As The Washington Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran revealed, the CPA was such a skeletal organization that it had just three people assigned to the enormous task of privatizing Iraq’s state-owned factories. “Don’t bother starting,” the three lonely staffers were counseled by a delegation from East Germany—which, when it sold off its state assets, had assigned eight thousand people to the project.29 In short, the CPA was itself too privatized to privatize Iraq.
