Davis: Iraq is on the right track. Allawi: Corroded and corrupt.

[This] scholarly yet immensely readable exposition of Iraqi society and politics will likely become the standard reference on post-9/11 Iraq.

When Henry Waxman was in the minority on the House Oversight Committee, he wrote to Chair Tom Davis (R-VA) several times a year asking for oversight of the debacle in Iraq before all hope was lost.

Davis held a window dressing of a hearing in 2003 that he called "Winning the Peace: Coalition Efforts to Restore Iraq." When Democrats controlled the investigations in 2006, Davis complained:

Self-righteous finger-wagging and political scapegoating won't make Iraq any more secure; it won't rebuild that ravaged nation; and it won't bring the U.S. troops home any sooner.

A new book by an Iraqi academic and world traveler explains that it was the unending fraud, errors, and arrogance that doomed the US effort: fraud, errors and arrogance that could have been remedied by effective oversight.
According to a review posted tonight by Associated Press:

In a rueful reflection on what might have been, an Iraqi government insider details in 500 pages the U.S. occupation's "shocking" mismanagement of his country - a performance so bad, he writes, that by 2007 Iraqis had "turned their backs on their would-be liberators."

"The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order," Ali A. Allawi concludes in "The Occupation of Iraq," newly published by Yale University Press.

Allawi writes with authority as a member of that "new order," having served as Iraq's trade, defense and finance minister at various times since 2003. As a former academic, at Oxford University before the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, he also writes with unusual detachment.

According to the Armed Forces Newspaper, Tom Davis missed the mess.  He reported back all was well, and said,

"almost to a person," the Iraqi leaders he met with welcomed U.N. participation, but expressed an interest in having the United States remain in charge. "There was, I think, some anxiety on their part that we would lose control," he said.

Davis said the "vast, vast majority" of the Iraqi people support the progress being made. "I think that we met with enough Iraqi leaders and went through enough towns to see that we're on the right track," he said.

Those who oppose the US effort, Davis said, are "underground" -- remnants of the Baath Party, prisoners freed by Saddam Hussein before his regime fell, and radicals from outside Iraq who are streaming into Iraq to inflict terror.

But beyond the short term, Davis predicted great promise for Iraq.

Davis must have been too distracted getting getting his wife a lobbying job, funding her political career, and raising money with Jack Abramoff.

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