When we were teenagers, my sister and I used to discuss how the people around you affect how you look. She was very short, and a little ‘plump’ and seemed to have girlfriends that were tall and skinny. I pointed out (just being argumentative, I was the older sister by a couple of years), that instead of wearing 6 inch platforms, she should get shorter and fatter friends, so she’d look taller and thinner.
Looks like Dubyah (I love Molly Ivins) never grew out of that belief.
It is a very common adage that we better ourselves by surrounding ourselves with smart people. Take for example a recent graduation address [1] at Whitman College, a very small college near Spokane. The address by Dr. Balof, included a quote variously attributed to many. The quote is:
If you’re dumb, surround yourself with smart people. If you’re smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you.
Dubyah hasn’t done that. He didn’t hire the best and brightest he could find to help him govern. Instead he surrounded himself with buddies, regardless of their ability or experience.
I can’t write it any better than the report done by Frontline, so I won’t even try. Here’s what that report [2] said:
What happened was that the hiring was done by the White House liaison to the Pentagon, an office of the Pentagon political appointee. This office served as the gatekeeper. Instead of casting out widely for people with knowledge of Arabic, knowledge of the Middle East, knowledge of post-conflict reconstruction, they went after the political loyalists and canvassed the offices of Republic congressmen, conservative think tanks and other places where they knew they would find people who would be unfailingly loyal to the president and to the president’s mission in Iraq. …
The hiring process involved questions that would have landed a private-sector employer in jail. They asked people what their views on Roe v. Wade were, whether they believed in capital punishment. A man of Middle Eastern descent was asked whether he was Muslim or Christian. People were asked who they voted for for president. …
So you wind up getting people like John Agresto to go run Iraq’s higher education system instead of getting somebody who had, let’s say, run a very large public university system. He was a former president of a small college in Santa Fe, N.M., with 500 students. But he had connections. He served on the National Endowment for the Humanities with Lynne Cheney; Joyce Rumsfeld sat on his board of directors at St. John’s College.
For [Iraq’s] primary and secondary education, [they] brought in a guy from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a very conservative think tank, who had written extensively on the need for school vouchers. This is not a guy who has any experience in rebuilding school systems in the Middle East.
We’ve talked about Jim Haveman, the guy from Michigan who had very little experience in public health, being brought over to rebuild Iraq’s health care system. And the list goes on — a bunch of political appointees with very little practical experience.
Grumpypilgrim just asked [3] when Dubyah was planning to create stability. That wasn’t going to be an easy job, and surrounding himself with yes men and old cronies made it impossible.
There is no fix now. We can’t undo the damage we’ve done. We can’t bring thousands upon thousands of Iraqis back to life. We can only hope to stem the tide of problems we instigated, and if Dubyah doesn’t change his method of choosing advisors, it isn’t going to happen in the next two years.
I’m not holding my breath.
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