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Economists for Dean
This week's New Yorker has an account of what went wrong in the post-war occupation of Iraq that is painful, but important to read. It doesn't break a lot of new ground in terms of the broad themes (e.g. ideological wishful thinking dominated pragmatic thinking), but the depth and the human dimension of the reporting is the best I've read. Unfortunately it looks like the New Yorker doesn't provide the article online.
One thing that made an impression on me, that hasn't been discussed much, is the extent to which there was just pure ineptitude due to government bureaucracy in the military.
Here's an excerpt (hand typed):
In Kuwait, Erdmann (part of ORHA) and some others felt so undirected that they began looking for tasks. Together they drew up a list of sixteen key sites around Baghdad that the military should secure and protect upon the fall of the city. At the top of the list was the Central Bank. No.2 was the Iraq Museum. "Symbolic importance," Erdmann explained. The Ministry of Oil was last."
On March 26th, the list went to the military war planners at Camp Doha, near the Iraq border. Two weeks later Baghdad fell and intense looting began. Erdamnn and the others went to camp Doha to find out what happened to their list. They met with a young British officer. "He's sitting there on the stool in front, in his British desert cammies," erdamnn recalled. "And he's like, 'Wll, you know, I just became aware of this big stack of stuff that you OHRA guys did yesterday.'" The list had fallen into a bureaucratic gap--and now Erdmann was wathcing on television as the Iraqi museum was looted and the ministries were burned.
One day during the war, Albert Cevallos, at the time a contractor with the United States Agency for International Development, was standing with a group of civil-affairs officers at the Iraq-Kuwait border. One officer asked him, "What's the plan for policing?"
Cevallos's job was in the field of human rights. "I thought you knew the plan," he said.
"No, we thought you knew."
"Haven't you talked to ORHA?"
"No, none talked to us."
Cevallos wanted to run away. "It was like a Laurel and Hardy routine," he said. "What happened to the plans? This is like the million-dollar question that I can't figure out."
While conservatives love to harp on the inefficiencies of government, there's actually an awful lot that the civilian government agencies do fairly well. People get social security and unemployment insurance checks on time and a host of other services at a fairly reasonable cost. Many agencies do well when measured by a metric such as outlays per federal employee compared to say, revenues per employee for corporations.
It seems like the real problem of big government is in the military.