Every March since the war in Iraq began, the Foreign Service Journal—the house organ of the American Foreign Service Association, the professional organization and union for U.S. foreign service employees—has examined the state of diplomacy and nation-building in Iraq. Reading those issues, one thing is apparent: the press has largely ignored an important story about the consequences for thousands of civilian foreign service employees of the administration’s disastrous war.
The maintenance of America’s largest embassy in an active war zone is a hard case to make. (Even in Vietnam security was never so bad that it prevented diplomats from doing their jobs.) Diplomats in Iraq—in the besieged International Zone in Baghdad and out in the perilous Provincial Reconstruction Teams (prts) around the country—operate under frequent mortar and rocket attack, or surrounded by armed guards when they dare venture beyond the wire to meet with wary Iraqis. In the prts, they are often forced to do without basic resources, like working phones. To date, three foreign service workers have been killed.
The press, meanwhile, has been more interested in the Pentagon’s effort to blame the State Department for the bungled nation-building effort—that somehow the lack of civil engineers, electricity-grid experts, and other specialists is due to State’s failure to, as President Bush said, “step up.” But this is not what diplomats do. They talk to people, negotiate, build relationships, and the like. Here are two basic questions that reporters need to unpack: Is it possible to perform effective diplomacy under such circumstances? And if not, then why is our government risking so many lives this way?
This view is understandable, but wrong. In what other type of circumstance would an expeditionary diplomatic corps be required to engage the local population, build up political institutions and electoral systems, and negotiate truces between competing factions? Generally, you'd be talking about unstable or failing states, which by their very nature, are difficult to operate in. But then, that's WHY our diplomats are there in the first place, to fix those things. Should they wait until security is absolutely guaranteed to grace the fledgling nation and the stretched U.S. military with their presence?
Any failed or failing state will have a security problem which U.S. employees will have to contend with as part of the job. The military is merely pointing out that other agencies need to do their share, so that LTs, Captains and Majors aren't constantly left with the mission of negotiating with tribal leaders, explaining grass-roots, local governance, convincing them to work together, and walking the streets encouraging people to go to the polls, as they did in the last Iraq election. It's not just State, but other agencies as well as our security and police organizations and public works departments. State Dept. should sit atop those efforts, coordinating needs and priorities with the local government in keeping with the standing U.S. foreign policy and strategy. That's not unreasonable or "spin politics", it's just how things are supposed to work.
The State Dept. has been AWOL. They were bruised during the planning process and made the decision to stand back, hands folded, and let the Pentagon carry the ball. This is, of course, overlysimplified, but that's how I see it. Rice pledged to beef up our so-called "expeditionary diplomatic corps" but I have yet to see evidence of it.
Posted by jordan
on Mon 30 Jul 2007 at 08:31 PM