Kerik may be a ker-plunk

Ok, so the two don't really go together that well, but you catch my drift. Benjamin Wallace-Wells has an informative guest-post on the nominee for Homeland Security... it ain't pretty:

So, fascinating guy. But is he really ready for his new gig, as Director of Homeland Security, leading a tender, evolving and urgently important government agency? His new job will require mastering the knotty bureaucracies and power structures of Washington. He's never worked in the capital. It will require him to be a nimble consumer of intelligence, deciding which threats warrant action for local police departments, when he has never before worked with intelligence. It will demand that Kerik figure out a way to fix our nation's porous borders (he's never dealt with immigration or border security) make sure our planes and transportation routes are safe (nope) and master the coordination of what were once 22 separate federal agencies, none of which he's ever worked for.

Bush, sensibly, gave Kerik a pre-hire tryout in the summer of 2002 in a gig that his experience prepped him much better for, training Iraqi police. So how'd Kerik do? Pretty poorly. Kerik's credited with upping the equipment of the forces, but he also neglected to run any background checks, meaning that, after Kerik left, the Iraqi police were so corrupt and insurgent-friendly that American leaders eventually demanded a purge. I write "after Kerik left" because he only stayed in Iraq for three months, leaving with no public announcement and for reasons which remain a mystery and which Newsday, among other outlets, has been trying to uncover ever since. The job, of course, was far from finished. In October, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi complained that the American training of his force was insufficient: "[The police's] capabilities are not complete and the situation is very difficult now in respect to creating the forces and getting them ready to face the challenges." That's not all Kerik's fault, but the problem he was assigned to fix probably deserved a stay of more than ninety days.

Most compelling to me are BWW's points that he has no experience with large bureaucracies and has never worked in DC... he will be very easy to undercut by folks who don't like his edicts (especially when his domain is so extensive). He will be minced meat within a months.