By Patricia H. Kushlis
How lower, exactly, is lower?
Blaming nameless “lower level” officials in the Department of State for taking it upon themselves to cancel Fulbright grants for seven Palestinians students just doesn’t compute.
Let’s put aside the concentration camp, shortsighted aspect of the Israeli Army’s noose around a small group of graduate students from Gaza and all the untoward ramifications that entails. I’m looking at a different dark side to this same story that my colleague Patricia Sharpe addressed on WV over the weekend.
What I raise here is the pass-the-blame game and worse - The New York Times’ willingness to buy into it. How well do the editors at The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune or Times Israel correspondent Ethan Bronner, who broke the story there, understand the operation of the US State Department or, for that matter, the Fulbright program? And why have the source or sources of this finger-pointing exercise remained anonymous?
It troubles me to see blame ascribed to unnamed “lower-level State Department officials” who, Bronner wrote on June 6, “had apparently assumed that the new stricter closing of Gaza would make it impossible to get the students out, so the officials canceled their grants.” It sounds as if, on first reading, a couple of GS-7s and 9s in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs had gone off the reservation and done something really stupid without checking with their superiors. Having worked in and with the bureau during my own lengthy Foreign Service career, I have my doubts.
A clever choice of words?
The more I think about it, however, the phrase Bronner used was “lower level officials.” Now, that’s really quite clever. I wonder if it wasn’t carefully chosen to appear to mean one thing – when in reality it may well mean something else. Yet no one, to my knowledge, has questioned it.
The uber-hierarchical State Department has multiple layers of “lower level officials” one ranking yet lower than the other. The operation is positively Byzantine. In the case of the Palestinian Seven, a “lower level official” could even have referred to the Deputy Secretary of State, the Under Secretary for Political Affairs or Public Diplomacy (if there had been one at the time), or the Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs. All are very high ranking but, of course, because they rank below Madam Secretary herself they themselves constitute “lower level officials.”
Alternatively, the term could have referred to mid-or even low level bureaucrats in the Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs. This latter meaning of the phrase is what we - Jane and John Q public - are meant to believe.
Blaming “lower-level” - presumably career government employees for incompetence - isn’t that the Republican way? Could the goal have been to make the career Washington bureaucracy appear incompetent yet again in order to cover up for a few Republican political appointee snafus – or for that matter top ranking professional diplomats - mistakes? I think the term was carefully selected precisely because it is so pregnant with meanings.
But why The Times printed this unsourced finger-pointing rumor is beyond me. I thought the newspaper had supposedly become more judicious in its use of unidentified sources. Or do I have it wrong?
How important is this?
Could this story have taken a different turn if, for instance, it had come out that Condi had lied despite her protestions of surprise and known about the problem all along, or that the unnamed “lower level officials” who had not informed her were at the highest, not lowest levels of the Department?
Come on: The Fulbright program has high level visibility and respect. This also means it usually receives high level attention when something major goes wrong. There are various routes that can be used to move such problems to the top - and quickly. Although even “fail-safe” systems can occasionally fail, the system, the program and the bureaucracy that administers it just don’t let those kinds of balls drop willy-nilly. Or if it did happen in this case, major changes at State - and perhaps the Embassy - need to occur. Now.
