Foley sets sights on Connecticut

Think of Tom Foley, the millionaire Republican candidate for senator who became the millionaire Republican candidate for governor last week, as George W. Bush’s one last gift to Connecticut.

The former president introduced Foley to public life by appointing him to his two and only government posts, ambassador to Ireland and director of private sector development in Iraq, where he was responsible for privatizing businesses that Saddam Hussein had nationalized. Both jobs were rewards for Foley’s fundraising prowess as a Bush Pioneer, one of 241 supporters who raised at least $100,000 for candidate Bush in 2000.

In his first presidential appointment, Foley was part of a group of Bush acolytes assembled by Paul Bremmer, who ran the occupation in Iraq and is best remembered for having fired half a million Iraqi government employees, including the entire army, with rather disastrous consequences.

Bremmer’s office was staffed by loyalists who were asked in pre-employment interviews how they voted in 2000 and what they thought of Roe v. Wade. As a result, a 21-year-old former Dick Cheney intern, whose previous job was driving an ice cream truck, headed domestic security, and the Iraqi Stock Exchange was in the hands of a 24-year-old Republican campaign worker.

Foley, who had made millions running an investment firm he founded in the 1980s, didn’t need to undergo a loyalty check and was a solid fit ideologically as he joined other deserving Republicans in what Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate in economics, called “making Iraq a playground for right-wing economic theorists.â€

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Foley’s zeal for that task is on display in “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,†an account of the Iraq occupation by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, The Washington Post’s Baghdad bureau chief at the time.

“A month after arriving,†Chandrasekaran wrote, “Foley told a contractor … he intended to privatize all of Iraq’s state-owned enterprises within 30 days.

“‘Tom, there are a couple of problems with that,’ the contractor said. ‘The first is an international law that prevents the sale of assets by an occupation government.’

“‘I don’t care about any of that stuff,’ Foley told the contractor, according to her recollection of the conversation. ‘I don’t give [an expletive deleted] about international law. I made a commitment to the president that I’d privatize Iraq’s business.’â€

Foley left Iraq after only a year and ran Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign in Connecticut, which didn’t work out, either. He became ambassador to Ireland two years later, having the two major qualifications for that job — he was a rich donor with a name as Irish as the previous ambassadors named Kenny, Egan, Sullivan and Kennedy.

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And now Foley is turning his talents to governing Connecticut without saying how he might do it. After announcing he’d seek the Republican nomination in Hartford last week, Foley answered the first question from the reporters invited to the announcement by saying, “This is actually not a news conference.â€

When the reporters protested, they were allowed what Ted Mann of The New London Day called “a five-and-a-half-minute scrum in the hall,†which elicited little news, other than an indication that Foley would spend his own millions on the campaign.

The session didn’t end well, according to The Hartford Courant.

When a Fairfield County reporter asked Foley if he didn’t feel he had an obligation to answer the questions the reporters had about his intention to run for governor, Foley said, “Thank you very much, I appreciate it,†as he stepped away.

“Is that a yes or no?†the reporter asked.

It was easier in Baghdad.

Dick Ahles is a retired journalist from Simsbury. E-mail him at dahles@hotmail.com.