By PHK
First, belated but sincere thanks to Justin Raimondo for correcting Liz Cheney’s State Department title on anti.war.com as I had asked and then quoting from WV – on an aspect of the ongoing Liz saga. Liz - for anyone who has tuned in late - is the State Department NEA PDAS who is taking off to have her fifth kid due in July. (If you’re not familiar with State’s alphabet soup and gotten into this story late, don’t panic. NEA means the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, PDAS means Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary. NEA is the regional geographic bureau that includes countries such as Iraq, Iran, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria.)
I’m not quite sure how Robert Dreyfuss’ insider State Department story in the June 6 American Prospect “The Commissar’s in Town” fits into current State Department political machinations since career Foreign Service Officer Jim Jeffrey was officially named to replace Ms. Cheney shortly before Dreyfuss’ article came out.
Nevertheless, Dreyfuss provides details on the continuing Liz Cheney-at-the-State-Department-melodrama that have all the hallmarks of authenticity. In my view, a major question may be whether Liz decides to drop number five kid on the nanny as she has the first four - or by now probably stable of nannies - and return to being daddy’s eyes, ears and mouth in NEA. Hopefully, the fifth kid will keep her at home – but who knows. If anyone can fill in that blank, please, please do.
But then even physically absent, who knows how deep Ms. Cheney’s tentacles reach into that lightening rod of bureaus in this administration – or for that matter elsewhere in Foggy Bottom. Dreyfuss refers to her close relationship with Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, but then he’s also reported to be leaving State soon – and for good.
I won’t spoil your reading of Dreyfuss’ article on Cheney in its entirety, but here’s a tempting tidbit. Marina Ottaway, senior associate and co-director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment who, according to Dreyfuss, “has worked with Liz Cheney on democratic reform issues,” described her as follows: “She has a mandate to do democracy promotion, but she had very little familiarity with the subject. They deliberately picked a person who was not a Middle East specialist, so that the conventional wisdom, well, let me rephrase, so that real, actual knowledge of the issues in the region wouldn’t interfere with policy.”
Ottaway is no one to quibble with on democratization or foreign policy issues in the Middle East and elsewhere – she’s a veteran researcher and writer on the topic who bases her articles and speeches on hard facts and careful, rational analysis. Too bad bubblehead Cheney fills the powerful PDAS position and not someone with Ottaway’s credentials.
Yet, it might have been worse. According to Dreyfuss, NEA was apparently saddled with the vastly under qualified Liz as the lesser of two evils.
Danielle Pletka was the other option the bureau was given by the W administration before Liz got the job. The latter happened thanks apparently in good part to daddy. Pletka, of course, is a fiery neocon mouthpiece for much of our failed over-militarized Middle East policy who is ensconced as vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the neocon infested American Enterprise Institute. But then, a little nepotism never got in Pepper Cheney’s way. Certainly the thought of intervening on the behalf of his child where and when he and she might not have been wanted would – I suspect – never have even entered his head.
Yes, the Department has been saddled with political appointees in the past - with people in positions well beyond their levels of competency. This, however, normally happens with cushy overseas Ambassadorships. But this bit of Cheney family nepotism takes the cake. It’s precisely this kind of stuff the career Civil and Foreign Service were established to eliminate.
The most immediate serious problem, however, is that daughter Liz Cheney’s presence in NEA is far from benign – if Dreyfuss has the story right – and I’ll bet he does.
She’s the person who not only oversees personnel choices, but also the Iran-Syria Operations Group which is at the forefront of spending the money on “democratization” efforts in these two troubled countries. Not that I oppose supporting more open political systems – I certainly sympathized with the Baltic struggle for independence and the institution of democratic governments in those countries and elsewhere in East-Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union after the Soviet Union’s fall. But it seems to me that attempting to topple Middle Eastern governments ala Bush Jr. is like kids playing with matches in a parched New Mexico forest during fire season.