I'm not sure whether to take the nomination of Bernard Kerik to be director of homeland security as a lesson in how functionally irrelevant most cabinet secretaries are these days, or yet another indication of the degree to which the current administration values loyalty and symbolism over competence and substance.
Let's clear up a few things. First, Kerik has never had a high-level post in Washington before, and so will be at the mercy of all the more Beltway-savvy subordinates who are fighting to retain their institutional prerogatives and stymie major reform within the recently-created DHS.
That's a problem considering that the department remains a cobbled-together assemblage of legacy agencies with little coordination or clear direction.
Second, like Ridge before him, there's really nothing in his resume' that suggests he's up to the job. He was NYC police commissioner for just over a year (August 2000 until a few months after 9/11). His last big job was to spend six months training the Iraqi police force. He came back after three months for reasons left obscure to the public, but easy to discern nonetheless: The training of Iraq's police has been a disaster.
As Reuters reported (link expired) at the time of the presidential debates (when George W. Bush was bragging about how many new police were on the job in Iraq):
Quote:The documents show that of the nearly 90,000 currently in the police force, only 8,169 have had the full eight-week academy training. Another 46,176 are listed as "untrained," and it will be July 2006 before the administration reaches its new goal of a 135,000-strong, fully trained police force.
Six Army battalions have had "initial training," while 57 National Guard battalions, 896 soldiers in each, are still being recruited or "awaiting equipment." Just eight Guard battalions have reached "initial (operating) capability," and the Pentagon acknowledged the Guard's performance has been "uneven."
Training has yet to begin for the 4,800-man civil intervention force, which will help counter a deadly insurgency. And none of the 18,000 border enforcement guards have received any centralised training to date, despite earlier claims they had, according to Democrats on the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee.
They estimated that 22,700 Iraqi personnel have received enough basic training to make them "minimally effective at their tasks," in contrast to the 100,000 figure cited by Bush.
But hey -- Kerik campaigned for Bush, so how bad can he be?
