Bulletin: Bush Critics Criticize Bush

In The Latest Chapters on the War, Howard Kurtz runs down the list of books that attack the Bush Administration. As a semi-counterpoint to all the blogging and daily news-cycle battles, it's kind of an interesting angle, but hardly remarkable: Lots of reporters oppose the administration and various sources with axes to grind know they'll find these journalists quite receptive. Kurtz mentions Bob Woodward's book, so I suppose even the imaginary sources will get their calls returned.

One's confidence about how accurate they are does not increase with the one book I've followed, Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City. No, I haven't read it, so fire away. But I've read the obligatory excerpt in the Post, the deluge of criticism, and Chandrasekaran's defense has been  weak when he isn't just ignoring it.

Chandrasekaran accuses the Bush Administration of hiring inexperienced and unqualified cronies for the Coalition Provisional Authority, but in what used to be thought of as amateurish errors, he omits plentiful opposing evidence. I missed all this when it was going on, so let me point to CPA senior adviser Dan Senor who wrote in an Op-Ed:

Chandrasekaran's thesis is that young and inexperienced neoconservative political hacks and Bush loyalists ran and ruined the occupation of Iraq. In pinning the shortcomings of the reconstruction effort on the mishaps of a handful of low-level political appointees, he virtually ignores the fact that the senior tiers of the CPA were populated with a bipartisan and generally nonpolitical corps of experts.

His book makes no mention, for example, of Richard Jones, who was the CPA's chief of policy and Ambassador Paul Bremer's top deputy. A career diplomat, Jones had served as President Bill Clinton's ambassador to Lebanon and Kazakhstan, and he was ambassador to Kuwait when he relocated to Baghdad. He was at the center of practically every decision and every meeting about the Iraqi political process from the moment he arrived. Indeed, during the first major crisis in Fallujah, Jones was the CPA's lead negotiator with the city's Sunni leadership, as was reported widely.

Nor does Chandrasekaran discuss Ryan Crocker, a striking omission since Chandrasekaran once described Crocker as Bremer's "top political aide" [news story, July 13, 2003]. Crocker, the senior State Department official with responsibility for Iraq before the war, led the CPA's political reconstruction team. A fluent Arabic speaker widely regarded as among the State Department's most distinguished Arabists, Crocker had served as ambassador to Syria and Kuwait under Clinton. ...

David Oliver, the CPA's budget director, does appear in the book. But Chandrasekaran curiously omits any description of Oliver's background. Oliver, a retired Navy rear admiral, had served as a principal deputy undersecretary of defense for Clinton, and by the time he was sent to Baghdad he had already taken a role as a public and financial supporter of one of the Democratic candidates challenging President Bush in 2004. Other prominent Democrats recruited to work in Iraq included former Clinton senior defense official Walt Slocombe and constitutional experts Noah Feldman and Larry Diamond -- both of whom had publicly opposed the decision to go to war in Iraq.

Etc. And Ramesh Ponnuru:

Chandrasekaran repeats some of the innuendo of earlier iterations of the Iraq-cronyism charge, notably the claim that “the daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator” [Simone Ledeen] was “tapped to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget,” even though she had no “background in accounting.” That’s a double lie: The woman in question, also a friend of mine, does have a background in accounting, and she wasn’t managing the budget....

To get to the main point of the article: O’Beirne wasn’t in charge of staffing the Coalition Provisional Authority; he didn’t have a “staff” of his own, let alone one that could ask crudely political questions of applicants; he didn’t ask anyone he interviewed about his views on Roe v. Wade (a claim that, careful readers will see, Chandrasekaran doesn’t quite tie to O’Beirne); he was eager to find Arabic speakers; and he has never been deluged with job applicants who opposed the Iraq war and the Bush administration but wanted to serve in a war zone (surprise, surprise).

Andy McCarthy added more along these lines.

Not all of the figures in these books or Kurtz's column are rabid Bush critics, but again, success has many fathers and failure is an orphan. Even if it's perceived failure, or setbacks over a time span that one day will be judged as insignificant by historians who will understand what was at stake.

Comments

[soccer dad]

One frustrating aspect to the Post is that in an editorial about the administration's reported missteps, it repeated the inexperienced political appointee canard. Even after the folks at NRO debunked it.

[Christopher Fotos]

Lovely.