The New Road

Party Over Competency

I'm reading Imperial Life In The Emerald City, about the Green Zone in Iraq, and by extension the history of the occupation. It's excellent and a highly recommend it. But it does get repetitive in spots because the administration kept making the same mistakes over and over again.

When we took over one of the things we did was put people in place at the ministries to get them off the ground and working again. Important ministries, like energy, needed a lot of help to get back to operating at pre-war levels. And they had a big impact on life for the ordinary Iraqi.

So who did we put in there? Originally we found a guy with great experience in the field who had run big agencies before. Clearly the right man, with the right skills for the job. He was found by the provisional authority in Iraq. But when the administration found out he was getting hired they stopped it. Why? Because the guy wasn't a party loyalist. He hadn't voted Republican. Instead they put in someone with no experience who had the right party connections.

It's like Russia during the Communist era. It's party loyalty over competence every time.

This happened over and over again. And the litmus test didn't stop with your party loyalty. When they were screening people they questioned who you voted for, your position on abortion, stem cells, etc. etc. Anything but about the job you were actually sent to do.

One guy, placed in charge of the banking ministry, had no experience at all in banking. He had however, played the part of an entrepreneur in a college production. That's good enough? Right? In charge of the ministry of banking, with no experience.

Every important position was fill with incompetent cronies through this process. And that directly effected our ability to stabilize the situation, during the critical phase right after the war when the Iraqis seemed positive about how the country might recover, and when we had an opportunity to turn the situation around.

It also goes beyond Iraq. Think about the story behind the story when it comes to the Attorney General's scandal. Who are the intermediate level folks involved in the scandal? Know-nothing cronies? Who is Kyle Sampson and why is he chief of staff for the Attorney General. He is a nobody who just happened to have the right credentials. And Monica Goodling? She went to a third-rate college for her degree. So how did she manage to get into her power position? Because the college just happened to be a Christian college that specializes in placing people in the administration. Lovely.