Desert swarm.

"Who's Who in Baghdad" (by Joshua Micah Marshall, Laura Rozen, and Colin Soloway, December) is a most overheated and conspiratorial tract, but I feel it useful to offer a few rather inconvenient counter facts. There is no credible case to be made that the Coalition Provisional Authority has a partisan element. Among the senior CPA officials since its conception one could find Mr. Walt Slocombe, a senior Clinton administration Pentagon official, retired Rear Adm. David Oliveh also a political appointee in the Clinton administration, numerous career and retired U.S. ambassadors who have served other presidents of both parties, and no small number of retired military and general flag officers of equally non-partisan stature. The CPA is represented by hundreds of dedicated Americans and citizens from many other coalition nations, working hard to help secure the blessings of liberty for 23 million Iraqis.

Lawrence Di Rita 

Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for

Public Affairs

I have no knowledge to quarrel with your general argument that there may be too many Republican nobodies in Baghdad. But I know two of the people you cite with scorn, Tom Korologos and Rich Galen, and neither went to Iraq to further their own political ambitions or to seek an administration job. The place is broken, and each took on an assignment that could help put it hack together, despite the palpable physical danger. What on earth is wrong with Bremer using someone like Korologos who knows Capitol Hill well as his liaison there? And what is wrong with cutting through two layers of bureaucracy, Iraqi and American, to help television crews find stories? That's what Galen is doing, as he has for years, especially when he was working for Newt Gingrich.

Adam Clymer

via email