Saturday, September 16, 2006

The blind leading the blind

Reason 1,567 why George W. Bush is a doofus who should never have been elected president.
This is truly astounding. Here is a story in the Washington Post explaining in part why things are such a mess today over in Iraq. It's because this administration valued ideology over competence when picking people to send to help rebuild Iraq.

...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.


It seems the most important consideration when picking people to rebuild Iraq was not whether they knew what they were doing and could get the job done, but whether they were loyal devotees of George W. Bush and fellow travelers in the right-wing conservative movement.

The decision to send the loyal and the willing instead of the best and the brightest is now regarded by many people involved in the 3 1/2 -year effort to stabilize and rebuild Iraq as one of the Bush administration's gravest errors. Many of those selected because of their political fidelity spent their time trying to impose a conservative agenda on the postwar occupation, which sidetracked more important reconstruction efforts and squandered goodwill among the Iraqi people, according to many people who participated in the reconstruction effort.

If you can stomach it, I would recommend reading the whole article. Why anyone would ever support anyone involved with this administration again is beyond me. It can only be explained by blind ideology or willful ignorance.

Launching this war in the first place was one of the worst, most-boneheaded decisions ever made by a U.S. president, but screwing up the occupation afterwards is probably a close second.

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