As we noted when he was first nominated, Tom Foley landed the job of George Bush's representative in Dublin the way all Bush's nominees get the cushy diplomatic slots: through hefty campaign donations. But just so everyone is clear on exactly how connected Foley is, his name pops up in a devastating book about the disastrous early reconstruction period in Iraq, when the provisional government was being stocked with political hacks and inexperienced 20-somethings. Hence this anecdcote from Rajiv Chandrasekaran's book:
Twenty-four-year-old Jay Hallen was restless. He had graduated from Yale two years earlier, and he didn't much like his job at a commercial real-estate firm. His passion was the Middle East, and although he had never been there, he was intrigued enough to take Arabic classes and read histories of the region in his spare time.
He had mixed feelings about the war in Iraq, but he viewed the American occupation as a ripe opportunity. In the summer of 2003, he sent an e-mail to Reuben Jeffrey III, whom he had met when applying for a White House job a year earlier. Hallen had a simple query for Jeffrey, who was working as an adviser to Bremer: Might there be any job openings in Baghdad?
"Be careful what you wish for," Jeffrey wrote in response. Then he forwarded Hallen's resume to O'Beirne's office. Three weeks later, Hallen got a call from the Pentagon. The CPA wanted him in Baghdad. Pronto. Could he be ready in three to four weeks?
The day he arrived in Baghdad, he met with Thomas C. Foley, the CPA official in charge of privatizing state-owned enterprises. (Foley, a major Republican Party donor, went to Harvard Business School with President Bush.) Hallen was shocked to learn that Foley wanted him to take charge of reopening the stock exchange.
"Are you sure?" Hallen said to Foley. "I don't have a finance background." It's fine, Foley replied. He told Hallen that he was to be the project manager. He would rely on other people to get things done. He would be "the main point of contact."
Sidenote: the O'Beirne referred to was the Bush hack in charge of filling provisional government positions; he's the husband of Kate O'Beirne, leading war cheerleader at the National Review. Anyway, the end of this particular part of the story is that the Iraqi stock exchange reopened using its pre-invasion low-tech methods that had worked before, and, given the dreadful circumstances of the economy, worked again, despite the attempts of the wide-eyed Yalie to give it an infeasible makeover. Unfortunately, most of the overpaid, over-Bushed, and over there Americans were not so easily sidestepped.
UPDATE: There's now a full-scale right-wing assault on the book, but it has a self-refuting character, as the various attack dogs are forced to acknowledge that they know all these people placed in Coalition Provisional Authority positions. Example Ramesh Ponnuru ("Jim O’Beirne is a friend, as is his wife, my colleague Kate O’Beirne," "[neocon daughter], also a friend of mine, does have a background in accounting, and she wasn’t managing the budget"). And here's what that "daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator," Simone Ledeen, says were her qualifications --
In my case, I have an MBA, spent a year in post-Communist Eastern Europe at a newly privatized publishing house, and have worked at an economic consulting firm and a venture-capital group.
Nothing, therefore, that brought any experience of reconstruction or the Middle East.
FINAL UPDATE 20 SEP: A 2nd wave of assaults today as the Washington Post prints a very minor correction regarding Simone Ledeen, and the National Reviewers assert that having a MBA is qualification for disbursing a $13 billion budget in a war-torn country:
[Andy McCarthy] the wonderful Simone Ledeen, daughter of our friends Michael and Barbara Ledeen ... Simone did not manage any budget in Iraq. She executed the budget, which was actually managed by her superiors. Moreover, Simone was highly qualified to do this work. She had an extensive background in accounting, including a master's degree in business administration ... while Simone was serving her country, in that same dangerous place, by doing such scut work as making sure officials there got paid, Chandrasekaran was given the awesome responsibility of shaping world opinion against the war ...
[Jonah Goldberg] ... I, too, am a fan of Simone Ledeen's ... but I would just like to say that based on years of knowing Jim O'Beirne that he's always struck me as one of the most honorable, wise and decent men I've ever met ...I am pleased and grateful such men of integrity work in our government. America could use a lot more Jim O'Beirnes.
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