"The man crowned by Tommy Franks as “the dumbest [expletive] guy on the planet” just made the dumbest [expletive] speech on the planet." Just last week, a former US official in the executive branch (in Bush's 1st term) told me that once Feith interviewed a Middle East expert from one of the intelligence agencies for a job in the Defense Department. The interview went well until Feith saw that the candidate had studied Arabic. He made it very clear that his knowledge of Arabic disqualified him. By the standards of the Bush administration (and the Clinton administration), knowledge of and experience in the Middle East, is a disqualifier. This explains why Indyk was in charge of Middle East policy in the Clinton administration, and why Abrams and Hanna are in charge of Middle East policy in this administration.