State Watch

By PHK

Maybe it’s a blessing that Condi is off to Turkey to attempt to explain to the Turks why our top general in Kurdistan says he won’t do anything to help rein in the PKK. If that’s the message, Rice’s one day fly-by en route to Iraq will be about as effective as Nero’s fiddling while Rome burns – but it does get her out of a smoldering Foggy Bottom for a few days while leaving her deputies to deal with the flames from an incensed Foreign Service.

Not only did our less than illustrious public diplomacy Czarina Karen Hughes submit her resignation papers this morning to begin mid-December but according to the news reports, Condi agreed to turn over Iraq employee convoy guard duty to Gates’ Pentagon as a result of the Blackwater shoot-em up on Nisour Square fiasco. I don’t object to the military providing State with protective services and placing contract security guards under some kind of law. After all, the Marine Guard has been a staple at US Embassies around the world for decades. But it looks to me as if the administration is - among other things - substituting one understaffed contracting oversight office for another – while continuing to expand the scope and weight of the US military establishment and the military-industrial complex over US foreign policy. After all, the military has to contract out guard duty and other functions too and it doesn’t necessarily control private contractors overseas – and certainly not in terms of fiscal or other kinds of accountability - that much better than State.

Easy come, easy go . . .

Meanwhile, Hughes, who - one might say - aptly chose Halloween to announce her departure from the Department, is the third State political appointee to desert State's sinking ship in less than a week.

An aside: Condi apparently managed to make that formal announcement before escaping to Andrews to catch her plane to Turkey. Clearly, however, she couldn’t be bothered to wait around for the much more difficult meeting with 300 career diplomats angered over the Department's newly announced forced assignments Iraq policy. Looks to me like her absence represents just one more example of why 88 percent of the American Foreign Service Association's active duty members do not think Rice "is fighting for them." Let alone has their interests at heart.

Earlier, the far more junior David Denehy who was most recently “senior advisor” (often a shunt-aside job) to the apparently unpopular democratizing Iran account in State’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs announced quietly last week that he was leaving to set up his own small company – whatever that means. This once-upon-a-time fledgling IRI staffer engaged in the democracy building business either saw the handwriting on State’s wall and jumped before being pushed, or someone elsewhere made him a better offer.

Then, on the red-faced security front, Richard J. Griffin, resigned abruptly as Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security, probably well aware that the improper and illegal offering of immunity to Blackwater security guards by a State security investigatory team was about to leak to the media. Griffin’s bio has already been expunged from State’s website. Reminds me of the airbrushed photos in the Russian archives from Stalin’s days. Now you see them, now you don’t.

But the real reason the steam is rising from the Department – as opposed to the grates in the sidewalk near the building where DC’s homeless take up permanent residence in winter – has much to do with the announcement of forced assignments of Foreign Service Officers to Iraq. Not only did the current Director General of the Foreign Service Ambassador Henry K. Thomas, Jr. announce the forced assignments decision to the media before letting those potentially affected know (so they had to read it first in the national press), but the fact is the Department just doesn’t have the staff to fill the once again expanded number of positions. As the October 15, 2007 Center for Strategic & International Studies “blue ribbon report” tells us, State’s staffing deficit really totals 2,094 positions including a shortage of over 1,000 Foreign Service Officers. Yet, during the past two years Congress has even refused to fund State’s modest request for 331 additional officers.

It was bad enough in previous years cajoling far too many Foreign Service Officers to serve in war zones for which they did not have the training, skills or inclination. Adding yet another 80 new positions in Iraq for the coming year could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Top this off with Ambassador Ryan Crocker’s request that the newcomers speak the language and understand the culture.

Ryan, you’re right, but stop wishing for the moon.

As the American Foreign Service Association points out in Emails to members, the reality is those people are not available.

Years ago – even before the end of the Cold War – State devalued the officers with precisely those skills and not just in Iraqi Arabic. Learning hard languages became a disincentive for promotion and retention.

During the 1990s, as Ambassador Monteagle Stearns documented in his 1996 book Talking to Strangers, the Department forced out way too many language and area specialists in its frenzy to downsize (or “right size” as the Clinton Administration mistakenly called it.)

Remember the October 1997 Foreign Service Journal article, “Where Have all the Arabists Gone?” Too many Arabic language trained FSOs were forced out or ignored because their expertise was not valued - or their political views did not fit with the bent of the political overlord who then headed the Near East Bureau. And this under Clinton/Albright.

True, under Colin Powell’s tenure as Secretary of State, Powell increased training in everything from management to Arabic, but as various GAO studies have subsequently shown, the number of Arabic speakers is still way too low: demand has far outstripped supply. And those who buck the prevailing neocon Israeli ethno-centric view of the Middle East have been too often frozen out.

Even in 2006, the State Department had only 23 officers who spoke Arabic at the “advanced proficiency level.” For a difficult language like Arabic, it takes a talented language student two years of intensive study to reach the minimum level of professional competency. As a seasoned linguist once reminded me – it takes 20 years to grow a tree as well as a professionally competent Arabic, or other hard language, speaker. Two weeks pre-departure training in - perhaps dodging bullets and spotting IEDs - does not begin to cut it.

The bottom line is that the Foreign Service, like the US Army, is broken. This administration’s demands far exceed the Foreign Service’s ability to fulfill the requirements placed upon it. It’s just that simple. And that sad.

And now Cheney, Norman Podhoretz and the neocon crew are busy as buzzing bees as they agitate in the media and elsewhere for the US to bomb Iran.

Will W’s over-militarized, contract out, adventurist foreign policy nightmare spurred on by AEI and his disastrous Vice President ever end?

Comments

[arthur green (USIA FSIO 197-1999)]

Pat,

read your thoughtful analyis of public diplomacy during the Bush Administration.

Is it really necessary to dump all problems in the Middle East on "the Lobby"

quoting "...those who buck the prevailing necon Israeli etho-centric view of the Middle East have been too often frozen out.."

I have dealt professionally for close to four decades with the complexity of the Arab-Iisraeli conflict

Cheap bumper sticker canards do not solve any purpose at all

[Charles Walsh]

What's interesting about the carefully orchestrated two-year-long rollout of this directed assignment mechanism to staff our Potemkin white elephant in Baghdad is what it tells us about this Administration's chutzpah.

The neocon default assumption that professional foreign service staff are "disloyal" must have made that much more delicious the dumping of the unwanted and virtually unachievable "nation-building in Iraq" portfolio from the Military on said sissies. Besides, WE don't do nation-building, remember?

In the hard and fast world of lets-make-rich the Amway Blackwaters, this must've looked like the perfect two-fer. Our soldiers don't get their pricey manhood dirtied with the messy stuff actually required by the situation on the ground in post-invasion Iraq and State can take the fall if it doesn't work out there, allowing us to motor on to Iran to "finish" the job. For a Rummy or a Darth - when they actually thought this stuff through clearly enough - this had to be brilliant, even if for the Shinsekis and Sanchezes, it spat blood.

Condi, in her perfectionist zeal for tightly wrapping the potentially less-than-neat, has shown a strong prediliction for controlling her interactions with staff via a housebroken DG. Perhaps this is an academic thing, sort of like using Deans to slap down dissent via tenure chats and official policies.

Regardless, while trying to make Iraq work could be argued to be a national and not simply ideological imperative, making the foreign service show its flag there as a disciplinary exercise seems an inspired means of waning the hearts and minds of a generation of do-gooding wannabes. Think of the initial brighteyed and Texan faceless multitudes who staffed Bremer's superb force as your goal. Now they were right thinking. That, gentlemen and ladies, is how the Near East should be won.

[JohnO]

I would not be surprised to see GWB make some comments about State Dept 'complainers' and how Ronnie R firing of all those Air Traffic Controllers was a good thing ...

[J.]

Hey Pat:

Was wondering if you've seen Phil Carter's post on the FSO revolt:

http://www.intel-dump.com/archives/archive_2007_10_28-2007_11_03.shtml#1193956374

He thinks (and I think Pat Lan also echoed) that they ought to suck it up and suffer with the rest of the military over there. I tend to think that saying "suck it up" kinda ignores the very bad position that any State Dept official would be in, given a forced assignment in the Green Zone. Care to elaborate?

[CKR]

Hey J.:

Since I'm the non-Foreign-Service member of this team and I just came upon your comment, I'll note that State Department employees are regularly evacuated from war zones, leaving skeleton crews.

I keep wondering, therefore, why there are so many State personnel in Baghdad and more needed. Much of what embassy personnel do involves meeting with people in peaceful joint endeavors or trying to understand how to promote more of such endeavors.

Kind of hard to do when you're surrounded by guys in Ray-Bans with ammo belts and guns.

[PHK]

J: Cheryl's right. Usually Embassies are evacuated in times of war. Diplomats are not part of the military and rarely carry weapons. Look up the definitions - I just did for another post I'm writing - Diplomat, Soldier and Military have very different meanings even in the Dictionary.

In my view, diplomats do not belong there. End of story. Juan Cole's right. The Embassy should be closed - or if not reduced to a skeleton staff of FSOs. If the USG wants any FSOs there then it needs to change a lot - including training (they now get next to none), a major increase in positions for the Department including the Foreign Service, a change in recruitment policies (hey, just hire special forces for a special assignment). And while I'm at it, more politicals in the Department should take the hint from Karen Hughes and leave before they are driven out with bags over their heads. Or maybe they should be sent to Iraq.