The Emerald City Gang

I have to admit that I haven’t been paying much attention to Mitt Romney’s foreign policy; the domestic side already offers a target-rich environment. But my eyebrows shot up when Dan Senor popped up speaking for Romney in the Libya/Egypt flap. Dan Senor?

I mean, Senor is one of the key figures in Rajiv Chandrasekharan’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City, an account of the disastrous US occupation of Iraq. As the head of public relations for the Coalition Provisional Authority, he exemplified the core problem with that occupation: officials were chosen for political loyalty to Bush, not experience or competence, and were evidently much more interested in getting Bush reelected than in running the country they were supposed to be fixing.

In Senor’s case this meant that instead of trying to win Iraqi hearts and minds, he was busy trying to put a smiley-face on events for the American audience, spinning reality so badly that he quickly became a joke, “Baghdad Dan”, to anyone actually paying attention.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/14/friday-afternoon-music-wilco-wfeist/?smid=tw-NytimesKrugman&seid=auto

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Incompetence is firmly rooted in American society because intellectualism has been made fun of and denigrated for many years.