I’ve been deliberately avoiding posting anything about Iraq. I didn’t support the war, and in retrospect I still wouldn’t have, but I don’t really have anything terribly insightful to say, and frankly I find the topic rather tiresome. But one of the cover stories from today’s Wall Street Journal deserves more attention than it’s getting in the blogosphere. The headline:

How a 24-Year-Old Got a Job Rebuilding Iraq’s Stock Market

Choice quotes:

At Yale University, Jay Hallen majored in political science, rarely watched financial news, and didn’t follow the stock market. All of which made the 24-year-old an unlikely pick for the difficult task of rebuilding Iraq’s shuttered stock exchange. But Mr. Hallen was given the job immediately after arriving in Baghdad in September.

In early November, Mr. Hallen traveled to Baghdad’s Hamra Hotel for a lunch meeting with Luay Nafa Elias, who runs an investment company here. Mr. Elias says he was expecting to meet a middle-age man and therefore was astonished to see the baby-face Mr. Hallen sit down at the table and order a plate of Kabobs. “I had thought the Americans would send someone who was at least 50 years old, someone with gray hair,” says Mr. Elias.

As the lunch continued, Mr. Elias found himself impressed by Mr. Hallen’s confident tone and his repeated promises to quickly open a stock market that is the envy of the Arab world.

Mr. Elias’s faith in Mr. Hallen, however, began to evaporate when the market’s opening was delayed without explanation, first to the middle of this month, and then into February. “Maybe someone older and more experienced could have gotten this done on time,” Mr. Elias says.

That doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in the Coalition Provisional Authority's ability to turn Iraq into a stable democracy.