D.C. flunks its reading test

Welp, let’s see whazzup in Iraq today . . . um-hmm, besides the Turks-&-Kurds rumbles I’ll post about separately, we’ve got a State Department accountability-moment, a look at Blackwater’s living conditions, a brand-new $38 million computer system that nobody missed when it went down for a month, and an attack policy that’s killing both Iraqi infants and U.S. cred. Yep, the headline here must be “World impressed with American know-how.”

Washington Poster Karen DeYoung has the skinny on the departure of Richard J. Griffin, the State Department’s Director of Diplomatic Security since June 2005, which confirms my surmise that

It was [John] Negroponte who carried to [Condoleezza] Rice the team’s recommendation — and his own — that Griffin be fired. Rice agreed and sent Negroponte to carry it out.

Now Griffin has until November 1 to clear out. According to DeYoung, his departure is “widely seen as a positive move within [DS],” where he arrived from the Secret Service then proved utterly unequal to supervising the huge increase in private contractors. But of course, Griffin is neither the only nor the highest sorry manager at State:

As she has concentrated on the Middle East peace process, Iran and Russia, Rice has increasingly turned major responsibility for hot-button issues — including North Korea, Pakistan and Iraq — over to Negroponte. He has taken the lead on management problems, such as the contractors, along with his longtime Foreign Service colleague Patrick Kennedy, a senior management official who served as Negroponte’s management deputy when Negroponte was director of national intelligence, before he took the No. 2 post at the State Department.

The White House has nominated Kennedy to replace Henrietta H. Fore as undersecretary of state for management. That shift took a major step forward yesterday when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted to send Fore’s long-delayed nomination as director of foreign assistance to the Senate floor. Senate aides said the committee may act on Kennedy’s nomination as early as next week.

But the changes in security policy for Iraq and in her team are unlikely to temper rising criticism of Rice’s management style. She is due to testify today before the House oversight committee, whose chairman, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), has accused the department’s prime security contractor in Iraq, Blackwater Worldwide, of tax evasion; charged the department with papering over evidence of widespread corruption in the Iraqi government; and accused the State inspector general of failing to monitor shoddy work and overspending in construction of a new, $600 million U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

Though nothing near as wretched as Condi’s State Department, the New York Times must be glad that its reputation doesn’t rest on John M. Broder’s Griffin story. Broder can report only that the guy resigned “abruptly,” offering a single quote, Henry Waxman’s “Mr. Griffin’s resignation is another indication that the State Department’s efforts in Iraq are in disarray.” Then he twits the Maliki government’s announcement that it will scrap Order 17, the Paul Bremer decree that gave private contractors’ immunity under Iraqi law:

That would be a first step toward taking it off the books, though the process would probably be plodding in Iraq’s typically sluggish government and Parliament, with no immediate effect on the operations of private security contractors. In a sign of the importance of the issue for the Iraqis, the national security committee in Iraq’s Parliament is considering similar legislation, though no bill has yet been passed to the full chamber for a vote.

The United States administration in Iraq wrote the provision into Iraqi law soon after the invasion in 2003. Since then, the number of security contractors has mushroomed and the question of their impunity has grown more pressing. After a drunken employee of Blackwater shot a man to death, for example, the employee was flown out of Iraq, docked pay and fired.

Mr. Maliki’s spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, issued a statement saying the government would draft the law revoking immunity before the next cabinet meeting. The statement did not say when the next cabinet meeting was scheduled.

Much more interesting at NYT is Paul von Zielbauer and James Glanz’s visit (with camera) to Blackwater’s compound in the Green Zone. And yes, it does look like exactly like a minimum-security prison — with maximum-security walls. They get a few of the inmates to talk (mostly the company line, though one or two stray a mite):

“Some guys are thinking that it [Nisour Square] was not a good shoot, that it was not warranted,” said one Blackwater contractor, using military jargon for an episode that results in a wrongful death. “I don’t think there was criminal intent involved. I just think it was the application of the use of deadly force gone horribly wrong.”

He added, “To mitigate one threat, 17 people had to die?” …

[A] growing number of Blackwater guards here believe that the federal investigation may result in criminal charges against some of the four to six members of the team believed to have fired weapons on Sept. 16. Most of the men who fired are former Marine infantrymen still in their 20s, said one Blackwater contractor with a military background.

The talkative ones also tell NYT that the leader of the Nisour Square convoy, a guy named Hoss, and two or three other members of that team have returned to the States, either because their tours of duty or their Blackwater contracts have ended or, in Hoss’s case, to get shrapnel removed from a pre-Sept. 16 wound.

Well, ’twasn’t Blackwater’s assignment to guard the British computer engineer kidnapped (with his security team) from the Ministry of Finance office last May. But according to WaPo’s Walter Pincus, those kidnappings halted a $38 million U.S. effort to create a computerized accounting system for the Iraqi government. The Brit was trying to install it, but now the whole project has been suspended

because the Ministry of Finance there has continued to use a paper system, according to the latest report of Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

“Nobody noticed” when the computerized Iraq Financial Management Information System was inoperable for a month, and no one relies on it to produce reports, Bowen said in a report released by his office yesterday.

Earlier this month, the Government Accountability Office reported that, $8 million having been spent to train about 500 Iraqis in various ministries to use the system, the Finance Ministry has refused to drop its paper spreadsheets. Now, might the fact that most of Iraq’s techies are now either dead or, like Riverbend, exiled have something to do with this? In fact, might the Ministry be making paper records not because it liked the early 20th-century but because it has no other choice? And might we not be long overdue to get the hell out of its way?

“Get the hell out of my way” is not only Blackwater’s message to Iraq but seems once again the U.S. military’s too. In Slate today, Fred Kaplan tracks some good-news-thanks-to-bad-news. The good is that, so far in October, the number of U.S. troops killed — 29 as he wrote — equals less than half the death rate of any previous month this year. The bad-news reason for that, according to Fred, “is almost certainly a shift in U.S. tactics from fighting on the ground to bombing from the air.”

An illustration of this shift occurred on Sunday, when U.S. soldiers were searching for a leader of a kidnapping ring in Baghdad’s Sadr City. The soldiers came under fire from a building. Rather than engage in dangerous door-to-door conflict, they called in air support. American planes flew overhead and simply bombed the building, killing several of the fighters but also at least six innocent civilians. (The bad guy got away.)

… in the first nine months of 2007, Air Force planes dropped munitions on targets in Iraq more often than in the previous three years combined.

More telling still, the number of airstrikes soared most dramatically at about the same time that U.S. troop fatalities declined. (Click here for month-by-month figures.)

So the shift-to-zoomies that means greater safety for our ground troops involves killing more innocent Iraqi bystanders — whose relatives hunger for vengeance and whose neighbors further doubt that Americans assure their safety: unless I’m much mistaken, a result the exact opposite of our announced aims.

Okay, let’s take stock here: an overseer who couldn’t oversee squat, security guards who live as prisoners, a computer system that sends a government back to paper records, a counterinsurgency performance that generates only more insurgents.

If we can see what all this means, why can’t Washington?

lotus

Tags: Condoleezza Rice, Fred Kaplan, Green Zone, Henry Waxman, Iraq, John Negroponte, Kurds, Middle East, Nisour Square, North Korea, Pakistan, Paul Bremer, Richard J. Griffin, Riverbend, Sadr City, security contractors, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, State Department, Stuart W. Bowen, Turks, U.S., U.S. Senate, White House