Government Incompetence

Shorter Liz Cheney: "And when I grow up, I want to be Just Like Daddy!"

The Washington Post has her listed as the former principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs - has she left the State Department? She held that newly-created post since February 2005 (and before that, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs - thanks dad!). It must be nice to blame the lack of success in Iraq on something other than the lousy job you (and your dad) are doing...

Interesting post on AlterNet from June 2006:

Liz Cheney catapulted into her current job after a rather undistinguished career that leapfrogged from public to private life and back again. In her early 20s, she did a stint at the State Department while her father was secretary of defense in the first Bush administration, and then headed to law school at the University of Chicago and worked for Armitage Associates, a firm run by Richard Armitage. As an attorney, she worked for the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank, and served briefly as a U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) officer in Hungary and Poland. Her Middle East experience was, well, limited.

Asked about Liz's familiarity with the Middle East, a former staffer at the Middle East Institute, a Washington D.C., think tank, says that she dabbled in the Institute's Arabic language classes. "And she'd come to our annual conference," she said. That's it. That was, however, apparently enough to get her named deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs (NEA) in 2002.
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Wayne White, who served as deputy director of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and who headed that unit's Iraq team during the war, left the State Department in 2005. "The thing we all said among us, in chit chat, when she moved up to be PDAS after being the deputy assistant secretary, was, 'Ah, now we see the plan,'" he says. "First, she gets her training wheels as deputy assistant secretary ... where she'd get softer assignments, sort of training, which happens to people in that position who don't have a Middle East background, and she doesn't -- and then boom! right up to PDAS. She is in a position to stop anything from going forward -- as in the form of a memo, a recommendation -- that she pretty much wants."
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David Welch, the assistant secretary of state for NEA, is nominally Liz Cheney's boss. But her connection to her father, plus her pipelines directly up to more senior State Department officials such as Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, make it easy for her to eclipse Welch. (Like Armitage, who also served as a top State Department official for George W. Bush, Zoellick is a signatory to the statements of the Project for a New American Century in the 1990s, which charted the administration's bellicose course.) "David Welch is in an impossible position on anything she takes an interest in," says a former top NEA official. "And she takes an interest in the big issues -- Iraq, Iran, and so on. They have to be very careful, if they want to do anything that protects the national interest, because it has to coincide with what Liz Cheney thinks is in the national interest."

We're so lucky to have these brave patriots like Liz working for our nation.

Comments

[CKR]

Yeah - she left to have her fifth child last spring.

Must be nice never to have to worry about getting the job you want. But I guess anyone who could write that op-ed would qualify.

[Sherri]

I love how the Republicans are throwing around the term Jihad and trying to scare up support to stay in and slightly escalate troops in this war. She did learn from the best though, dear ol' dad should be proud.

[Victoria]

Why would anyone...ANYONE...care what lil Lizzy Cheney the daughter of, in my opinion, a war criminal has to say about anything. If she is so concerned about the American people why does she not strap on a gun and go to the front. Oh forgot...she comes from the family who has other priorities...like making major profits from this continuing farce she and the other war criminals...Bush, Rummey, Wolfy and Perle continue to promote. I can only believe the name Cheney will join Bush in the history books under worse administration ever in the U.S. Screw impeachment...try them all for crimes against the Iraqi and American people.