AP has a story today which manages to put into sharp focus exactly why we are in such a badly messed up situation in Iraq. In a nutshell, it’s because the people we have had running the show and making the basic decisions (from the very beginning right up till now) have suffered from a complete – sorry, COMPLETE – lack of common sense.

Training the police is as important to stabilizing Iraq as standing up an army there, but the United States has botched the job by assigning the wrong agencies to the task, two members of the Iraq Study Group say.

“The police training system has not gone well,” former Rep. Lee Hamilton, who co-chaired the bipartisan commission, said in remarks prepared for delivery Wednesday to the Senate Judiciary Committee. He was joined in his statements by another member of the study group, Edwin Meese III, who was attorney general during the Reagan administration.

The U.S. erred by first assigning the task of shaping the judicial system in a largely lawless country to the State Department and private contractors who “did not have the expertise or the manpower to get the job done,” Hamilton and Meese said in testimony obtained by The Associated Press.

In 2004, the mission was assigned to the Defense Department, which devoted more money to the task. But department officials also were insufficiently trained for the job, Hamilton and Meese said.

As a result, Iraq has little if any on-the-street law enforcement personnel or a functioning judicial system free of corruption, they said.

Justice Department officials, they said, should lead the work of transforming the system. Police executives and supervisors should replace the military police personnel now assigned.

How completely clueless do you have to be when it doesn’t strike you for almost four years that police training is a job best accomplished by law enforcement professionals?

And there have, of course, been enough stories about how every other aspect of our vaunted reconstruction effort in Iraq was managed in the same way.

Think for a minute how different the attitude of the average Iraqi would have been towards US forces in Iraq if we had actually built those schools, restored electricity and power, restored law and order before the insurgency got under way. Think for a minute how the insurgency might have gone initially if we had had the active support of the average Iraqi, instead of their simmering resentment.

At the risk of sounding sexist, I cannot help feeling that if only we had put women in charge, things would be very different in Iraq today.