Dan Senor

Daniel Samuel Senor (born November 6, 1971) is an American columnist, writer, and political adviser. He was chief spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and senior foreign policy adviser to U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney during the 2012 election campaign. A frequent news commentator and contributor to The Wall Street Journal, he is co-author, along with Saul Singer, of the book Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle (2009) and The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World (2023).

Early life and education

Senor was born in Utica, New York, and grew up in Toronto, Ontario, the youngest of four children. His father, Jim, worked for Israel Bonds; his mother, Helen, was from Košice, now in Slovakia, where she and her mother hid from the Slovak Nazi collaborators during the Holocaust. Helen Senor's father was murdered at the Auschwitz concentration camp. After the war, Helen and her mother fled to Paris, then via New York to Montreal. Senor said that his mother's post-Holocaust trauma "was very heavy for us growing up". Senor graduated from Forest Hill Collegiate Institute.

He studied at the University of Western Ontario and earned a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in history. He moved onto Hebrew University of Jerusalem to complete a one-year international study program as part of his undergraduate years. He earned a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Harvard Business School.

Career

Early career

Senor spent much of the 1990s working as a staffer on Spencer Abraham's (R-MI) 1994 Senate campaign and then in his Capitol Hill office. He later worked for Senator Connie Mack III (R-FL) and at AIPAC. During that time, he caught the attention of Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, who introduced him to the neoconservative group affiliated with George W. Bush.

From 2001 to 2003, he was an investment banker at the Carlyle Group.

Iraq

In the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and during the fighting, Senor was a Pentagon and White House adviser based in Doha, Qatar, at U.S. Central Command Forward.

Senor was subsequently based in Kuwait, working with General Jay Garner during the final days of the invasion, and was in southern Iraq when the Saddam Hussein regime fell. His responsibilities were to highlight US success to the media, which received criticism from reporters opposed to the war. Senor formally re-located to Baghdad on April 20, 2003. He traveled with General Jay Garner's team in the first American post-war civilian protection unit, becoming one of the first American civilians to enter Baghdad after the fall of the regime. Senor served as Chief Spokesperson for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), as Senior Advisor to Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, and as adviser to the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. In the U.S., he was "a regular television fixture in the immediate aftermath of the 2003 Iraq invasion", thus becoming "the face of the Bush Administration's efforts in Iraq".

According to Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Senor was known for the zealous spin that put a good face on the disaster unfolding in Baghdad. Some statements he made to the press did not reflect the actual situation in the city, according to Maureen Dowd. She said "As the spokesman for Paul Bremer during the Iraq occupation, Mr. Senor helped perpetrate one of the biggest foreign policy bungles in U.S. history. The clueless desert viceroys summarily disbanded the Iraqi Army, forced de-Baathification, stood frozen in denial as thugs looted ministries and museums, deluded themselves about the growing insurgency, and misled reporters with their Panglossian scenarios of progress. 'Off the record, Paris is burning,' Mr. Senor told a group of reporters a year into the war. 'On the record, security and stability are returning to Iraq.'" According to the Associated Press, Senor once explained a suicide bombing by saying, "The reason we have bad days like this in Iraq is because we have had so many good days!"

The Forward stated as spokesman for the CPA, Senor developed a reputation for saying one thing on the record and the opposite off the record. Liberal commentator Rachel Maddow referred to Senor as "the guy trying to convince all the reporters the invasion was going awesome when of course, in fact, it was a disaster."

Senor remained in Iraq until the summer of 2004. His 15 months working for the CPA from Baghdad made him one of the longest-serving American civilians in Iraq at the time. For his service, he was awarded the Department of Defense Distinguished Civilian Service Award, one of the Pentagon's highest civilian honors.

Start-up Nation

Senor is the co-author, with his brother-in-law, Jerusalem Post columnist Saul Singer, of Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle. The book, published in November 2009, examines the entrepreneurial economy of Israel and the cultural and social environment that supports this economy. "It's a book about Israel that's not for Jews," Senor has said. "I didn't want it to be in the Judaica section of the bookstore, or the Israel or the Middle East section", instead of the Business section, where in fact it is more likely to be placed. The book has provoked a wide range of responses, from reviews that hail its research and its portrayal of often-neglected facets of Israeli society, to reviews that claim the book implicitly justifies never-ending conflict in the region. Senor and Singer have been praised for the effectiveness with which they have "translat[ed] Israel's own image of itself for an international audience"; their book's title has entered the language as shorthand descriptive term for Israel. The book inspired the creation of Start-Up Nation Central, a non-profit organization based in Tel-Aviv.