The Great Iraq Swindle: How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury (from Rolling Stone)

In a much-ballyhooed example of favor­it­ism, the White House ori­gin­ally installed a clown named Jim O’Beirne at the rel­ev­ant eval­u­ation desk in the Department of Defense. O’Beirne proved to be a clas­sic Bush vil­lain, a mor­on’s mor­on who judged applic­ants not on their Arabic skills or their rel­ev­ant expert­ise but on their Republican bona fides; he sent a twenty-four-year-old who had nev­er worked in fin­ance to man­age the reopen­ing of the Iraqi stock exchange, and appoin­ted a recent gradu­ate of an evan­gel­ic­al uni­ver­sity for home-schooled kids who had no account­ing exper­i­ence to man­age Iraq’s $13 bil­lion budget. James K. Haveman, who had served as Michigan’s community-health dir­ect­or under a GOP gov­ernor, was put in charge of rehab­il­it­at­ing Iraq’s health-care sys­tem and decided that what this war-ravaged, mal­nour­ished, sanitation-deficient coun­try most urgently needed was … an anti-smoking campaign.