From this morning’s Wall Street Journal:

President Barack Obama last month handed his auto-industry team a seemingly impossible task: to engineer the most complicated industrial restructuring ever attempted by the federal government, and to do it fast.

With almost no experience in the car business, the team’s dozen core members have undergone a crash course in the myriad woes plaguing the U.S. auto industry. Within days, just over a month after setting to
work, they’ll begin announcing decisions.

Why does this remind me of Jerry Bremer & gang trying to “re-engineer” Iraq — a subject they knew almost nothing about — in a matter of weeks? We can only hope the consequences aren’t quite as disastrous in this case. At least the U.S. auto industry, circa 2009, isn’t quite as badly messed up as the state of Iraq, circa 2003. But it’s getting there.