This hasn’t been a good week for the Obama Administration, with the Daschle mess, the ongoing battle over the stimulus bill, and the progosphere’s unhappiness with his choice of Senator Judd “just because the guy’s giving me a job doesn’t mean I’m going to vote for his bill” Gregg for Commerce.  The one good bit of news about it, though, is that none of these messes has involved anyone really going off on the Obama team (well at least anyone other than bloggers and pundits).

Until now.  This one is so bad it is both a SNAFU and completely FUBAR.  It’s our FUBAR SNAFU of the week.

Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, the former head of Central Command, a man not known to exaggerate — and someone who was an early and vocal supporter of Obama — has told both The Washington Times and the Foriegn Policy that the Obama team had told him that he was going to be the next U.S. Ambassador to Iraq — a job now said to be going to Christopher Hill, a foreign service officer currently serving as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs (and someone with zero Iraq experience).

Guess what?  Zinni is, how can I put it, just a wee bit unhappy about this:

When retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni told the Washington Times that he was offered the job of U.S. ambassador to Iraq before being passed over in favor of diplomat Christopher Hill, he did not say that one of the outrages of the experience was that his friend of 30 years, fellow former Marine Corps commandant and now national security advisor James L. Jones, had offered him the job, and then failed to tell him when the decision was changed.

“Jones had called me before the inauguration and asked if I would be willing to serve as ambassador to Iraq or in one of the envoy jobs, on the Middle East peace process,” Zinni told Foreign Policy. “I said yes. . . . Then two weeks ago, Jones called,” Zinni continued, “and said, ‘We talked to the secretary of state, and everybody would like to offer you the Iraq job.’ I said yes. . . .

“[Hillary] thanks me, asked me my views on Iraq,” Zinni recalled. “She said to [Undersecretary of State William] Burns and [Deputy Secretary of State Jim] Steinberg, ‘We’ve got to move quickly, Crocker is leaving, we’ve got to get someone in there and get the paperwork done and hearings. . . . Lots to do to get ready to go.”. . .

“To make a long story short, I kept getting blown off all week,” Zinni said. “Meantime, I was rushing to put my personal things in order,” to get ready to go. “Finally, nobody was telling me anything,” Zinni said. “I called Jones Monday several times. I finally got through late in evening. I asked Jones, ‘What’s going on?’ And Jones said, ‘We decided on Chris Hill.’ . . .I said, ‘Really,’” Zinni recalled. “That was news to me.”

Jones asked him if he would like to be ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Zinni said. “I said, ‘You can stick that with whatever other offers,’” Zinni recalled, saying he had used more colorful language with Jones. Asked Jones’s response and if he was apologetic, Zinni said, “Jones was not too concerned. He laughed about it.”

Whoopsie!  Sorry about that Gen. Zinni!  No hard feelings, okay?  Okay?  Bueller?

There’s some speculation that this might have been Richard Holbrooke’s doing, but that doesn’t make sense:  Holbrooke’s brief is Pakistan-Afghanistan, not Iraq.  I have no basis for this, but I wonder if Gates had something to do with it.  Another possibility is that Burns told Clinton that she needed to throw a bone to the foreign service.

Regardless of who was responsible, this was handled really, really badly.  Rule one of job searches is that you never give someone the impression that they’re your top candidate, even if they are — both because you haven’t made a final decision and because you don’t want to give them leverage in the subsequent final negotiations.

Rule two is that you always call other finalists the minute that someone else accepts the job.

Whoever was responsible for managing this — Jones, Clinton, one of their subordinates — broke both those rules.  No, I take that back.  They didn’t break them.  They threw them over a cliff.

Good luck getting Zinni back on board, guys.  I hope they’re already scheduling the calls from Clinton and Obama.  This is not someone you want showing up on CNN (or even worse, Fox) dissing the Administration.

Related posts

• Why Hillary Still Might Say No
• Whoopsie
• Transition: Constant Leaks or Conscious Tactic?
• Transition Watch: Anger in the Ranks
• The Panic over Political Appointments