North Arlington All Stars

Incompetence Watch

The Bush Administration continues to demonstrate the type of leadership and foresight that has become its hallmark. This lovely piece explores the mystery of who stole, er, what happened to all that money we sent to Iraq:

Only $13.7 billion of the $58 billion pledged and allocated worldwide to rebuild Iraq has been spent, with $10 billion more about to be spent. The biggest chunk of that money has been used to run Iraq's ministry operations. . . One of the biggest problems, Singer said, is that, while money has been pledged and allocated, not much has been spent. The GAO report shows that very little of the promised international funds — most of which are in loans — has been spent or can be tracked. The CPA's inspector general found the same thing. . . Both the GAO report and the CPA report said the CPA was seriously understaffed for the gargantuan task of rebuilding Iraq. The GAO report suggested the agency needed three times more employees than it had. The CPA report said the agency believed it had 1,196 employees, when it was authorized to have 2,117. But the inspector general said CPA's records were so disorganized that it couldn't verify its actual number of employees.

Lovely.

This is also cause for bellicose national rejoicing:

"They really didn't have a specific plan for what to do, case by case, if we lost," a senior Defence Department official was quoted as saying in the report. "The Justice Department didn't have a plan. State didn't have a plan.

"It's astounding to me that these cases have been pending for so long and nobody came up with a contingency plan."

Keep on rockin', Bush Boys!