Like Kelsey Grammar teaching you to Drive

Nobody could have failed to anticipate:

The Bush administration repeatedly ignored corruption at the highest levels within the Iraqi government and kept secret potentially embarrassing information so as not to undermine its relationship with Baghdad, according to two former State Department employees.

Arthur Brennan, who briefly served in Baghdad as head of the department's Office of Accountability and Transparency last year, and James Mattil, who worked as the chief of staff, told Senate Democrats on Monday that their office was understaffed and its warnings and recommendations ignored.

"Nobody could have anticipated". It's only in the waning days of the Administration I realize I really should have written a macro to spit that phrase out.

Brennan also alleges the State Department prevented a congressional aide visiting Baghdad from talking with staffers by insisting they were too busy. In reality, Brennan said, office members were watching movies at the embassy and on their computers. The staffers' workload had been cut dramatically because of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's "evisceration" of Iraq's top anti-corruption office, he said.

The State Department's policies "not only contradicted the anti-corruption mission but indirectly contributed to and has allowed corruption to fester at the highest levels of the Iraqi government," Brennan told the Senate Democratic Policy Committee.

Something tells me that during their video prayer chats Bush & Maliki don't talk about corruption -- after all business is business.

And that Maliki's government would be corrupt isn't a terrible surprise, that happens to some degree in all governments and in a situation like Iraq's not unexpected (unanticipated?). But the fact that it is so over-the-top bad and ignored by the American government that is doling out the money and propping it up can be explained best in one excerpt from Robert Draper's 'Dead Certain':

By the time he first laid eyes on Maliki in Baghdad on June 13, 2006, Bush could not afford to be choosy. Iraq was out of control, here was its new leader ... and through his willful optimism, Bush would see to it that theirs was a match made in heaven. In 2007, he found himself mentoring the head of the world's most frail democracy on how to lead a nation.

OH, FUCK!

Explains everything.