scout

“A Unified Mission Plan fo Post Hostilities Iraq.”
The first section cautioned against staying too long. The document went on to warn of potential civil disorder and noted that the “establishment of a secure environment is the highest priority military task.” But key parts of one of the document’s most important sections were noticeably blank. Section 8- the civil administration pillar- lacked a mission statement, a concept of operations, key objectives, or time lines. Those parts of the document were unfilled less then a week before American marines felled Saddam’s statue in Baghdad.
I’ve been reading "Imperial Life In The Emerald City" and I am in disbelief, which is saying quite a bit as a person who rates G.W. Bush as the worst President in American history. Bush planned to implement a culture in Iraq that reflected his vision of a society.
The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) ran Iraq’s government. It enacted laws, printed currency, collected taxes, deployed police, and spent oil revenues. The hiring of senior advisors in the CPA were settled by the highest levels of the White House and Pentagon. “The criterion for sending people over there was that they had to have the right political credentials”, said Frederick Smith. Smith said that O’Beirne once pointed to a young man’s resume and pronounced him an “ideal candidate”. The young man’s chief qualification was that he had worked for the Republican Party in Florida during the presidential election recount in 2000. In job interviews, two staffers said they were asked if they supported Roe vs. Wade and if they had voted for George W. Bush. “One former CPA employee who had an office near the White House liaison staff wrote an e-mail to a friend describing the recruitment process: “I watched resumes of immensely talented individuals who had sought out CPA to help he country thrown into the trash because their adherence to ‘the president’s vision for Iraq’ was ‘uncertain’. I saw senior civil servants from agencies like Treasury, Energy,…and Commerce denied advisory positions in Baghdad that were instead handed to prominent RNC contributors.”

I have examples of hires that are reminiscent of “Brownie”. You would think, that after such a catastrophe as what happened with Katrina, that Bush would have learned a valuable lesson, namely hire people who have experience in that field. Anyone interested in reading Bush’s hires for rebuilding Iraq?

scout

From Imperial Life in the Emerald City:
“The recruitment process worked fastest when there were no requirements other then political loyalty. When Bremer’s budget chief asked for “ten young gofers” to perform administrative tasks, O’ Beirne’s staff had a list at the ready.” The list included; Simone Ledeen, daughter of neoconservative commentator Michael Ledeen; Casey Wasson, recent grad. From an evangelical university for home schooled children; Todd Baldwin, a leg. Aid for Sen. Rick Santorium. They discovered once they arrived in Baghdad, that they had come to the Pentagon’s attention due to sending their résumé’s to the Heritage Foundation. Because of the personnel shortage in Baghdad, six of the golfers were assigned to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget, even though they had no previous financial management experience.
Jay Hallen was dissatisfied with his job at a real estate firm. He had not followed American stock markets, hadn’t studied economics or finance. “His brief fling as an entrepreneur-on stage. At Yale University, where he majored in political Science, he had appeared in a campus adaptation of Dr. Seuss’s ‘The Lorax’. Upon graduation, Hallen went to work for a private consultant company and sent his resume to the White House after a year and a half”. The day Hallen arrived in Baghdad, he met his new boss, Tom Foley. Foley told him he would be in charge of re-opening the stock exchange.
“When the trio met with a team of Germans to discuss how factories in the former East Germany had been privatized, the CPA team was told that the Germans had eight thousand people working on the project. ‘How many do you guys have?’ one of the Germans asked. ‘Your looking at all of them,’ Corliss responded. The Germans laughed and asked again, ‘No, how many people work for you?’ No, this is it. Three people. Don’t bother starting the German said.”
“Once the Americans arrived, the job of rehabilitating Iraq’ health care system fell to Frederick m. Burkle, Jr., a physician with a masters degree in public health and postgraduate degrees from Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and the University of California at Berkeley. Burkle was a naval reserve officer with two Bronze Stars and a deputy assistant administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development. He taught at John Hopkins School of Public Health, where he specialized in disaster-response issues. During the Gulf War he provided medical aid to Kurds in northern Iraq. He had worked in Kosovo and Somalia. He had been put in charge of organizing the American response to the expected public health crisis in Iraq. A USAID colleague called him the ‘single most talented and experienced post-conflict health specialist working for the United Stated Government.”
A week after Baghdad’s liberation he was replaced by James k. Havemann. A sixty-year old social worker. He had no medical degree, but had connections. Prior to his stint in government, he ran a large Christian adoption agency in Michigan that urged pregnant women not to have abortions. Comments?

PressCoverage

perhaps too much reading for the Bush lovers...

but i've been saying this forever... the man's hires are beyond comical, if not enraging... he consistently hires the exact OPPOSITE person for the assigned job almost every time... war related, or domestic...

A Fox News schlub Tony Snow as Press Secretary?

Henry Kissinger as Chairman of the 'independent' commission of inquiry into the 911 attacks on the US?

Christine Todd Whitman to head the EPA? This is a woman with a long history of siding with business/corporate interests who has reduced fines issued to industries, sewage plants and other facilities that discharge pollution into waterways some 70 percent.

Dr. W. David Hager to head up the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee? This is a practicing OB/GYN who describes himself as "pro-life" and refuses to prescribe contraceptives to unmarried women. Hager is the author of "As Jesus Cared for Women: Restoring Women Then and Now."

I mean, the list goes on and on and on...

It's actually frightening if you truly consider the entire body of people running making decisions for this country right now...

here's a comprehensive list of what i like to call "Bizarro Appointments"


"Strength through unity! Unity through Faith!!!"

scout

Bush's world is coming to an end. There are going to be investigations concerning all the mishandling of Iraq and he is going to pay. I don't believe he knows how bad the situation was/is in Iraq. Remember Katrina, when aids had to make him a video to show him reality. He did make some good appointments, but they didn't last. Paul O'Neil was good, fired. Kristine Whitmen was someone I have mixed feelings about. She is an old Republican who is fiscal responsible, thus did not get along with W. I always wondered why she made that dump a national treasure. Dr. Hager, has to be the joke of his appointments, with all due respect to Brownie. A gynecologist whose defense of raping and sodomizing his wife was; I can't feel the difference.

PressCoverage

well, i don't wanna see him executed, as that's just not something this country would ever do... plus, he's just a puppet in a lot of ways...

however, i would like to see him at least impeached, considering his lies have been far more damaging than Clinton's impeachment "reason"...

DarrylS

The wholel thing with Bremer is telling as to how George envisioned this conflict going, here is a businessman with little international experience and less military experience.. going into a very different culture often at odds with the military.. it was disasterous, and they got him out on a "Peter Principal" move, just to protect everyone.

Cannot believe that George, even though he was advised of all of the pitfalls, essentially ignored all of the intelligence and just went ahead. Said before and will say again, what this presidency lacks is differing views and respecting those views. Colin Powell, a man who I respect, was essentially pushed out of the way so that this adm could just forge on with his single minded focus.

He did this in FEMA, and to lesser extents in many of the other cabinet positions.. I has been told to me by a DC insider that one of the things going on now very subtly, that through regulatory processes, that many of our traditional protections are being dismantled. One day we will wake up to some kind of disaster, maybe a huge factory fire and find that the former processes that protected the workers through inspection and regulation no longer exist.

__________________
"Being the best doesn't mean you always win. It just means you win more than anyone else".. tweet from Kurt Warner to Tom Brady.

Real World

Huh? Care to elaborate on this?

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"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him."
Leo Tolstoy, 1897

italia44

Soon Iraq will be free to decide what kind of goverment they wish to have,Afghanistan has it now,
we haven't been attacked since 9/11/.2001.
The problems the leftist loons on this site have is with
democracy,as in pro...........they detest it more than life itself.......self government is anathema to them,they MUST be in control of our lives,if not,all
the polemics spouted by their "heroes"......Marx,Stalin,Pol Pot,et al were for naught.

They're obsessed with the fact that we are not only
a democracy,but more important,we are the last
REPUBLIC.That is a goverment of the people,by the people,and for the people.
Liberals can't stand this....and will do anything to bring this type of goverment down.

George Bush will go down in history as the "Saviour" of the Republic.....and I thank God,that we have the will and the GUNS,to protect America
from the lunatic liberals,who wish for a totalitarian
utopia.

PressCoverage

George Bush will just go down in history...

When you're done straw manning the left's argument out of thin air, and telling us all what we must believe, come join us in reality.... We'll all be here waiting for you...

It's interesting that Bunkerites like this loon can only see the world in black and white... i.e.: Capitalism and Communism... and anyone who's not "yay Reagan" simply must be a communist.... because they can't possibly get their head around the fact that even moderates are distancing themselves from the wacko "we've-never-done-anything-wrong" Bunkerites... like this guy...

scout

The problem with a lot of people who rant about the left, the liberals, the anti-Republican faction, is that they tend to ignore the destruction and lawlessness of the current administration. Contrary to what you think, they do not care about the Iraqi's. I can deliver you qoutes from the Iraq decision makers on not caring about the people of Iraq and the international laws being broken for the sake of U.S. interests ($). The United States has become less of a Democracy under George Bush, so when you go on about "we the people" it loses its impact. I don't think any of this will change your mind, as there are still people out there that think W's face will be put on Mt. Rushmore when all is said and done. In the next year and a half, Bush is going to have to answer to a lot of questions and it wouldn't surprise me if he doesn't fullfill his second term. There are dozens of books published by very credible authors revealing this lunatic fringe, this lunatic fringe is to the right. On the other hand, this lunatic fringe that you talk about is the vast majority of Americans.