Who's who in Baghdad

Washington Monthly, Dec, 2003 by Joshua Micah Marshall, Laura Rozen, Colin Soloway

Each of the three has education policy credentials. But one searches their resumes in vain for any evidence of the sort of expertise that would suit them to rebuild an educational system in an Arab country in the aftermath of war, a decade of sanctions, and two generations of totalitarian rule.

To date, Evers and his team have resisted the urgings of their colleagues back in Washington to foist on Iraq vouchers and other schemes conservatives have thus far failed to get enacted in the United States. But critics say that even the much-hyped successes getting schools refurbished and reopened may not stand up to scrutiny. The White House routinely trumpets the fact that 1,595 of Iraq's 10,000 schools have already been rehabilitated. But when Newsweek reporters visited five of those schools in October, they found each one trashstrewn, poorly supplied, and mostly a wreck.

More such "help" may be on the way in the person of Rich Galen, veteran GOP-spin meister, former spokesman for Vice President Dan Quayle and onetime head of Newt Gingrich's GOPAC. In late October, Galen received the call to serve his country in Iraq as yet another of Bremer's Senior Advisors. His gig? Adding more artillery to the Iraq War spin operation. "My job," Galen told The New York Post before shipping off, "will be to help reporters on the ground find interesting stories that they can use. If there's a civil-affairs unit out of Manhattan that rebuilt a school, it might be of interest to Channel 5 but not to a network."

CPA officials say that the older GOP functionaries do a reasonable job keeping their partisanship publicly under wraps. But the younger Republicans in Iraq spend much of their time plotting against the Democrats. "Everything is seen in the context of the election, and how they will screw the Democrats," said one CPA official. "It was really pretty shocking to hear them talk"

"They are all on the campaign trail," said another official. "They see this as a stepping stone to a better job in the next Bush administration."

"I don't always know if they are Republicans," said yet another senior CPAer. "But what is clear is that they know nothing about development, and nothing about transitional economies." They're trying to do the right thing, this official adds, "but they do what they do without any knowledge of how the post-war world works in reality. They come up with harebrained schemes that cause so many problems they take more time to fix than to create."

It's also driven journalists on the ground, watching these operatives move in and out of Saddam's marble Republican Palace, which CPA commandeered as its headquarters, to joke: "They don't call it the Republican Palace for nothing."

Joshua Micah Marshall is a Washington Monthly contributing writer and author of Talking points memo.com. Laura Rozen is a national security writer in Washington, D.C. Colin Soloway is a contributing editor of Newsweek.