WhirledView

America's Unsuccessful War in Pakistan

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Pakistan is the world’s sixth largest country, with a population of nearly 168,000,000 people, most of them Muslims, which means there are multiple deeply held divergences in the interpretation and practice of Islam, although these chasms may disappear when outside force is applied—U.S. force included. To understand this dynamic, Americans might remember how bipartisanship crops up when external threats appear. So Americans should not be surprised that even relatively secular urban Pakistanis are not enthusiastic about American efforts to vigorously pursue or eradicate “Islamist insurgents” within their northern borderland. There is certainly a problem of law and order in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, a problem that is acquiring urgency because the ferment is spilling out and into other parts of Pakistan. Terrorists have threatened Islamabad and Lahore as well as the ever volatile megacity of Karachi, for example. Above all, longstanding, largely tacit understandings about cultural autonomy and spheres of influence within and across national boundaries have been abused and violated by many players.

But employing the Pakistani Army to slaughter unruly tribals by the hundreds or thousands in order to pluck Osama bin laden, America’s Enemy Number One, out of his mountainous safe haven would appear, to most Pakistanis, like swatting a fly with an atom bomb: a strategy certain to do more harm than good. And Pakistan is jealous of its sovereignty.

“Half of all Pakistanis want their government to negotiate and not fight Al Qaeda, with less than a third saying military action by the Pakistani government is called for,” according to a recent poll by Terror Free Tomorrow. They'd prefer to negotiate with the Afghan and Pakistan Taliban, too. Some 73 per cent of those polled said that “the real purpose of [America's] war on terror is to weaken the Muslim world and dominate Pakistan.” Part of me wonders if a more effective Public Diplomacy effort might have led to less negativity. Part of me replies, "It's the policy, stupid."

American policymakers should pay attention to such disheartening poll results. Pakistan, as a semi-cooperative ally, is endlessly exasperating to American policy makers. Pakistan as a sullen ex-ally would be far worse, and all it would take to accomplish such a divorce is the capture and public parading of a few U.S. special forces operatives nabbed on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan. The furor over America's border-crossing bombs, called in to kill alleged insurgents who turned out to be Pakistan Border Corps troops, of whom 11 died, gives a tiny hint of the likely reaction. American popularity in Pakistan is at an all time low these days, while sympathy for Al Qaeda’s goals, if not the violence with which those goals are pursued, is rising. Thus, the secular elite that has been governing Pakistan since its inception is increasingly under siege. To stay in power the non-religious parties must maintain their nationalist if not their Islamist credentials. A popular way of criticizing Pervez Musharraf, George W. Bush’s increasingly marginalized ally in the “war against terror,” is to call him an American tool.

Hands Across the Border

Once upon a time India served as the juicy scapegoat for Pakistan’s nationalists, and not so long ago outside observers worried that India (or Pakistan) might inadvertently (or intentionally) lob a nuclear device across the border. To defend the brand new country against the threat of Indian irredentism is what the Pakistan army was created for. And why did Pakistan originally encourage the activities of violent Islamists who are now, in classic blowback fashion, threatening a form of Islamic revolution within Pakistan itself? Why, to weaken India on the cheap, by forcing New Delhi to deal with incessant insurgency in Muslim majority Kashmir.

But things may be changing on the Indian front. When asked the tired old question as to whether a “foreign hand” might be “fanning trouble in the tribal belt,” Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani replied “yes.” Yet India wasn’t named this time. The alleged culprits were “some foreigners from Central Asian States.” No doubt American policymakers would have preferred a Gilani diatribe against Arabs, as in Osama bin Laden, or Egyptians, as in Aymen Al Zawahri, but the latest series of talks between India and Pakistan seem to be achieving some degree of trust between the traditional enemies. The still wary neighbors are discussing peach and security, confidence building measures in Kashmir, economic ties, prisoner exchanges and anti-terrorism.

Better yet, from that point of view, a recent editorial in Dawn applauds the new sanity:

....detente between Indian and Pakistan will impact positively on global politics. With no signs of Islamabad winning the “war on terror” in the immediate future and the militants recognizing no borders, a wise strategy demands that India and Pakistan join hands in their security endeavour.

However, the Dawn editorial ends with a twist that may not please Washington:

In that context their agreement...to hold meetings of their anti-terrorism mechanism regularly is encouraging. It would also reduce Islamabad’s dependence on Washington in world politics.

Speaking of Washington, when asked about making Pakistan’s Dr. Strangelove, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, available for further interrogation from IAEA as a result of recently uncovered evidence that his one-man proliferation operation was even more generous than previously known, Gilani said, “the issue of Dr. Qadeer is over.” This will displease the Americans. So will Gilani’s present position on the Pakistani nuclear weapons program: “we are not a rogue state and are neither indulging in an arms race with any one” although “minimum deterrence will be maintained in this regard.

Desperately Seeking Bin Laden

Above all, the Americans are definitely not happy with Pakistan’s failure to nab Osama bin Laden or to permit American forces to nip over the border from Afghanistan to do the job for them.

POW Experience and the Presidency

by Cheryl Rofer

When I heard Wesley Clark say, on Sunday, that while John McCain's behavior as a prisoner of war was honorable, it wasn't a job qualification for the presidency, I breathed a sigh of relief that at last someone was calling the McCain campaign, and possibly even more so, the media, on the unthinking conflation of things military with things civilian.

McCain's POW experience speaks to a particular kind of military discipline and honor. Those qualities have some relevance to the character traits we want in a president. But too often, McCain's POW experience seems to stand in for experience in foreign affairs, military command, and numerous other intellectual/managerial qualities we want in a president. I thought that Clark made the distinction nicely, and that it was a distinction that needed saying.

So ensues the faux outrage over any criticism of anything military. Andrew Bacevich has pointed out the militarization of our society, which includes putting military experience beyond criticism. Today he has an op-ed in the Boston Globe that speaks to other matters, but it has some relevance to the Clark furor.

The challenge facing Obama is clear: he must go beyond merely pointing out the folly of the Iraq war; he must demonstrate that Iraq represents the truest manifestation of an approach to national security that is fundamentally flawed, thereby helping Americans discern the correct lessons of that misbegotten conflict.

The problem with a lifetime of honorable service in the military, intensified by experience as a POW, is that it can produce a mindset that elevates that military. McCain's membership in today's Republican party and everything he has said so far on the Iraq war suggest that he shares this mindset, part of the militarization of our society.

So I'm joining others in the blogosphere in saying that Wesley Clark said nothing wrong. In fact, what he said could be a beginning of disentangling American security from mindless militarism.

Others commenting:

Ezra Klein

Kevin Drum

Jason Sigger

Cernig

Ron Beasley

Libby

Senators McCain and Obama: How Will they Vote on the Wheelchair Bill?

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

While Obama and McCain play to the crowd on the oil price crunch, Congress is playing games with Medicare.

On the one hand, we have Republican politicians shouting that we can’t afford Medicare, much less universal health care, which many Democrats more or less support, while clinging to various coy and complex reservations. I include Obama in this flirtation with meeting American’s health needs, because he has not, to my mind, been sufficiently comprehensive in his goals or clear in his assertions. McCain is essentially for total health care privatization, which definitely won’t help to raise America’s life expectancy stats to a respectable level.

On the other hand, Congressional leaders of BOTH parties, it seems, have voted to undercut efforts to halt Medicare over payments for medical devices. It seems that an elderly or post-operative person who is a little wobbly can buy an ordinary walker in a big box store for half what it would cost Medicare to provide the same item.

How can this be? Simple. Current procurement policies for Medicare don’t require suppliers to bid competitively on contracts to supply such devices. This bit of federal assistance, a brazen subsidy to the private sector of the sort that "Conservatives" are addicted to, was going to be eliminated by Congressional reformers.

But then the industry got to work on our representatives and presto!!!! More of our tax dollars funneled—approximately $1,000,000,000—to the undeserving. That’s big business bed-manufacturers, not beggars. The system isn’t being milked by illegal immigrants, it seems. It’s being bilked by the free enterprise types who typically hate competition. It's so inefficient.

Science Selections

by Cheryl Rofer

Science magazine frequently has good stuff in it, but it’s available on the internet by subscription only. So I pull pages out of the dead-tree version to make posts from. Sometimes Science's Eureakalert has short versions on line. Here are a few recent goodies.

The Lusi mud volcano on Indonesia’s Java Island is still going strong, despite the various attempts to stop it. (Last WhirledView post here.) Geologists disagree as to where the mud is coming from and what caused the volcano. Indonesian courts have ruled the volcano a natural disaster, absolving the drilling company Lapindo Brantas of responsibility. The mud has covered 750 hectares and has destroyed the homes of 30,000 people. (13 June)

Since I last googled that subject, a couple of new articles on the mud volcano have shown up. The photo is from Reuters, via The Guardian. You can see the scale of it from the trucks and earthmovers that are building the dams. Time Magazine reports here. Lots of satellite images from the National University of Singapore here.

Imagery from the LANDSAT satellites is being made available free on the internet. The data are of the whole world, in multiple spectral ranges. All newly acquired data will be made available, and the archives are being opened up during the rest of this year. This will be invaluable for following all sorts of changes over time: vegetation cover, city growth, bodies of water, probably Lusi as well. NASA LANDSAT site, USGS LANDSAT site (23 May)

Who’s got the biggest carbon footprint in America? If you guessed those car-crazy Californians, you’re wrong. The biggest carbon emissions per capita are all in the eastern part of the country. This report, from Brookings, tells why. And it makes some policy suggestions to lessen our carbon dioxide emissions. (13 June)

Deserts may be taking up some of that carbon dioxide. Measurements in western China and Nevada suggest that desert soils account for some of the good luck we’ve had so far, with more carbon dioxide disappearing than scientists have expected. It’s not clear whether the carbon dioxide is going into the soil itself or living communities that form crusts on the surface. I’ll suggest that in just a couple of years, watering some of the soils in my yard has produced some underground cementation. But I can’t say whether that’s calcium carbonate, let alone whether it’s from the air or it’s being dissolved and reprecipitated. But it’s the kind of thing you might see if moistened alkaline desert soils are taking up carbon dioxide. (13 June)

Where’s the Failure?

by CKR

David Ignatius must have taken an airplane trip recently. The airlines are in a downward spiral, he tells us. And one of the giants of the industry, Robert Crandall, former head of American Airlines, recently gave a speech outlining why he thinks the airlines should be re-regulated. He’s been opposed to deregulation all along, and some of his more dour predictions have come true.

Crandall makes a number of specific suggestions, but it’s his bigger points that are really important. He talks about goals for the aviation industry and goals for the country. He says we’re lacking goals. But, more precisely, we have allowed a set of ideology-driven fanatics to determine the goals for the country.

The goals we currently are working under are:

1) To maximize the “free market.” This means removing regulatory requirements and privatizing government functions.

2) To increase US hegemony through military power.

It’s becoming clear that these goals are doing far more harm than good, the disaster of airline deregulation being only one of many: crumbling infrastructure, Blackwater, lack of health care for too many citizens, alienation of our allies, and the list goes on.

Ignatius takes quick note of these ills and blames them on Washington gridlock. But he’s wrong. There is a specific ideology that insists on removing regulation, the devil take the hindmost. It is called conservatism, and Peter Scoblic has shown how it has undermined national security.

Some time around when the airlines were deregulated, politics became more of a popularity contest. Television showed us the five o’clock shadow, and politicans learned to be pretty and vague and attractiveness as a beer-drinking partner was added to the promise of a chicken in every pot or a Hummer in every driveway. The preparation for this sort of political career does not include the backbone to develop and stand by policies. It also allowed ideologues to put on a pretty face and promise lower taxes and ponies for everyone.

Crandall observes that we have neither a transportation policy nor an energy policy. Of course not! That’s not why these members of Congress were elected. Politicians proferring energy policies raising gasoline taxes or gas mileage or moving toward solar or nuclear power would have been beaten by those strong-chinned fellows offering the opportunity for every man to be a millionaire by the magic of unfettered free enterprise. Or offering their attractiveness as beer-drinking companions.

We like cheap airline fares, but not the increasingly crummy and cramped cabins. We like cheap gasoline until something happens and it’s not cheap any more. We like easy politicians, not the policy wonks. We don’t like recognizing that the cheap fares give us the cramped cabins or that reducing taxes reduces our ability to respond to changing conditions.

Presidential leadership would help. Like a leader who gave us a long-term energy plan on September 12, 2001, not just a demand for a quick fix by July 4. Like a leader who could recognize that American business depends on convenient, safe transportation, up-to-date infrastructure, and affordable health care. Like a leader who would put those things into enactable legislation, not just talk about them. And Congressional leaders could pitch in some leadership, too.

The United States used to be good at solving problems. These days, we don't seem up to the job.

That’s what Crandall said. I think that we can solve the problems if we focus our attention. We need leadership, and we need intelligent followership too. Here’s hoping voters recognize that in the November elections.

Update: Looks like some other folks were thinking similarly this weekend.

Our Nuclear Future

by CKR

John McCain wants to build 45 nuclear plants by 2030. Barack Obama says nuclear is worth considering. Even James Lovelock, associated with the Gaia hypothesis that says the earth is one big living organism, says we need nuclear power.

Public perception of nuclear power has been unfavorable since some time after I got inspired by the idea of power too cheap to meter. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl had something to do with that, but anything that is associated with mushroom clouds and an element named for the god of the underworld via the outermost planet is going to face an uphill battle.

Several people have been urging me to write something in response to McCain’s proposal. The more I’ve thought about what to write, the more it has all seemed one big ball of wax, with strings and fuel rods embedded. So I can pull at whatever string or fuel rod and see what comes out.

Jane Harman provides a place to start (thanks, J.!). The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is obsolete. That’s a lousy place to start, actually, but let’s consider that an editor at the Wall Street Journal provided that headline, which is consistent with the rightwing allergy to treaties, and move on to what Harman actually says.

The NPT guarantees the nuclear fuel cycle to its signatories, which are all the countries of the world but four, and those four developed the nuclear fuel cycle anyway. Having the nuclear fuel cycle allows a country to build nuclear weapons with the addition of only a few bells and whistles.

So we need to internationalize the fuel cycle, with heavy safeguards by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

A more promising approach might be to create an international consortium of fuel centers that provide enrichment and reprocessing of nuclear fuel, and end-to-end oversight of nuclear resources. Driven by market demand, private companies could operate facilities with IAEA oversight, and participating states would agree not to engage in independent enriching and reprocessing. Material would be purchased from the international market, thereby creating supply assurance for nations who fear being denied fuel.

I can quibble with Harman’s exact wording, but overall she’s got it right.

A private company is building a uranium enrichment facility in Eunice, New Mexico. This could be a place to start internationalizing the fuel cycle. We’ve got to do more than just talk about it. Another private facility in one country, supplying that country’s needs alone, is business as usual. And if we’re serious about both proliferation and increasing energy sources, we’ve got to start now.

McCain, of course, is for business as usual. Harman doesn’t mention Eunice or Mohamed ElBaradei’s call for internationalizing the fuel cycle, which came before President Bush’s call for the GNEP, which she mentions and gets wrong. What is wrong with GNEP is not that Bush is “as a research and development initiative,” but rather that he put this US-centric initiative out as a competitor to ElBaradei’s initiative. And, yes, all us Amurricans know that our country is totally reliable and fair, but others might just have a different viewpoint.

That’s just one point relating to McCain’s 45 nuclear plants by 2030. Other questions abound. What about the waste? (I do think that Yucca Mountain is the answer to that one, but it’s the first question others come up with.) What about reactor safety? Is uranium available for fuel? Could a company break ground by 2030 if they applied today, given the permitting process? Will anyone want a reactor in their neighborhood? Does the construction capacity exist, or can it be developed, to build these plants?

And you can probably think of others. To be continued.

The Foreign Service and the Military

By Patricia H. Kushlis

A friend clued me into an oped in the Sunday, June 15 Washington Post by James DeHart, a Foreign Service Officer soon to be assigned to an Afghanistan provincial reconstruction team after a year as a Fellow at Georgetown University. I don’t know DeHart and I wish him well on his onward assignment but I also wonder why he is spending the year at Georgetown and not learning (or improving his) Dari, Pashto or whatever other local language is spoken in the region to which he is being assigned and knowledge of Afghan culture at the Department’s own Foreign Service Institute or why he agreed to a PRT assignment in the first place.

Could the answer to my second question be contained in his observation that State Department assignments to war zones are fast tracks up the career ladder and that as war zone vets “rise up the chain and (presumably) gain a bigger say in future personnel decisions, the practitioners of more ‘traditional” diplomacy’” may find themselves second class citizens?

I’m not sure I buy that argument. At least until I see the statistics. I would love to see the numbers that demonstrate that Iraq and Afghanistan State Department veterans are, in fact, getting promoted faster than their peers. If someone can point or e-mail them to me – I’d be delighted. Since this is becoming an increasingly divisive issue in the Foreign Service - based from what I can tell primarily on corridor gossip – a systematic, fact-based, transparent study should be an imperative. But maybe I've just missed it.

I think it is true – or it should be the case – that the vets do, or did, get a nice assignment after a year in Iraq or Afghanistan and an attractive pay package while serving there to boot. This is what they were promised. It is also what has kept the State Department from introducing a policy of forced assignments. But from what I’ve seen with respect to recent Ambassadorial postings, a senior assignment in Human Resources appears to be an easier way thus far to make Ambassador than braving the desert sands in Iraq – or particularly Afghanistan.

Saluting vs thinking

If DeHart, however, really thinks the State Department will place more weight on the “ability to salute” rather than a “liberal arts education” in its recruitment of future diplomats – and this will, therefore, be the cause of a more militarized US diplomatic corps and perhaps approach to foreign policy, I think he needs to think again. The US military has – in my Foreign Service memory – always been one of State’s recruiting grounds.

State also, however, recruits from the Peace Corps, academia, the media, the legal profession, business and an occasional natural scientist. The Foreign Service written exam – with its wide ranging questions – set a high liberal arts entry bar. My own entering class in the Vietnam War era included several former military officers. But they also had liberal arts degrees and knew how to think critically. So, by the way, did others.

That being said, DeHart raises a number of thought-provoking questions that the next administration needs to consider – in particular his concern about the militarization of the service although he sees the problem far differently than I do. Let’s face it George Bush’s approach to foreign policy remains that of leading with guns and steel – regardless of whether tanks and the bombers are the most appropriate way of dealing with problems overseas.

State’s red-haired step-child’s role in this “militarization” game is a given and hard to swallow for those of us who think there are usually other, less costly and more effective approaches, but it also may change. Hopefully, a new president with a different foreign policy team and mindset will rethink the fundamentals as well as reinvigorate USAID and staff it with experts in “nation-building” as opposed to contracting the task out and assigning State Department officers and the military to perform functions for which they are unqualified and unsuited.

An even more insidious problem

Yet I fail to understand why DeHart fails to mention a far more insidious problem. Namely, the mushrooming of Foreign Service Officers assigned as advisors (POLADS) to and students at various US military institutions. There have always been a few – and that’s been good because both parts of government need to understand how the other works and thinks - but the POLAD expansion, I think, has happened just over the past year. What makes it even more questionable, however, is that it is also occurring despite the fact the Department is one-two thousand officers short and is intentionally leaving most posts (except Iraq, Afghanistan and passport services) and the Department itself understaffed.

Three Stumbles and (Maybe) He's Out

By Patricia L. Sharpe

For about 48 hours I tried to feel good about the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, but I wonder now.

Support Barak!

Not that I won’t vote for Obama in November. No matter what. Here’s one very strong reason why. The most recent Supreme Court rulings extend habeas corpus rights to Guantanamo detainees, but the vote was five to four, a close call, and Bush-appointees Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Justice Alioto dissented. Should a Bush clone be in a position to fill the next vacancy on the Supreme Court, these welcome decisions could be reversed. In fact, the differences between Republicans and Democrats are clearly drawn on a whole host of important issues. So there is no way I could back John McCain, and I was going to argue that strongly with other high-and-dry Hillary supporters.

A Wobbly Supporter

Then, last weekend, I had an interesting conversation with a friend. An early and staunch Obama supporter, she astonished me by expressing the fear that Obama himself might be a little wobbly on foreign affairs.

“But,” she said, quickly, “that doesn’t matter. He has good advisers.”

Not Just a Pretty Face

My reply had several parts. First of all, I don’t want a president elect who comes to the Oval Office as a naif when it comes to foreign affairs. We've seen where that leads. I want a president who already knows a lot about the world, its current state and how it got here. I want a president who already knows plenty about the ways in which the U.S. has acted in the world—and why. I want him to have some vision of where he’d like to take us, a vision he can articulate in reasonable detail. In short, I don’t want a president who’s dependent on advisers for the whole shebang. Why elect an empty suit? Furthermore, in order to evaluate advisers, you have to know something. In order to choose between good and bad advice, you have to know a good deal. Too bad Joe Biden wasn’t able to mount a stronger campaign.

However, if the president of the U.S. is going to be a pretty face, a cheerleader, a figurehead, then he or she better have very good advisers indeed. And so I come to my second concern. Two big stumbles have already given the McCain forces dangerous ammunition.

The initial blooper had to do with Obama’s remark that he’d speak to anyone, even the leaders of Iran. This willingness to prioritize diplomacy pleased many of his supporters. It pleased me, too, even before the primary phase was over. But McCain and company jumped on it. Naturally. The failure came when Obama was unable to explain, clearly, why he could and would stand on that simple principle. Talking to tough cookies really is defensible.

The Manichaean Conservatives

by Cheryl Rofer

U.S. vs. Them, by J. Peter Scoblic, Viking Penguin, 2008.

Peter Scoblic has a grand unified theory of conservatism and national security: the division into good and evil comes before everything else for conservatives. He uses this theory to make sense of a long history of defective conservative prescriptions for national security.

Today’s conservatism was born in the years after World War II, when the world was more Manichaean than it is today: the United States faced the Soviet Union. Conservatives, reeling from their economic failure in the Great Depression and political failure in pushing an isolationist foreign policy in response to Hitler’s rise, needed a New Look. William Buckley and others supplied it: a combination of moralism based on absolute good and absolute evil, along with a preference for war over diplomacy.

Scoblic makes his case persuasively for the the last half of the twentieth century. I’m not so sure that the case works as well for the George W. Bush administration. Perhaps, however, we are too close to the Bush administration, not yet able to shear away the detail to show the clear lines of conservative thought. Nor can we yet read the minutes of the meetings, the proposals for action, the written arguments for and against those proposals.

The conservative record is impressive: MacArthur’s insistence on taking the Korean War to China; the insistence that Eisenhower roll back the Soviet Union by nuclear strikes; opposition to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty; opposition to and denigration of the United Nations; distrust of the CIA; a love of missile defense; a hatred of treaties. All fruitless and wrongheaded, some actively dangerous.

State, the blame game, the media and the Palestinian Seven

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.