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By September 8, 2007One Comment

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.

One Comment

  • james Showers says:

    Dear Dan,If the spe­cif­ic examples of these appoint­ments are true – I am still fur­ther aston­ished at the gull­ib­il­ity of the American people. I know it’s not all Americans. But is it that the sup­port­ers of this administa­tion (and this ‘cul­ture’) are blinded? And if so, by what? Religion, pat­ri­ot­ism, dynasty-worship, a hope for a slice of the fat cake, too many irra­di­ated burgers?
    In Europe we simply do not under­stand such blind­ness, and think of you’all as stu­pid – which is only partly true, I feel; is it that Mom and apple pie val­ues extend to all author­ity, perhaps?
    From this side of the issue, the self serving, cor­rupt­ing and amor­al actions of your gov­ern­ment are a dis­aster for a civ­il­ised world.
    And so we are guilty of writ­ing off (by being unable to under­stand) a people whose heart is in the right place, but whose spokespeople have almost no abil­ity to think about or under­stand a world out­side the USA.
    It must be pain­ful for you to see the issues and know they con­tin­ue unchecked, main­at­in­ing America’s pos­i­tion as the most hated nation in the world since Nazi Germany.
    There was a won­der­ful New Yorker car­toon years ago of a whole line of cars pulling off the high­way to go to a fast food res­tu­ar­ant called ‘Burger on a String’. In the park­ing lot the punters are all quite bewildered by the pat­ties and rel­ishes and pickles drop­ping out of their string-suspended bur­gers onto the tar­mac. That says it all about US mass culture.
    Keep say­ing no, my friend. I like what you are doing. You can­not be alone over ther.

    Warm good wishes

    James