You can’t read this story about the botched, cut-rate training of the Iraqi police without getting very, very, very angry. Even if you thought going in and deposing Saddam was the right thing to do, the arrogance and willful ignorance (they had the information, they ignored it) and the sheer incompetence with which it was done is unforgivable, unforgivable.

Before the war, the Bush administration dismissed as unnecessary a plan backed by the Justice Department to rebuild the police force by deploying thousands of American civilian trainers. Current and former administration officials said they were relying on a Central Intelligence Agency assessment that said the Iraqi police were well trained. The C.I.A. said its assessment conveyed nothing of the sort.

After Baghdad fell, when a majority of Iraqi police officers abandoned their posts, a second proposal by a Justice Department team calling for 6,600 police trainers was reduced to 1,500, and then never carried out. During the first eight months of the occupation � as crime soared and the insurgency took hold � the United States deployed 50 police advisers in Iraq.

Against the objections of Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, the long-range plan was eventually reduced to 500 trainers. One result was a police captain from North Carolina having 40 Americans to train 20,000 Iraqi police across four provinces in southern Iraq. [ . . . ]

Field training of the Iraqi police, the most critical element of the effort, was left to DynCorp International, a company based in Irving, Tex., that received $750 million in contracts. The advisers, many of them retired officers from small towns, said they arrived in Iraq and quickly found themselves caught between poorly staffed American government agencies, company officials focused on the bottom line and thousands of Iraqi officers clamoring for help.

When it became clear that the civilian effort by DynCorp was faltering, American military officials took over police training in 2004, relying on heavily armed commando units that had been established by the Iraqis. Within a year, members of the Sunni Muslim population said some units had been infiltrated by Shiite Muslim militias and were kidnapping, torturing and executing scores of Sunni Muslims.

Let’s go back to the beginning of the article to see the result:

[Today], the police are a battered and dysfunctional force that has helped bring Iraq to the brink of civil war. Police units stand accused of operating death squads for powerful political groups or simple profit. Citizens, deeply distrustful of the force, are setting up their own neighborhood security squads. Killings of police officers are rampant, with at least 547 slain this year, roughly as many as Iraqi and American soldiers combined, records show.

Now the importance of the police, for good or for ill, is being belatedly recognized, and barn door is being fumblingly locked behind stolen horse:

This spring, three years after administration officials rejected the large American-led field training effort, American military commanders are adopting that very approach. Declaring 2006 the year of the police, the Pentagon is dispatching a total of 3,000 American soldiers and DynCorp contractors to train and mentor police recruits and officers across Iraq.

American commanders now see the force, which is to increase to 190,000, as the linchpin of a new strategy to protect the population, secure reconstruction projects and help facilitate the withdrawal of American troops.

Even before the 2003 invasion, General Jay Garner and Justice and State Department specialists had explicitly warned the administration that the rotten Saddam-era police force was likely to collapse and that 5,000 to 6,000 American and foreign advisers would be needed to train and monitor a new force. Bush and Rumsfeld blew them off, saying that we didn’t want to be viewed as heavy-handed occupiers and that taking over too much of what the Iraqis should be doing for themselves could create “a culture of dependence.” Yet the operations in Kosovo and Bosnia had taught two key lessons: “Law and order first,” and “blanketing local police stations with foreign trainers [ . . . ] helped deter brutality, corruption, and infiltration by militias.” Because this advice was ignored, by the time General Garner got to Baghdad, 16 out of 23 major government ministries — and the National Museum — were “stripped shells.” Iraqis were desperate:

A population that had lived in a police state with virtually no street crime for 25 years was dismayed as murder, kidnapping and rape soared.

Official after official who was assigned to take charge of the occupation or the police-training facet of it says that he was given his assignment on short notice with little time to prepare — Garner (6 weeks); Bremer (2 weeks); Bernie Kerik (10 days), who says he “prepared for his job in part by watching A&E Network documentaries on Saddam Hussein.”

Academy training time for police recruits was originally supposed to be six months (which Kerik found laughable). It was reduced to 16 weeks, then to 8 — half of which was wasted in translating training materials from English to Arabic.

In 2004, DynCorp again sent a mere 500 contractors, American police chiefs and sheriffs, to field-train 90,000 Iraqi officers. They were paid $134,000 a year each; DynCorp billed the government about $50 million a month. Conscientious advisers found themselves stretched impossibly thin, unable to do the job. They themselves were barely supervised; one stole $600,000 worth of fuel, and a few others are under investigation for criminal fraud. Twenty were killed by insurgents, as were over 2800 Iraqi police since September 2004.

It goes on and on. Duplication of effort, with different teams drawing up similar plans in complete ignorance of each other’s existence. Finger-pointing: Defense and Justice blame each other; the administration blames the CIA; DynCorp and State claim they never got the money for the first batch of advisers; an administration official blames Bremer for not pushing for them; Bremer says he pushed but DynCorp didn’t deliver. With this bunch, the buck never stops. The buck is a hot potato.

And they all lied. The same people who are griping now came home and put a good face on things:

[N]o American officials publicly sounded the alarm about the troubled situation. After spending three and a half months in Iraq, Mr. Kerik returned to the United States and praised the police during a news conference with President Bush on the South Lawn of the White House.

“They have made tremendous progress,” Mr. Kerik said. “The police are working.”

Read the thing if you can stand it. It’s funny how you never know which piece of information will finally push you over the edge. I’m wondering: is wanton bungling an impeachable offense?