Wrong Man for the Job

In late May of last year, Bernard Kerik--President Bush's nominee for Homeland Security Secretary--took a leave from his lucrative job at Giuliani Partners and headed for Iraq. The Defense Department lured Kerik away with a $140,000 salary and the prestigious position of training the new Iraqi police force.

"I will be there at least six months--until the job is done," Kerik told Newsday. He jumped ship less than four months into his six-month contract with the job far from done. Kerik said he needed a vacation.The Pentagon alleged he'd completed his task.  Over a year later, many details of Kerik's stay--particularly why he left early--remain shrouded in mystery. The known facts do not offer a ringing endorsement.

** Kerik's oversight of a $50 million police-training contract for the controversial defense contractor DynCorp produced few tangible results.

** Kerik spent $1.2 billion to train 35,000 troops in Jordan even though France and Germany offered to provide training for free. He also bought $20 million worth of rifles and revolvers from Jordan when the weapons could've been obtained for far less in Iraq.

** Kerik hired Iraqi policemen without background checks who later turned out to be hardened criminals. He re-hired policeman formerly employed by Saddam Hussein and bragged of training 37,000 new officers. Currently, roughly a quarter of the force Kerik left in place--a total of 30,000 officers--have been or will soon be fired by the US government and paid $60 million in severance payments, according to the far-from-antiwar New York Post.

** A few weeks before leaving, Kerik announced a plan to train 28,000 Iraqi officers at a US base in Hungary. A week later, Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Medgessy denied ever discussing an arrangement with Kerik and expressed shock at reading of the details for the first time in the press, according to the International Herald Tribune. The US Embassy in Budapest soon confirmed Medgessy's version. Kerik has never publicly explained what he was talking about.

Soon after his departure, the Philadelphia Inquirer described the Iraqi police force as "understaffed, underequipped, and in no position to stamp out the gangs of kidnappers, carjackers and thieves--let alone bombers."

This is Kerik's Iraq legacy: An Iraqi police force in shambles. Recruits are quitting their jobs in droves while the insurgency has no shortage of infilitrators. Of the 82, 051 officials on the payroll, only 32,880 have been trained by the US, with just 8,200 receiving the supposedly-comprehensive six-week training program. Recruitment rates continue to drop as insurgents target the remaining officers with increasing precision. In Mosul, 3,200 of the city's 4,000 officers fled their posts recently after rebel attacks.

"The early administrators, including Kerik, were in denial of this being a tough job," says Peter Singer, a security expert at the Bookings Institute. "If we are not successful in training the Iraqi police, this whole operation is a failure."

Kerik cannot be blamed solely for the severity of the current mess. But the incompetence of his abrupt tenure laid the groundwork for the rapidly deteriorating security environment today. Now Bush wants the man locals dubbed the "Baghdad Terminator" to run a sprawling federal department consisting of twenty-two agencies, 180,000 employees and a $40.2 billion budget.

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