

The ultimate truth is that there was contradictory planning, and none of it was firmed up at the executive level. The chaos on the streets goes right back to Rumsfeld and the Executive.

You also can't single-handedly blame Bremer for the psychic devastation of the Iraqi people. 35 years of a police state did more to kill initiative and punish the worthy than a couple of years' worth of bad decisions coming from the C.P.A.

The one thing you can fairly, squarely blame Bremer for is the demobilization of the Iraqi army. That was his call, and nobody upstairs contradicted him. We made hundreds of thousands of enemies we really, really didn't need when he gave that order.

[Xiahou]

The one thing you can fairly, squarely blame Bremer for is the demobilization of the Iraqi army. That was his call, and nobody upstairs contradicted him. We made hundreds of thousands of enemies we really, really didn't need when he gave that order.

That's something I was always mystified by. Even if the armed forces were unusable, I would think you'd still want to give them paychecks just so you could still have them sitting around and relatively happy instead of out joining the insurgency.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

My morning local radio jock was reading a column written in 9/02 by former secretary Webb -- now running against George Allen in VA -- in which Webb warned that the Bush Admin was completely unprepared for the aftermath of an attack on Iraq. His words seem prophetic now -- but clearly indicate that some in the administration were blinding themselves to the post-Sadam difficulties. This galls me.

[Pannonian]

Pannonian, you're about half-right on several fronts. Neither Bremer nor Garner could have done much of anything about looting -- civilian staffers sent the military lists of sites that should be protected. Nobody on the military side of things could ever say what heppened to those lists. And you can't blame it on not enough troops -- there were whoe companies without orders once Baghdad fell.

The ultimate truth is that there was contradictory planning, and none of it was firmed up at the executive level. The chaos on the streets goes right back to Rumsfeld and the Executive.

You also can't single-handedly blame Bremer for the psychic devastation of the Iraqi people. 35 years of a police state did more to kill initiative and punish the worthy than a couple of years' worth of bad decisions coming from the C.P.A.

The one thing you can fairly, squarely blame Bremer for is the demobilization of the Iraqi army. That was his call, and nobody upstairs contradicted him. We made hundreds of thousands of enemies we really, really didn't need when he gave that order.

It's not just the demobilisation of the Iraqi army. It's also the removal of the entire civil service that ran the country, removal of all restrictions and rules governing the economy, removal of all the social sinews that held the country together. It's like a rerun of the arguments put forward by the Whigs in the 18th century, except they never dared implement those ideas in their totality in Britain, and they didn't have the muscle to implement them abroad.

It's ironic that many conservatives support the Iraq venture because it was done by a nominally conservative party, when the ideas involved are hyper-liberalist. Freedom from restrictions, belief in the idea of progress, export of these ideals - classic liberalism.

[Lemur]

I've been fascinated by the total lack of fallout surrounding this story. No media outlets have picked it up, and it hasn't been mentioned on any televised media that I've been able to track. Some bloggers are chattering about it, and that's about it, with the exception of the National Review's ferocious defense of Jim O'Beirne, which is hardly surprising, since one of the supposed crony hires was the daughter of an NR staffer.

We hear about the liberal elite and their liberal media ad nauseam, so it's interesting to see a piece like this pass without a ripple. Perhaps the bureau chiefs decided that nobody could be bothered with examining events that transpired all of three years sgo. Who's got that sort of attention span?