Thank the God of Your Choice that we in the blogosphere can say Shit! Beccause this story demands it!

Scat, Republicans! Scat! Scat!:

A $75 million project to build the largest police academy in Iraq has been so grossly mismanaged that the campus now poses health risks to recruits and might need to be partially demolished, U.S. investigators have found.

The Baghdad Police College, hailed as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country’s security, was so poorly constructed that feces and urine rained from the ceilings in student barracks. Floors heaved inches off the ground and cracked apart. Water dripped so profusely in one room that it was dubbed “the rain forest.”

The most serious problem was substandard plumbing that caused waste from toilets on the second and third floors to cascade throughout the building. A light fixture in one room stopped working because it was filled with urine and fecal matter. The waste threatened the integrity of load-bearing slabs, federal investigators concluded.

You know? That’s a lot of shit!

Translation: Mission failure.

Remember how training the Iraqis was so important? And especially training the police, so the Iraqis could deal with the death squads and the looters and the insurgents and all the rest of the Iraqis who are throwing roses at each other and us?  Read more 

Republican little children. Leading us straight into an Iraqi qWagmire, at the cost of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, with nothing to show for it but tons of Republican methane.

These are the consequences of unchecked Republican rule in Iraq:

Many of those chosen by [Pentagon personnel screener and political appointee Jim] O’Beirne’s office to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq’s government from April 2003 to June 2004, lacked vital skills and experience.

[O’Bierne] and his staff used an obscure provision in federal law to hire many CPA staffers as temporary political appointees, which exempted the interviewers from employment regulations that prohibit questions about personal political beliefs.

To recruit the people he wanted, O’Beirne sought résumés from the offices of Republican congressmen, conservative think tanks and GOP activists. He discarded applications from those his staff deemed ideologically suspect, even if the applicants possessed Arabic language skills or postwar rebuilding experience.

A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance — but had applied for a White House job — was sent to reopen Baghdad’s stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget, even though they didn’t have a background in accounting.

I guess this must be what Bush means by “civilization.” Or maybe “vision.” Who knows, with these people?  Read more