Here’s a topic I’d like to know more about.
As you may know, Vice President Cheney’s daughter Elizabeth is the deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. She also has the title of “Coordinator for Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiatives.” Basically that means she’s in charge of democratizing the Middle East.
She has a budget of, I believe $75 million, for bringing about ‘regime change’ in Iran.
I also noticed this recent aside in The Nelson Report in which Chris Nelson wrote that his sources “say [Undersecretary of State Nick] Burns has been fighting an apparently losing battle with Undersecretary for non-proliferation Bob Joseph on a variety of issues, and that Vice President Cheneyâs office seems to be sponsoring the hiring of exceptionally large numbers of political appointees, not career FSOâs, to staff the to-be-created Iran democracy projects to be run out of State.”
Bob Joseph, in case you don’t remember, was the NSC staffer in charge of brow-beating the CIA’s Alan Foley into letting the White House use the bogus Niger uranium claim in the president’s speeches.
But back to the Cheneys.
Elizabeth Cheney recently went on an open-ended maternity leave. But I am still curious to know what happened or is happening with that money. Vice President Cheney is clearly deeply involved in packing that outfit with political appointees. So given all that’s happened in recent years I think this operation needs some real scrutiny.
Supporting dissidents in countries with repressive regimes is a good thing. But if your goal is to get the regime to fall in the next twelve or eighteen months you’re probably going to go in for more traditional agitprop and destabilization methods. And how much trust do you have that any operation in which Dick Cheney is calling the shots would have any idea who to support or what to do in a country like Iran anyway? I mean, after things worked out so well in Iraq and all.
My understanding is that the majority of this $75 million has gone to radio program type stuff like Voice of America’s Persian language service. That’s normally good stuff, though the Bush administration has so politicized and boondoglized VOA and related services that its effectiveness is probably questionable. We’ve spent a lot of money on Radio Sawa, for instance, a pop music and news station aimed at the young of the Arab World. But a recent State Dept IG report said it had little influence and parents didn’t want their kids to listen to it because “because its broadcasts contained such poor Arabic grammar.”
(We may not be pro-Palestinian; but we’re pro-Philistine! A little Near Eastern archeology and history humor there for you.)
If all that weren’t enough there’s the issue of cronies and pay-offs. I’m sure there are plenty of whack-jobs who’ve gotten run out of Iraq but have equally grand ideas about how to slick things up in Iran. And those guys have mortgages to pay. So maybe they could be set up with some contracts to get to work on Iran. Don’t forget that before his high-flying days came to an end our friend Mitchell Wade — briber of Duke Cunningham — was trying to angle for some of the democratize Iran money. Who knows. Truly anything is possible. But given the folks calling the shots, my confidence level is just not that high.
Given the mix of potential bad-acting, incompetence and cronyism, I’m not even sure what to call this. But for lack of a better word let’s call it agitpork. Who’s getting it? And what are they doing with it? I think there are folks out there who know. And we’d like to hear from you. Your anonymity will, of course, be protected.
