After listening to Ted Cruz talk about his ISIS strategy during the December 15 Republican debate—"making the sand glow" and "carpet bombing" Syria—I asked, somewhat rhetorically, who could possibly be filling his head with such ridiculous notions. But now that Cruz has won Iowa, and he may win more (though probably not New Hampshire), it is worth asking: who is the defense/security advisor with whom he's closest?
After all, Cruz himself has absolutely no National Security experience. He never served in the military. Sure, after winning a Senate seat in 2012 he was appointed to the Senate Armed Services Committee. But let's do a roll-call check: Out of 50 SASC meetings between '13 and '15 (his first two years in the Senate) he showed up only 17 times. So, when it comes to his presidential campaign, you would think he would assemble a deeply knowledgeable bench in a field in which he is so obviously a neophyte. Perhaps a general with 30 to 40 years of experience. Or an academic or member of a think tank who has thought about these issues for just as long. Or guys like me, who worked in the military at the strategic level and did the writing and much of the prep work for decisions by those generals.
Instead, Ted Cruz went with an art historian. One who, when asked about Cruz's earlier statements on ISIS, said, "I'm never going to apologize for working for a candidate who wants to be too mean to the terrorists. That doesn't seem to me really to be a downside."
So just who is Dr. Victoria Coates, who appears to be Cruz's sole National Security Advisor? Let us start with what she is not.
She has never worked in the Pentagon; never worked in the State Department; never worked in the intelligence community; never served in any branch of the military; never lived overseas representing the United States in any way; never worked for the federal government; never had a security clearance. (Unless, perhaps, for editing. I'll check that.); never written a book, or indeed any academic or professional article, on national security, any aspect of any of the branches of the military, or on modern international relations; never been in a combat zone, one of ours or anybody else's.
So what are her qualifications?
Victoria Coates graduated college in the early 1990s. In a recent interview with Breitbart, she said that she "missed being a double-major in political science by one class credit." So close! She stayed in academia, gaining a Masters degree and then, in 1998, a PhD in Art History, in which her specialization was the Italian Renaissance. From 2010 to 2013, she was a "Consulting Curator" at the Cleveland Museum of Art, at which she was an expert for their show "Last Days of Pompeii." Her only book, which just came out, is a book called David's Sling: A History of Democracy in Ten Works of Art.
Who is behind this rise from art historian at the Cleveland Museum of Art to being the National Security Advisor to one of the presidential front-runners for the Republican Party? It appears to have begun with Donald Rumsfeld.
In 2007, just after Rumsfeld bailed from the position of Secretary of Defense, he spent a while in transition before setting up his own holding company, which, if you don't know, is literally a shell. It is a shield used to protect people for financial reasons. Nominally, DHR Holdings LLC said its purpose was in part to provide scholarships, but it appears that the reality was otherwise: its employees mostly worked to produce Don Rumsfeld's book.
The LLC had just two employees. The company's estimated intake for the whole company per year was just $88,000-99,000. Split two ways, in DC, that is not a lot of money. Maybe Rumsfeld subscribed to the wage gap; it is, and apparently has always been, an all-female staff.
Dr. Coates' job was as an editor. Editing the English Language does not exactly make you a National Security expert, does it? But working for Donald Rumsfeld was enough to get her a gig with Texan Rick Perry, her first as a "national security expert" when he took a run at the Presidency from late 2011 through the beginning of 2012.
From there she went on to a one-year position as "adjunct fellow" at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, the neo-con foundation in downtown DC set up in the wake of September 11. Even there, however, it is difficult to see what she actually did, or more importantly learned. The foundation did not publish any work she had written.
Indeed it appears she's only ever written five short articles in the past decade, and all of them were of little more substance than an op-ed: Two for the Weekly Standard, and three blog posts on the conservative blog Redstate, none of which were exactly rigorous scholarship.
So why did Cruz picked her? Perhaps he assumes that time spent working at Donald Rumsfeld's private firm and five months with Rick Perry makes her an international relations and national security expert.
Death is permanent. For those who deal in the reality of combat, this is not an abstract issue open to offhand suggestions during a presidential debate based on the advice of Don Rumsfeld's art-historian editor. It is personal.
Then again, given Coates's experience and complete distance from actual people who fight and die, this is not really surprising. But then what do I know? I am just a 25-year US Army Airborne Infantry Ranger.
As always, I can be reached at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com
