Ed’s Note: This is the fourth part of a four-part interview with Tom Foley, Republican candidate for Governor of Connecticut.
Part I, published the week of February 10, 2010, featured some of Foley’s ideas about voter participation, being an ambassador to Ireland, and UConn’s tuition increase.

Part II, published the week of February 17, 2010, scratched the surface of his participation as the Director of Private Sector Development for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq from August 2003 through March 2004.

Part III, published the week of March 3, 2010, searched Foley’s responses to those who criticized the job he did in Iraq.

 

Tom Foley has measuring sticks for what success in Iraq will look like.

 

"If Iraq emerges as a representative government with representation of human rights, I think the goals that our government had in mind when they invaded Iraq will be achieved," he said. "People will have to decide if it was worth the cost in terms of lives and money."

 

This leads to the inevitable question: Seven years ago, in March 2003, did you support the invasion of Iraq?

 

"I wasn't a member of the government, I wasn’t in the legislature," he said. "I supported my government's foreign policy. If you are not a member of the legislature, or a member of the executive branch, you don't vote on every aspect of our government's foreign policy. I supported our government's policy."

 

But Mr. Foley, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said that the office of citizen is the highest office in a democracy. As a citizen, in March 2003, did you support the invasion of Iraq?

 

"I supported my government's foreign policy," he said.

 

The Bush Administration's foreign policy in March 2003 was the invasion of Iraq. Did you support the invasion of Iraq in March 2003?

 

"I supported my government's foreign policy," he said.

 

About a week after we had that merry-go-round of a conversation, it still bugged me. So I emailed Foley, and asked him to call me back for a few follow-ups. When he did, I asked him why the distaste for saying that you supported the invasion of Iraq?

 

"There is no distaste," Foley said. "I was just making the point that when you are a private citizen being asked if you supported it, I trust the government and support its foreign policy, but I wasn't a policy maker. To say I supported it, that is a different question if you are a policy maker."

 

Then Foley slipped back into his talking point about how history will be the ultimate judge of the invasion of Iraq. Doesn’t it bother you, then, I asked Foley, that we have spent thousands of American lives, more than a million Iraqi lives, and maybe $300 billion and we don't know the outcome?

 

"Sure, it'd be better that if it was so overwhelmingly positive, but we're not there," Foley said. "War is always messy. I don't think you can measure the cost of one live, or thousands of lives, against the outcome we are talking about."

 

The outcome Foley seeks is for Iraq to have a strong economy, and have a solid democracy that is a stabilizing influence in the Middle East.

 

"I think you need a historical perspective," Foley said. "If we lost a half million people in World War II, and we ask was that worth it? Most people, I think, would say it was."

 

Rather than go into the history of American corporate support for the Nazi regime, from Ford Motor Company to IBM to Union Banking Corporation, I moved swiftly to other areas that I needed to cover.

 

Books like from Rajiv Chandrasekaran's 2008 tome Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone and T. Christian Miller's Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives and Corporate Greed in Iraq (Black Bay Books, 2007, p. 38), criticized Foley as incompetent and a failure who CPA proconsul L. Paul Bremer wanted to dismiss but for Foley's connections to President Bush.

 

In so many words, Foley called such criticisms hogwash.

 

"It's absolutely untrue," he said. "I was asked to serve for six months. I served for seven. I served honorably. Nobody asked me to leave."

 

Foley pointed to his receipt of the Department of Defense's Distinguished Public Service Award as proof positive that his service was appreciated.

 

"Bremer wanted to dismiss me?" Foley said. "Bremer nominated me for the award, it would seem unlikely that Bremer thought me incompetent."

 

During his tenure, Foley sung the praises of American progress in developing Iraq for investment. For example, on February 24, 2004, he visited England to address a group of 150 British companies interested in securing reconstruction contracts in Iraq.

 

"In 12 to 18 months, Iraq will be a booming economy. In 5 to 10 years, Iraq is likely to emerge as the economic powerhouse of the Middle East," Mr. Foley said according to "UK getting fair share of Iraq contracts - O'Brien," a February 25, 2004 story by Saeed Shah in the Independent (UK).

 

Foley also said, per Shah: "There's great long-term potential for UK companies in the private sector." Foley told the crowd "unemployment had fallen steeply since the end of the war, from more than 50 per cent to 28 per cent and that 1 million jobs would be created from the upcoming contract awards."

 

In the six years since, the Iraqi unemployment rate has dropped to only 18 percent overall, with some segments of the population suffering higher rates, according to a January 2009 United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs report.

 

The UN report noted: "Opportunities for private sector job creation have been limited by a dominant public sector, the absence of a conducive regulatory environment, high dependence on oil revenues and security issues."

 

Furthermore, the UN body stated "The number of Iraqis employed in the public sector has doubled since 2005, with the public sector currently providing 43% of all jobs in Iraq and almost 60% of all full time employment."

 

Today, that UN report equals exoneration, Foley said. He criticized the Iraqi government's reliance on public sector jobs.

 

"I am not sure at what I was saying at the time wasn't accurate,” Foley said. "That has to do with the policies that sovereign government have pursued and implemented since they took over, some of which I don't agree with, and which I think are a mistake, having such large public sector employment, they are dampening, but ultimately to grow
28 to 18 percent is about a million jobs in Iraq."

 

In 2004, Foley also soft-pedaled security concerns, saying that they were "not nearly as great as it seems on television."

 

Six years later, Foley says he was just doing his job.

 

"Let me put my role and the timeframe in the context," Foley said. "In February 2004, I was traveling around Europe on a road show to pull together the potential investors and financial communities in all the major European countries to describe to them what was going on in Iraq to encourage them to consider investing an essential part of stabilizing Iraq and to build a better life and cement the peace.

 

"I was making a lot of statements that would be typical of someone trying to make people consider investing in Iraq. At the time they were reasonable," Foley said.

 

Yet (as Part I of this interview showed) two weeks prior to this trip to England, Foley's boss in the CPA, L. Paul Bremer told the Louisville Journal-Courier that the security situation was not looking good. Yet Foley demures.

 

"Iraq is the size of California, it has two-thirds of the population," Foley said. "There were parts of Iraq where there was violence, there were even larger parts of Iraq that were stable and peaceful. His statement might have been correct, my statement might have been correct also."

 

Just because a car bomb is going off doesn't mean that capitalism can't occur, Foley said.

 

"Plenty of car bombs that go off in places where they have strong economies and investors who do well," Foley said. "Pakistan would be an example."

 

The security situation in Iraq in February 2004 still allowed room for hope, Foley said.

 

"In February 2004, it wasn't implausible. There were lot of opportunities," Foley said. "It was until April and the problems in Fallujah that everyone really said 'Whoa, this is not going where we though it was.'"

 

Fast forward to April 30, 2004, Foley addressed a crowd of businessmen at a Washington, D.C. conference designed to highlight investment opportunities in Iraq.

 

"Whatever you're seeing, it's not as bad as it appears. You just need to accept that on faith," Foley said according to Naomi Klein's report in "Baghdad Year Zero," printed in the September 2004 issue of Harper's Magazine.

 

Unfortunately for Foley, this happened to be the same morning the first photos of torture from Abu Ghraib had been released. Foley said his comment was not in reference to Abu Ghraib.

 

"That's obviously not what I was referring to," Foley said. "It was taken from remarks I was making to an investor group. I was talking about security issues."

 

The media was only covering the hot spots in Iraq, Foley said.

 

"If the only source of information people had was U.S. television, it would be misleading," Foley said.

 

As for Abu Ghraib, the CPA was a civilian organization that had nothing to do with the military administration of jails. Foley said he got his information about Abu Ghraib from news reports at the time.

 

"It's terrible," Foley said. "It is criminal behavior on the part of some of our military personnel. I believe it was plausible that it was not a policy, it is my understanding that it was only a few bad apples and they were punished."

 

Although, in 2006, former Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who was demoted as a result of the expose of Abu Ghraib, claimed Donald Rumself himself signed a memo authorizing civilian contractors to utilize techniques including sleep deprivation and the playing of loud music.

Interview with Tom Foley, Part IV top...