Friday, February 19, 2010

London Telegraph The 9/11 hero jailed for tax fraud: Bernard Kerik was a posturing buffoon when I met him in Baghdad

By Peter Foster

The news that Bernard Kerik, former New York police commissioner and 9/11 hero, has been jailed for four years for tax fraud brings back memories of a terrifying day back in June 2003. That was when I had the misfortune to spend a morning with him in Baghdad, where he was head of the nascent Iraqi interior ministry and the man in charge of putting Iraq’s police force back on its feet.

He was out sacking – he said “terminating” – a senior Iraqi police officer as part of the disastrous De-ba’athification strategy which sped Iraq’s descent into chaos. Mr Kerik was a standing joke among Coalition officials in Baghdad: he was known in the marble corridors of Sadaam’s former Republican Palace as the “Burning Carrot”.

A buffoon with almost no organizational skills, he postured around the palace while men with buckets and spades rebuilt Baghdad’s police stations, at a time when every citizen in the city was crying out for better security. They needed bulldozers, not buckets.

He was manifestly ill-equipped for the job, a political appointee who became a beacon of the hubris and incompetence that characterized the post-conflict handling of the Iraq invasion. Whether the war was illegal or not, what was certainly criminal was the handling of the aftermath of the conflict. I say this not with the benefit of hindsight, since we reported in The Telegraph at the time that everyone in Baghdad was painfully aware of the unfolding disaster.

In the words of a very senior British official I quoted in a front page article of the time (June 17, 2003), the Iraq reconstruction effort suffered from “a complete absence of strategic direction” and was “in chaos”. Mr Kerik, who astonishingly nearly became chief of Homeland Security the following year, was at the forefront of the madness.

It is at least to the credit of the US vetting system that he didn’t get the job, as I’ve absolutely no doubt about it. America is a safer place without him.

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