So we have one

So we have one more Bushie giving up the (loyalism) ghost and spilling the beans: the CPA was run by a bunch of inexperienced partisan operatives, chosen for their party-linism rather than any experience with what they’d be doing in Iraq. And they — through incompetence or their lust for a piece of the pie — let the reconstruction of Iraq get overrun by all manner of corruption large and small.

You can read this piece in Newsweek to get Andrew Natsios’ take on what happened. He was head of USAID at the time.

And in rebuttal, Newsweek got this comment from Dan Senor, the fellow who typified what the CPA became …

I’m not familiar with the traditional USAID program that was recommended. If it was traditional and conventional, it may have made sense for the reconstruction of Switzerland. But it sounds like it was completely irrelevant to the facts and conditions on the ground that we found in Iraq. [The CPA] recruited some of the top career Foreign Service officers from the State Department to serve in the CPA’s management roles. We would have welcomed suggestions—from Andrew or anyone else—of who would have been better experienced.

The arrogance and ignorance and obliviousness to the colossal failure he helped manage just defy able prose.

Here’s how I summed up Senor’s qualifications for his job as Bremer’s deputy a couple years ago …

Before attending Harvard Business School from 1999 to 2001, Senor was a staffer for then-Sen. Spencer Abraham of Michigan. After receiving his MBA, he went to the Carlyle Group, where he was a venture capitalist from 2001 to 2003. Senor left Carlyle in 2003 for a brief stint as White House Press Secretary Scott McLellan’s deputy before shipping off to Iraq. Though he showed up in Iraq as a junior press handler, Senor is now Bremer’s senior advisor and for most of last summer he was in charge of organizing Iraq’s post-Saddam media, an effort which most have rated as little short of a disaster.

Reconstruction for Switzerland. This pretty much encapsulizes the mentality.

It apparently hasn’t occurred yet to this bozo that post-war reconstruction efforts generally happen in countries which have just experienced a war. Apparently, everything in Iraq was entirely unique.

In this case, in dissing his critics, Senor confirms their darkest allegations. He still thinks Iraq was sui generis. Working with experts on post-war reconstuction was no more than pissing away time and expense on a tribe of effete paper-pushers. He’s unperturbed and oblivious to the fact that the product of his cocky assuredness has descended into blood and fire.