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May 1, 2007
Proof that there is no punishment for failure in politics
Fred Clark beat me to the topic of this post by wishing everyone a Happy Andrew Natsios Day last week, but this has been something I've wanted to comment on for a bit, so I'll have a go at it myself.
A couple of weeks ago, I was at a wedding of a couple of college friends in Salem, Massachusetts, and after the reception ended, a bunch of us headed over to a local branch of the Boston Beerworks down the street for some drinks and snacks. On the menu was something called the "Big Dig Brownie" which claimed to offer "$14 billion worth of taste." I pointed out that it would be more accurate if the Big Dig Brownie was listed on the menu for $2.50, but when you got the bill, you would get charged more than $14.
Now, a lot of people were responsible for the costs of the Big Dig having spiraled out of control from it's original estimate of $2.8 billion, but one of the more infamous characters in all of this was Andrew Natsios, the chairman and chief executive officer of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority during the Cellucci administration. It turned out that during his tenure, he covered up evidence of cost overruns, which had already been spiraling upwards as it was, in order to ensure that federal money wouldn't be cut off and to avoid more federal oversight from the Clinton administration, not to mention the fact that he wanted to avoid the fate of his predecessor, Jim Kerasiotes, who was also fired when cost overruns became apparent.
Things being as they are, it turns out it's awfully difficult to cover up cost overruns on the billions-of-dollars scale, and sure enough, Natsios was outed and promptly fired in 2001. I promptly forgot about him until one evening in the summer of 2003, I was watching a re-run of Nightline originally broadcast in April 2003 on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, and who was the guest, but Andrew Natsios explaining that Iraq could pay for its own reconstruction through oil revenues. By the mid-summer, when I was watching this, it was clear that the guy was going to be totally wrong. Not too much later in September, 2003, the president would plead for an extra $87 billion to continue the war in Iraq (by the way, Happy Mission Accomplished Day, everyone!), and sure enough, no one is claiming that the war is something that hardly cost us a thing.
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| "Why, the mileage on this car is so great, the scheduled maintenance will pay for itself!" |
Whose idea was it to pick Andrew Natsios, a guy tainted by scandal by covering up cost overruns in the largest public works project in the world, to be the public spokesman for predicting costs of the Iraq war? Surely some people must have been sitting around a table discussing who would be good, and someone said, "let's find someone with experience. This guy Natsios had a job like that before. How about him?" Somehow no one objected by saying, "that guy was fired because he screwed up the very job you want to hire him for!"
Surely, you're thinking, this guy had to have been banished to ignominy after being so blatantly wrong (if not outright misleading) about the most expensive military operation in 30 years, no? Or even if he was given a patronage job, they made him something like assistant ambassador to Denmark or something, right? Funny you should ask, since the answer is, in fact, "no" to both questions. Last September, the guy was appointed Special Envoy to Sudan.
One is reminded of an eerie parallel of a certain April Glaspie, US ambassador to Iraq in 1990 who told Saddam Hussein as tensions rose between Iraq and Kuwait that "We have no opinion on your Arab - Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. ... the Kuwait issue is not associated with America" on the eve of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Yeah, not one of the slicker diplomatic moves in history if you're trying to stop a potential middle eastern conflagration. No one heard of her again until 1993 or so when she turned up in a diplomatic post in Somalia, where the U.S. suddenly found itself bogged down in a military conflict trying to hunt down warlords. It can't possibly be coincidental that wherever these people get assigned to, things start to go wrong in a big way soon afterwards.
Posted by Dean at May 1, 2007 11:30 PM
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Comments
That's OK, pretty soon he'll stop pestering only Sudan and start screwing up most of the world when he's appointed to replace Wolfowitz at the World Bank
Posted by: Cael at May 19, 2007 3:11 PM