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September 01, 2003
CPA-I: Iraq and Responsibility
A small discussion in this past Thursday's entry regarding Iraq and responsibility for the current mess that is reconstruction. (See http://www.livejournal.com/users/collounsbury/28405.html )
As the question arose who to blame in regards to some acerbic comment of mine in regards to the CPA-I, perhaps a small explanation is useful.
Back in June when I first began to have serious dealings with these clowns, I was rather more willing to cut slack - and indeed pin the blame on the people in Washington (whose ideological blindness is indeed a major component of the problems.
However, the people on the ground are also part of the problem. First, they should be kicking and screaming for resources - not writing idiotic letters and presentations trynig to claim things are not "that bad." Of course not every part of Iraq every day is going to be all out warfare, however the levels of insecurity etc in fact do prevent normality from returning, and underneath the surface which the foreigner sees passing through much more is going on.
Further to the core issue, competence of the CPA-I staff, there are too many military jar-heads. Many of them are fine people but they have no clue as to what they are doing, or only a vague clue. Take for example the fellow in charge of the the Iraqi Securities Dealers: he wants to simply transate the NASD rules and regs and apply them. Frankly, this kind of translate and apply bullshit is a direct route to failure. The institutional and social capacities and habits that make a NASD type system work (and presume by the way a different legal tradition) are not present in Iraq.
There needs to be some understanding of that. However the DoD people just do not get it.
In my considered opinion we need a very large housecleaning to ge the CPA-I functional, stripping the military people of non-military functions and getting economic and political specialists used to dealing with a different cultural environment in place, otherwise we are simply setting up another failure.
Posted by The Lounsbury at September 1, 2003 11:30 AM
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Jan-Dec 2003
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