Who's in charge here?

Mr. Bush is out looking for a War Czar but is being turned down by his candidates. The job is to coordinate and direct the war efforts of the departments of defense and state, along with other agencies. It sounds to me a lot like the job of Commander in Chief. I suspect one reason he can't find a capable person to do the job is that none of them agree with his policy. Past presidents acted as Commander in Chief, but we are probably better off with him looking for someone else to do it. Someday I'm going to research and publish the number of days Bush spends on vacation and compare it with other presidents.

In case there was any doubt, now 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. The U.S.- and British-educated engineer and financier is the first senior Iraqi official to look back at book length on his country's four-year ordeal. It's an unsparing look at failures both American and Iraqi, an account in which the word "ignorance" crops up repeatedly.

No wonder Bush can't find anyone to do his job for him.