TED BARLOW is unhappy with the idea of Barbara Bodine as an important administrator in postwar Iraq. I don’t know much about her, but he’s got a lot of links — though many of them don’t really seem to suggest that she’s as bad as his post suggests, and some cut the other way. Ditto some of the comments to his post. So if you go there, read everything.

I genuinely have no opinion on her suitability or not for the job, but I do think that — although at one level it seems premature to be talking about postwar stuff when the war is just starting — the postwar follow-through is likely to be at least as important as the war. My MSNBC post for tomorrow is on that. I think that a lot of us — me included, sometimes — are spending a lot of time reading minute-by-minute reports that are fragmentary and often wrong, and not enough time thinking about the big picture.

UPDATE: Several readers seem to think that Gen. John Abizaid, who interestingly is a favorite of Aziz Poonawalla, will really be calling the shots on Iraqi reconstruction. Stay tuned.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Bill Hobbs likes Abizaid, too, and has some more information on him.