I don’t really believe that “incompetence” — as opposed to the invasion being a fundamentally unsound idea — has been the source of our problems in Iraq, but if it’s evidence of incompetence and bungled you want, this New York Times article about Iraq’s police has it in spades. Bernard Kerik tells us he was given ten days notice and no guidance before being sent to Iraq to head up the creation of a police force. “Looking back, I really don’t know what their plan was,” Kerik says, and he apparently ‘prepared’ for the job by watching shows about Saddam on A&E.
And of course why was Kerik given the job in the first place? Even if you want to be give maximum credit to the Giuliani administration for reducing New York City’s crime level, Kerik obviously wasn’t the key figure there. And even if you do somehow want to give Kerik credit for the whole thing, this experience had literally nothing to do with the job at hand. Most people, of course, have no experience whatsoever with training and building foreign police forces. But some people do! This wasn’t a task that had never been attempted before, the administration just decided to go with a crowd-pleasing, headline-making pick rather than doing something boring like finding someone who might have some idea of how to do the job.