Dorrance Smith has received one of George Bush's precious recess appointments. How exciting!

We now have as Assistant Secretary of Defence for Public Affairs a man who is on record as describing (without offering any evidence) al-Jazeera as having "a working arrangement [with terrorists] that extends beyond a modus vivendi". It's almost as if the Secretary of Defence specifically wanted to neutralize a potentially effective, reality-based State Department-housed public diplomacy which included an outreach to al-Jazeera.

Allow me to quote myself on this lucky new recess appointee:

His legacy in Iraq was an almost unbelievable record of failure in the realm of building a credible, independent, critical Iraqi media. His view of the media as inherently political (he reportedly walked around the Green Zone wearing a "W 2004" hat, and his C-Span Baghdad project was a pure form of media as state propaganda, to "get the good news out") and his evident contempt for the contributions of the press to a functioning democracy, have had crippling legacies. And his views no doubt contributed to the Iraqi government's unbridled hostility towards al-Jazeera, including kicking them out of the country and making their own unsubstantiated allegations about collaboration with the insurgency. His views on al-Jazeera are of a piece with his views on the media as a whole. Indeed, he actually says this: "Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and al Qaeda have a partner in Al-Jazeera and, by extension, most networks in the U.S." That a person with such views was responsible for the media in the new Iraq tells us a lot about why it failed.

Hey, maybe it was his impressive performance in undermining the emergence of an independent Iraqi media that won him the prize - ahead of the curve, really.

Whatever the reason for the recess appointment of a proven incompetent political hack (who evidently couldn't even get through a Republican-controlled Senate) to this crucial position, it's a dark day for America's public diplomacy efforts in the Arab world.