Iraq showed that the U.S. is better at breaking things then fixing them. A new unit aims to change that.
The United States bumbled into Iraq without much of a postwar plan. There were too few troops to secure the country, and the U.S. authorities often lacked the civilian experts to get things up and running again. So key jobs fell to inexperienced Republican apparatchiks or just about anyone the Coalition Provisional Authority could get its hands on.
That's how 20-somethings with no experience in finance wound up running Iraq's $13 billion budget (their names were plucked from a job-application page on the conservative Heritage Foundation's Web site) and setting up Baghdad's new stock exchange.
Embarrassed by the disasters that resulted (and by grumbling from more-experienced hands), U.S. officials eventually realized they had to come up with a better system for training and deploying seasoned civilians in future conflicts.
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