Former national security staffer under President George W. Bush, and now Obama's nominee to be U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Brett McGurk is getting a little press, unfortunately I believe he may have negotiated a "lesser of two evils" approach to salvaging his career.
On April 18, 2012 Foreign Services veteran and Author, Peter Van Buren posted a story on his Blog We Meant Well. Let's look at this intriguing little snippet, allegedly about McGurk,
"What if a video existed that showed a prominent State Department VIP on the roof of the Republican Palace in Baghdad receiving, um, pleasure of an oral nature from another State Department officer not his wife, or even his journalist mistress of the time?"
and
"What if the Deputy Chief of Mission, hand in hand with the Diplomatic Security chief (RSO) at the time, decided that the whole thing needed to be swept under the rug and made to go away, at least until some blogger got a hold of it."
Today ABC news reports a slightly different story on McGurk. This story makes no mention of the allegations pending against him regarding the Iraq incident, and look how nicely they've tidied up his relationship with the "journalist mistress".
"McGurk has so far refused to comment on a collection of racy emails he purportedly exchanged with reporter Gina Chon while both were working in Iraq in 2008. McGurk, who was married at the time, was serving as chief negotiator during the 2008 U.S.-Iraq security agreement talks. Chon was covering the negotiations for the Wall Street Journal. McGurk later divorced his wife and married Chon."
In other coverage, yesterday it took the Washington Free Beacon to touch on the truth. While telling of McGurk and Chon's email correspondence the writer refers to McGurk in this way,
"McGurk--who is rumored to be the senior U.S. official caught on video receiving fellatio on the rooftop of Saddam Hussein's presidential palace--offers to throw his weight around in order to get Chon into a high level powwow with U.S. and Iraqi political bigwigs."
Is this the right man to be the new Ambassador to Iraq? I think not. If a man cannot hold up the weight of his zipper, there is no way he should be given the weight of Diplomacy.
