Kiddie Korps

One signature of the Justice Department meltdown is the number of giant mistakes by young, inexperienced, and lightly credentialed senior officials. There clearly was a pattern of choosing these people - Kyle Sampson, Monica Goodling, etc - on the basis of ideological purity or, more precisely, personal loyalty to Bush, rather than on competence. This is absolutely no surprise - we saw the same catastrophic pattern in the response to Hurricane Katrina, and, most gravely, in the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

At one level, the reason for this massive incompetence is obvious: George Bush. He is surely one of the dumbest and most dishonest inhabitants of the oval office ever. Somehow, though, that's not really quite enough of an explanation. How did he manage to attract, recruit, and appoint so many idiots to his cause? It's almost as if the man has some sort of "fifth force" attraction for stupidity and mendacity.

There are a lot of smart guys in the US Army. Most of them have been in Iraq. Somehow, though, those that rose to the top wound up being singularly unsuited to the job - especially Franks and Sanchez. Abazaid is no fool, but somehow he wound up having little useful control. Petraeus, the current US commander, is probably the best guy we've got, but there seems to be little chance that he can succeed.

Stupidity flows from the top. If the commander-in-chief is a fool who completely misunderstands the nature of the challenge that confronts him, and if in addition he is a lazy and unserious man who surrounds himself with sychophants, the best tactics on the ground are unlikely to save the situation.