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Tuesday, January 24, 2006

And yet more Bush Administration incompetence
Posted by Jill | 6:59 AM

George W. Bush is like any other spoiled brat -- he'll come along and knock over another kid's Lego city, then leave the mess on the floor for someone else to clean up.

The Administration's so-called Iraq reconstruction effort is a total botch-job:

The first official history of the $25 billion American reconstruction effort in Iraq depicts a program hobbled from the outset by gross understaffing, a lack of technical expertise, bureaucratic infighting, secrecy and constantly increasing security costs, according to a preliminary draft.

[snip]

In the document, the paralyzing effect of staffing shortfalls and contracting battles between the State Department and the Pentagon, creating delays of months at a stretch, are described for the first time from inside the program.

The document also recounts concerns about writing contracts for an entity with the "ambiguous legal status" of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the question of whether it was an American entity or a multinational one like NATO.

Seemingly odd decisions on dividing the responsibility for various sectors of the reconstruction crop up repeatedly in the document. At one point, a planning team made the decision to put all reconstruction activities in Iraq under the Army Corps of Engineers, except anything to do with water, which would go to the Navy. At the time, a retired admiral, David Nash, was in charge of the rebuilding.

"It almost looks like a spoils system between various agencies," said Steve Ellis, a vice president and an authority on the Army corps at Taxpayers for Common Sense, an organization in Washington, who read a copy of the document. "You had various fiefdoms established in the contracting process."


This is what happens when an effort like this is specifically designed to fatten the wallets of Administration cronies, rather than to actually rebuild the country we destroyed.

Now can anyone name ONE THING this bunch has gotten right?
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