http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003525603_iraqpolicy15.html Timothy Carney went to Baghdad in April 2003 to run Iraq's Ministry of Industry and Minerals. Unlike many of his compatriots in the Green Zone, the rangy, retired U.S. ambassador wasn't fazed by chaos.
He'd been in Saigon during the Tet Offensive, Phnom Penh as it was falling to the Khmer Rouge, and Mogadishu in the throes of Somalia's civil war. He disregarded security edicts and drove around Baghdad without a military escort. His mission, as he put it, "was to listen to the Iraqis and work with them."
He left after two months, disgusted and disillusioned. The U.S. occupation administration in Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), had placed ideology over pragmatism, he believed. His boss, Paul Bremer, refused to pay for repairs needed to reopen many looted state-owned factories, even though they had employed tens of thousands of Iraqis. Carney spent his days screening workers for ties to the Baath party. "Planning was bad," he wrote in his diary May 8, "but implementation is worse."
When he returned to Washington, D.C., he made little secret of his views. They were so scathing that his wife lost a government contract. He figured his days of working on Iraq were over, until Tuesday, when David Satterfield, the State Department's Iraq coordinator, asked Carney if he'd be willing to go back to Baghdad as the coordinator of the reconstruction effort
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While I am glad that it seems someone might finally be thinking about making things work, this article just strikes me as more evidence of the incompetence, in 1984 Orewellian doublethink talk. Perhaps I am just too jaded.
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