The Green Zone as Young Republican playground

The catalog of what has gone wrong with our administration of the occupation of Iraq rivals the list of administration lies that led to the beginning of the war in Iraq, but today's Washington Post report on the way the Congressional Provisional Authority was staffed is a stunner.

A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col Joseph Yoswa, is quoted saying that when the government ran short of qualified applicants they "turned to the Heritage Foundation, an educational facility, albeit a conservative one, but primarily a place where you can get good, solid people." Hundreds of hires were made from the names gathered from a job board posted on the explicitly partisan Heritage web site. How good? How solid? The Post examines a group that were assigned to the CPA budget offices.

When Ledeen's group showed up at the palace -- with their North Face camping gear, Abercrombie & Fitch camouflage and digital cameras -- they were quite the spectacle. For some, they represented everything that was right with the CPA: They were young, energetic and idealistic. For others, they represented everything that was wrong with the CPA: They were young, inexperienced, and regarded as ideologues.
Several had impressive paper credentials, but in the wrong fields. Greco was fluent in English, Italian and Spanish; Burns had been a policy analyst focused on family and health care; and Ledeen had co-founded a cooking school. But none had ever worked in the Middle East, none spoke Arabic, and few could tell a balance sheet from an accounts receivable statement.

Other staffers quickly nicknamed the newcomers "The Brat Pack."

"They had come over because of one reason or another and they were put in positions of authority that they had no clue about," remembered Army Reserve Sgt. Thomas D. Wirges, 38, who had been working on rehabilitating the Baghdad Stock Exchange.

The various blunders and inadequacies of the gaggle of 20-something idealogues we staffed the occupation offices with are scary, but what I found particularly infuriating was this paragraph.

The pay turned out to be good. Ledeen and her coworkers had agreed to come to Iraq without knowing their salaries. They ended up with standard government base salaries in the range of $30,000 to $75,000 a year, plus a 25 percent foreign differential, another 25 percent for a workplace "in imminent danger" and overtime pay. In the end, almost everyone was making the equivalent of six-figure salaries.

Compare that to the pay rate of an Army infantry Specialist with four years of intensive training and experience, facing daily fire far from the CPA's heavily fortified 'Green Zone'. The experienced E-4's monthly rate is $1814, less than $22,000 a year. The allowance for 'Immanent Danger' is $225 a month. All totaled, the highly trained, combat hardened infantryman with all allowances makes less than the base pay of the CPA's entry level trainees, and less than a fourth of the six figure paychecks that "almost everyone" in the Young Republican trainee corps was pulling down when their generous allowances were folded in.

Scandalous.