This article of yours stimulated some interesting observations when you posted it in the Tacitus diary. The reactions went in several different directions that I've spent quite a bit of time today responding to. So I thought I'd bring over my part of those discussions to chez Nadezhda. The first is with Irving, regarding his repeated claims that the sort of thing the article describes in Tikrit is actually going on all over the place. The second and third are followups to reactions to your terrific comment that "Boss Tweed" didn't seem to be contemplated by the neocons' "Wilsonianism." The initial reaction was Ken White's, who focused on your remark to highlight the need to take cudgels to bureaucratic inertia. The second reaction was alk's, which posited that the "Boss Tweed" scenario (an "autocratic thug" in her words) may in fact be one of the outcomes contemplated by the neocons if they understood that institutional change comes in sudden bursts rather than on a gradual, smooth trajectory. Her metaphor for this type of change is evolutionary theory's "punctuated equilibrium."