It only hurts when I laugh

Rumsfeld Cautions Iraqis on New Government
This made me laugh -- "[Rumsfeld] warned that Iraqis had to 'be darned careful about making a lot of changes just to be putting in their friend or to be putting in someone else from their tribe or from their ethnic group. This is too serious a business over there and the United States has got too much invested and too much committed and too many lives at stake for people to be careless about that.'
So here is Rumsfeld warning Iraq against hiring people just because they're friends or from a particular tribe -- when the United States screwed up the Iraq economy and reconstruction because it insisted on hiring people to staff the coalition provisional authority office whose only qualification was that they were Republicans who had sent their resume to the White House or posted it on the Heritage Foundation website. The Washington Post reported last June that "most CPA hiring was done by the White House and Pentagon personnel offices, with posts going to people with connections to the Bush administration or the Republican Party. The job of reorganizing Baghdad's stock exchange, which has not reopened, was given in September to a 24-year-old who had sought a job at the White House. "It was loyalty over experience," a senior CPA official said."
Read this entire WP article to refresh your memory about the miserable history of the Iraq occupation -- and see if you agree that the insurgency is really all Turkey's fault because Turkey wouldn't let the US send 30,000 troops into Iraq from the north, as Rumsfeld also said this weekend, or whether this is just one more ass-covering remark from an incompetent administration.