The RNC Branch Office on the Tigris
As long-time readers of Whiskey Bar may recall, that was my pet nickname for the Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA -- the unloved, unwanted, unmourned and completely unsuccessful agency assigned the job of running Iraq after the 2003 invasion.
My own personal favorite fuck up was when the CPA couldn't even get its own name right on its own web site, and thus informed the world that it was the Coalition Provincial Authority -- no doubt to demonstrate its intention to turn Iraq into the Canada of the Middle East. But that was an example of ruthless Prussian efficiency compared to the CPA's performance of its other responsibilities, such as fixing the power grid, getting the oil flowing, rebuilding the health care system, etc. etc. etc. Aside from the Pentagon, no single entity did more to give us the Iraq we know today. And they'd better hope God has mercy on their souls. I know I wouldn't.
The reasons for the CPA's FEMA-like failures were both polymorphous and perverse, but the biggest problem (not counting the complete lack of pre-war planning, the petty bureacratic squabbles between Defense and State, the utter cluelessness of Doug Feith and Donald Rumsfeld, and the sheer absurdity of trying to govern Iraq with a few thousand Americans, most of whom didn't speak Arabic and couldn't have found Baghdad on a map before they arrived -- and in some cases even after they did) was the Cheney Administration's deliberate decision to fill the CPA's ranks almost entirely with GOP party workers, campaign donors, hack politicians, think tank interns and assorted relatives of neocon VIPs, like Michael Ledeen's daughter. Thus the nickname...
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