McCain complains about US-designed Iraqi government

I missed this initially, but via the peerless Kevin Drum comes the news that Senator McCain criticized the situation in Iraq for having no political progress failing US strategy religious and sectarian violence too many ministries. No, seriously. And he wasn't shy about saying so, telling a group of journalists, "Whoever designed that government ought to be taken out and shot."

Two things about this: First of all, the idea that the number of ministries somehow causes corruption, as McCain indicated, is pretty silly. There's corruption because there's no functioning political system, which is a result of a bad electoral system and concurrent Iraqi and US failures to establish any workable compromises on the major disputed issues. Number of ministries? Really? For those keeping track, there are 31 of them, and while I'm not sure, for example, why Iraq need a Communications Ministry *and* a Communications and Media Commission Ministry, the list doesn't really seem particularly unreasonable. For comparison, the US has 15 cabinet-level Departments and literally hundreds of other federal departments and agencies (everything from NSA to IRS to National Weather Service).

More importantly, though, the idea that some random, nameless, faceless person designed the Iraqi government is absurd. Who designed the Iraqi government? Uh... we did. At the very least we created the political structure and midwifed the executive branch into being, which is where the ministries reside. And I'm pretty sure the United State Senate has some ability to affect and oversee US policy, and I don't recall Senator McCain saying much about these problems to which he now objects as they were being established and institutionalized. It's really amazing to hear the presidential candidates talk about "Washington" this and "the government" that. Y'all are in it! Do something!