In the early days after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, many Americans both inside and outside the government indicated a desire to go to Iraq to help with the war effort. But a new book by Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran, "Imperial Life in the Emerald City," argues that ties to the Bush administration or to the Republican Party regularly trumped years of experience or knowledge in a particular field when key jobs were being assigned.

The result, Mr. Chandrasekaran writes, is that under the leadership of L. Paul Bremer, the first administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, many inexperienced or unqualified people were given key posts in the rebuilding of Iraq, and often found themselves in situations they could not handle.

Before anyone could go to Baghdad, Chandrasekaran (who had spent six months in Iraq before the war started in March 2003, and then was the Post's Baghdad bureau chief from April 2003 to October 2004) reports, they first had to go through the office of Jim O'Beirne in the Pentagon.

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To pass muster with O'Beirne, a political appointee who screens prospective political appointees for Defense Department posts, applicants didn't need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration.

O'Beirne's staff posed blunt questions to some candidates about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the US occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade.

The result, Chandrasekaran says, was that officials in many key areas, "lacked vital skills and experience." Many people involved in the effort to rebuild and stabilize Iraq now see this decision making process as "one of the Bush administration's gravest errors."

"We didn't tap – and it should have started from the White House on down – just didn't tap the right people to do this job," said Frederick Smith, who served as the deputy director of the CPA's Washington office. "It was a tough, tough job. Instead we got people who went out there because of their political leanings ...

One former CPA employee who had an office near O'Beirne's wrote an e-mail to a friend describing the recruitment process: "I watched résumés of immensely talented individuals who had sought out CPA to help the country thrown in the trash because their adherence to 'the President's vision for Iraq' (a frequently heard phrase at CPA) was 'uncertain.' I saw senior civil servants from agencies like Treasury, Energy . . . and Commerce denied advisory positions in Baghdad that were instead handed to prominent RNC (Republican National Committee) contributors."

In a review of the book in The Washington Post, Moses Naim, editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine, writes that while common wisdom holds that "the decision to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein is still open to debate, American mismanagement of the country after the invasion is not."

What caused the massive collapse of common sense that doomed the CPA and undermined the US gamble in Iraq? That is the question that every page tacitly forces on the reader. American ingenuity, pragmatism and practical approaches to problem-solving are legendary. But Chandrasekaran shows that what reigned in Iraq was massive incompetence, patently unfeasible schemes, naive expectations and arrogance fueled by ignorance. His book methodically documents the baffling ineptitude that dominated US attempts to influence Iraq's fiendish politics, rebuild the electrical grid, privatize the economy, run the oil industry, recruit expert staff or instill a modicum of normalcy to the lives of Iraqis. Nor are the book's complaints Monday-morning quarterbacking. The CPA's failings caused widespread grumbling at the time. Chandrasekaran tells of a message board on which some Marines had drawn a gravestone inscribed with the words "COMMON SENSE." The caption underneath it read: "Killed by the CPA."

But writer, blogger and Republican consultant Rich Galen, who was in Baghdad around the same time as Chandrasekaran, writes at the Townhall.org site that many of the portraits of CPA officials and personnel in the book are "appallingly unfair."

The obvious implication being, while coalition military personnel were in constant danger of being injured or killed by ambush or IED, the "naive neocons" of the CPA were lounging about in perfect luxurious safety, eating dates and pomegranates, sipping fine wines and taking an occasional refreshing dip in the "resort-sized swimming pool" ...

The vast majority of CPA employees lived in trailers (two people per half, shared bathroom, running water a pleasant surprise), ate in the cafeteria (food by Kellogg, Brown & Root a subsidiary of Halliburton); worked in crowded, dusty outdated offices (even by Saddam standards); and went out into the Red Zone of Baghdad to do their jobs each and every day.

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Feedback appreciated. E-mail Tom Regan.