[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 117 (Tuesday, September 19, 2006)]
[House]
[Pages H6706-H6708]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                IRAQ WAR

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McDERMOTT. Madam Speaker, the Iraq war is doing badly, and the 
President would like the American people to think about something else. 
With less than 2 months until the mid-term elections, the Republicans 
suddenly fear the democracy they claim to be spreading.
  A commentary in today's Asia Times sums it up. The article is 
entitled,

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``Iraq, Trying to Spin the Unspinnable.''
  Let me briefly quote from it:
  ``The power of spin is not infinite; however, as the administration 
is now discovering, bad news has cascaded out of Iraq at such an 
astonishing pace that it defies credulity to suggest that the war has 
not drastically worsened the lives of Iraqis.''
  American soldiers have been fighting and dying in Iraq for years to 
prop up the same flawed and failed policy by the President who cannot 
win the war, cannot win the peace, and cannot lead the United States 
out of harm's way.
  The President says stay the course, and Republicans in the Congress 
refuse to say or do anything independent of the President. No 
oversight, just blind allegiance. The number of U.S. soldiers killed in 
Iraq stands at 2,678. Every day in Iraq, on average of two more 
soldiers die. The number of U.S. soldiers injured in Iraq recently 
passed another grim statistic, 20,000 physical injuries. Every day in 
Iraq, 19 U.S. soldiers on average are injured as they try to survive in 
the middle of a civil war. And we have not yet begun to count the 
number of U.S. psychological casualties, the soldiers with PTSD. That 
could be another 20,000 to 30,000 from PTSD alone.
  But nothing will change as long as the President has a Republican 
Congress rubber-stamping his vision. Even Iraqi leaders and parliament 
get it. Just yesterday, Abdel al-Anisi, a member of the largest party 
in Maliki's government said, ``We have to determine the nature of our 
relationship with the Multinational Forces in Iraq, which is to support 
the role of the government, not to take over its role.''
  We are seen as occupiers in Iraq trying to control their oil and 
trying to dictate their policies, and our presence provokes more 
violence.
  The President would like you to believe that terrorism is a new 
threat in a new century. The only new thing about the latest threat is 
how the President has mismanaged our response. Had Republicans in 
Congress provided any Iraq oversight, the truth would have emerged and 
we would have changed the course.
  But the Republican congressional leaders demand acquiescence by their 
members, so the President's flawed war just keeps getting worse.
  Throughout history, nations in the East and nations in the West have 
faced the threat of terrorism. A new book entitled, ``What Terrorists 
Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat,'' by Louise 
Richardson, ought to be required reading for Republicans. The author 
analyzes history to show us that terrorists want three Rs: revenge, 
renown, and reaction. She doesn't stop there. The second half of the 
book is called ``The Counter-Terrorists.''
  Armed with understanding, not rhetoric, not ideology, the author 
provides insights into successfully dealing with the terrorists. If 
only our President would listen. If only Republicans in Congress would 
demand the President stop the rhetoric and face the reality. But that 
can't happen as long as the special interests receive special treatment 
by the Republicans.
  Another new book, ``Imperial Life in the Emerald City,'' by a 
Washington Post reporter, offers a sobering assessment of the extent to 
which favors meant more than credentials in Iraq.
  I submit for printing in the Record a story published yesterday in 
the Christian Science Monitor entitled, ``Mistakes Made by U.S. in 
Staffing Iraq? The new book alleges it wasn't what but who you knew 
that determined who got the key jobs.''
  As the newspaper story recounts, before anyone could go to Iraq, they 
were vetted by a Republican political appointee and his staff in the 
Pentagon who, quoted here, posed blunt questions to some candidates 
about domestic politics: Did you vote for George Bush in 2000? Do you 
support the way the President is fighting the war on terror? Two people 
who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation said they were even asked 
about Rowe v. Wade. The President sent a 24-year-old over there to open 
the stock market. That is how the President is running the Iraq war.
  The congressional Republicans are doing just as they are ordered. 
Over the next 7 weeks, the Republicans will offer the American people 
endless rhetoric. But that will only produce endless casualties until 
we replace a Republican Congress that merely takes orders. We have to 
have a Democratic Congress that is willing to provide oversight on what 
this President is doing. Election is about 50 days away, Mr. President.

          [From the Christian Science Monitor, Sept. 19, 2006]

                 Mistakes Made by US in Staffing Iraq?


New book alleges it wasn't what, but who, you knew that determined key 
                                  jobs

                             (By Tom Regan)

       In the early days after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, many 
     Americans both inside and outside the government indicated a 
     desire to go to Iraq to help with the war effort. But a new 
     book by Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran, 
     ``Imperial Life in the Emerald City,'' argues that ties to 
     the Bush administration or to the Republican Party regularly 
     trumped years of experience or knowledge in a particular 
     field when key jobs were being assigned.
       The result, Mr. Chandrasekaran writes, is that under the 
     leadership of L. Paul Bremer, the first administrator of the 
     Coalition Provisional Authority, many inexperienced or 
     unqualified people were given key posts in the rebuilding of 
     Iraq, and often found themselves in situations they could not 
     handle.
       Before anyone could go to Baghdad, Chandrasekaran (who had 
     spent six months in Iraq before the war started in March 
     2003, and then was the Post's Baghdad bureau chief from April 
     2003 to October 2004) reports, they first had to go through 
     the office of Jim O'Beirne in the Pentagon.
       To pass muster with O'Beirne, a political appointee who 
     screens prospective political appointees for Defense 
     Department posts, applicants didn't need to be experts in the 
     Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed 
     most important was loyalty to the Bush administration.
       O'Beirne's staff posed blunt questions to some candidates 
     about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 
     2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the 
     war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the US 
     occupation authority said they were even asked their views on 
     Roe v. Wade.
       The result, Chandrasekaran says, was that officials in many 
     key areas, ``lacked vital skills and experience.'' Many 
     people involved in the effort to rebuild and stabilize Iraq 
     now see this decision making process as ``one of the Bush 
     administration's gravest errors.''
       ``We didn't tap--and it should have started from the White 
     House on down--just didn't tap the right people to do this 
     job,'' said Frederick Smith, who served as the deputy 
     director of the CPA's Washington office. ``It was a tough, 
     tough job. Instead we got people who went out there because 
     of their political leanings . . .''
       One former CPA employee who had an office near O'Beirne's 
     wrote an e-mail to a friend describing the recruitment 
     process: ``I watched resumes of immensely talented 
     individuals who had sought out CPA to help the country thrown 
     in the trash because their adherence to `the President's 
     vision for Iraq' (a frequently heard phrase at CPA) was 
     `uncertain.' I saw senior civil servants from agencies like 
     Treasury, Energy . . . and Commerce denied advisory positions 
     in Baghdad that were instead handed to prominent RNC 
     (Republican National Committee) contributors.''
       In a review of the book in The Washington Post, Moses Naim, 
     editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine, writes that while 
     common wisdom holds that ``the decision to invade Iraq and 
     topple Saddam Hussein is still open to debate, American 
     mismanagement of the country after the invasion is not.''
       What caused the massive collapse of common sense that 
     doomed the CPA and undermined the US gamble in Iraq? That is 
     the question that every page tacitly forces on the reader. 
     American ingenuity, pragmatism and practical approaches to 
     problem-solving are legendary. But Chandrasekaran shows that 
     what reigned in Iraq was massive incompetence, patently 
     unfeasible schemes, naive expectations and arrogance fueled 
     by ignorance. His book methodically documents the baffling 
     ineptitude that dominated US attempts to influence Iraq's 
     fiendish politics, rebuild the electrical grid, privatize the 
     economy, run the oil industry, recruit expert staff or 
     instill a modicum of normalcy to the lives of Iraqis. Nor are 
     the book's complaints Monday-morning quarterbacking. The 
     CPA's failings caused widespread grumbling at the time. 
     Chandrasekaran tells of a message board on which some Marines 
     had drawn a gravestone inscribed with the words ``COMMON 
     SENSE.'' The caption underneath it read: ``Killed by the 
     CPA.''
       But writer, blogger and Republican consultant Rich Galen, 
     who was in Baghdad around the same time as Chandrasekaran, 
     writes at the Townhall.org site that many of the portraits of 
     CPA officials and personnel in the book are ``appallingly 
     unfair.'' The obvious implication being, while coalition 
     military personnel were in constant danger of being injured 
     or killed by ambush or IED, the ``naive neocons'' of the CPA 
     were lounging about in perfect luxurious safety, eating dates 
     and pomegranates, sipping fine wines and taking an occasional 
     refreshing dip in the ``resort-sized swimming pool'' . . .
       The vast majority of CPA employees lived in trailers (two 
     people per half, shared bathroom, running water a pleasant 
     surprise), ate in the cafeteria (food by Kellogg, Brown & 
     Root a subsidiary of Halliburton); worked in crowded, dusty 
     outdated offices (even by

[[Page H6708]]

     Saddam standards); and went out into the Red Zone of Baghdad 
     to do their jobs each and every day.

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