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By Pat Cleary Posted in Miscellanea — Comments (11) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

"Describing Jim Haveman as a social worker who was a community health director is a little like describing Bill Gates as a college dropout who now runs an electronics company."

On the front page of last Sunday's WaPo was an article by their former Baghdad bureau chief, Rajiv Chandrasekaran entitled, "Ties to GOP Trumped Know-How Among Staff Sent to Rebuild Iraq." It's an excerpt from his book that the WaPo is hyping. You can pretty much tell from the title of the piece where it's headed.

In any event, it got us wondering about how close his facts might have landed to the truth. Regular RS readers will likely not be surprised by what we found.

Read on....

Chandrasekaran's thesis comes early in the piece, contending that one of the Bush Administration's "gravest errors" in Iraq was sending "loyal and the willing" political supporters to Iraq for reconstruction, says Chandrasekaran, "instead of the best and the brightest." He goes on to say that, "Many of those selected because of their political fidelity spent their time trying to impose a conservative agenda on the postwar occupation..." OK, so at least now we know where he's coming from: Clearly the Bush Administration doled out these plum (?) Iraqi reconstruction jobs to conservatives. Right.

Among his "case in point" studies is one Jim Haveman, brought in to oversee the rebuilding of Iraq's health care system. Chandrasekaran 's description of Haveman? "A 60 year-old social worker" who had "been the community health director for the former Republican governor of Michigan." Wait -- it gets worse: Not only did he work for a Republican (sneer), but Haveman's international experience was only in his capacity as director of a "faith-based relief organization." So he must be unqualified, right? He worked for a Republican and he ran a faith-based group. Is your skin crawling yet? If not, here's the coup de grace: "Before his stint in government", says Chandrasekaran, "Haveman ran a large Christian adoption agency in Michigan that urged pregnant women not to have abortions." Wow -- how unqualified can you get?!?

And so we had an opportunity to talk to Jim Haveman this week, to see just how unqualified he was to run this operation. What we found is that describing Jim Haveman as a social worker who was a community health director is a little like describing Bill Gates as a college dropout who now runs an electronics company. Jim Haveman ran the $9.5 billion Michigan Department of Community Health, one of the largest in the country. Were this 5,000-employee, Cabinet-level agency a private corporation, its size alone would place it well into the Fortune 500 list. The adoption agency that he ran happened to be the largest in the world, with employees in the US and 12 other countries. You can see his full curriculum vitae here and judge for yourself.

The other half of Chandrasekaran 's working theses is that these unqualified (?) hacks wreaked havoc on the system they were sent to fix, blinded -- of course -- by their conservative ideologies. Once again, some facts on Jim Haveman's tour of duty in Iraq:

-- When the Coalition Provisional Authority health team arrived, there was no functioning Ministry of Health. Saddam's Ministry was riddled with corruption and health care delivery was poor to non-existent.

-- Under Haveman's direction, The CPA health team acquired, distributed and administered 30 million doses of vaccines for a monthly immunization program that reached 3 million children under the age of 5 -- vaccines against such potentially fatal diseases as polio, diphtheria, TB and measles.

-- Saddam's health ministry spent $16 million on Iraq's population of 26 million. Within a year, Haveman had a budget of $1 billion -- bereft of the corruption and graft that had marked Saddam's system.

-- They distributed supplementary food rations providing high-protein supplements to almost a quarter of a million high-risk Iraqi citizens, including pregnant mother and malnourished children;

-- The national blood service was reconstituted and they secured $2 million of World Health Organization funding to modernize the central blood bank, enabling a viable blood bank throughout Iraq;

-- They provided tetanus vaccinations for 700,000 pregnant women;

-- Some 30,000 tons of medicines and supplies were procured and distributed;

-- More than 8,000 health workers were trained in diagnosing and treating malnourished children.

This is just a piece of what Haveman's team accomplished. You can see more in this official summary. In fact, the Ministry of Health was the first to earn full autonomy, far in advance of other Ministries.

Iraq reconstruction is and was hardly a dream assignment. The people who are involved in it put themselves far from their families and loved ones, and in harm's way. Haveman's own security chief was murdered, and Haveman and his team were the victims of some dozen attacks. Let there be no mistake, Iraqi reconstruction is no boondoggle. Yet despite Chandrasekaran's best efforts, Jim Haveman remains committed to the mission he began in Iraq.

Chandrasekaran's attack on Haveman betrays his own partisanship. Of all the time he spent on this book, only a scant 3 hours were spent directly interviewing the man he would savage. It makes one question the accuracy of a book whose premise is tainted by its author's clear point of view. It also makes you wonder if he mis-characterized the qualifications or the work of the other people profiled in the article or his book. Apparently others have accused Chandrasekaran of "generat[ing] a relentlessly negative stream of articles from Iraq." Guess so.

Fact is, Jim Haveman and the brave men and women who have worked hard to rebuild Iraq and restore its freedom deserve better.

[UPDATE]: Here's a link from Powerline on the same subject.