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Today's Must Read
Don't tell Foggy Bottom that the Bush administration's post-9/11 foreign policy has made the country safer. The State Department is in the midst of a staffing crisis thanks to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, according to a new report by an advisory council.
The Los Angeles Times reports that the Foreign Affairs Council, an association of nonprofit organizations, finds that the need to fill diplomatic positions in the war zones has left the foreign service understaffed by about 1,000 positions. The Council anticipates "a very, very serious situation a year from now" unless the administration and congress takes immediate action.
The council said Rice has required diplomats to carry out a more aggressive mission of "transformational diplomacy" to prod other countries to adhere to democratic principles.But at the same time, envoys have had to cope with wartime strains, inadequate language and skills training and more overtime work.
In addition, about 750 have been required to take one-year stints in sometimes dangerous postings where they are not allowed to bring their families, the group said.
It's understandable that Iraq and Afghanistan require an outsized share of diplomatic resources, hard as it is to get many at State to go to the war zones, particularly Iraq. Muckraker reported in February how and why some Foreign Service Officers balk at Iraq assignments. But the Foreign Affairs Council's report suggests that unless the Foreign Service expands significantly -- the service only has about 9,000 people -- will barely be able to play catch-up when new crises emerge.
Not surprised at all. Who wants to work for *this* government? You might end up under a Schlozman!
June 6, 2007 9:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
Conservatives for years and years have been complaining that State's Foreign Service is a "bastion of Democrats."
The Administration successfully has driven out many long-term loyal FSO's as a result of its untenable foreign policy, yet has failed to build the ranks with their own -- probably since most GOP loyalists don't want to have to do tours in Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan.
Still, watch this space. 1,000 open jobs and a perceived notion that the Foreign Service is Democrat-laden. That sounds like a crony bonanza just waiting to happen!
June 6, 2007 9:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
That is 1000 loyal republicans that could be feeding at the govenment trough.
June 6, 2007 9:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
Couldn't we just farm the jobs out to private companies?
June 6, 2007 10:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
I guess the churches must be empty.
They've also emptied the Finnish embassy of its Finnish speaking American PR head and sent him to Baghdad because he was undiplomatic enough to be caught remarking about Mr. Bush's penchant for appointing wealthy hacks who know nothing about their host countries, which irritated his political hack boss who knows nothing about Finnish or the Finns, or Russia, for that matter.
Counter-intuitive as it may seem, it may be better for America under Mr. Bush not to fill its diplomatic posts. It's as true in diplomacy as in medicine: the first obligation is to do no harm, a precept wantonly violated in Mr. Bush's "diplomacy".
June 6, 2007 10:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
Check the State Department web site and you'll find that its new foreign service examination has not yet been completed, and that its administration date has been further delayed.
Consider also that six out of seven who passed the old exam were weeded out in GROUP interviews even before foreign language testing or a consideration of resume and recs.
In addition, the foreign service is closed to anyone, including those who are fluent in citical languages, diagnosed with heart disease, HIV or diabetes, even if medical records show they are in excellent health.
June 6, 2007 10:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's not like we need those 1000 diplomats: this administration does not believe in diplomacy. Further, this admin thinks it will get brownie points in legasy heaven for having made government smaller. /snark
June 6, 2007 10:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
From what other reports have said, they are having trouble finding even bushies to take the open jobs in many areas of government.
I'm just glad they laid the blame at condi's doorstep. She did poorly as National Security Adviser. And it sounds like she's doing just as poorly managing State.
They are falling on their faces - and even repubs are repulsed!
The law of karma in operation.
June 6, 2007 10:38 AM | Reply | Permalink
Diplomacy is nuance. Bushit bullies don't do diplomacy.
There's also this dilemma: How does one find a "loyal Bushie" who would know the meaning of diplomacy? And if one did, and he confessed to knowing its meaning, he wouldn't be hired because not a bully -- and because suspected of being a stealth "librul".
.
June 6, 2007 10:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yes. And it just so happens that the giant, new, multi-acre US Embassy in Bagdhad handles up to 1000 staff.
Believe It --or Not!
June 6, 2007 10:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm amazed and in total agreement with Linda Swearengen. The exam process is incomplete - you couldn't enter the service if you wanted to right now. The reason? Condi wants to politicize the hiring process at State and to dumb down the meritocratic structure that it has had for so long. So while she slowly works her way torward a more perfect process, there is a gigantic hiring gap.
Great timing and great leadership once again.
June 6, 2007 10:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
FSO's also support the various White House, Congressional and other executive branch visits to their respective countries.
Might be nice to hear from some FSO's regarding their experience with the GWB crowd. How are they spending the people's money when they travel abroad?
White House visits to foreign countries aren't cheap -- and the White House advance teams (of political neophytes) just loves to bury extra "expenses" in those trips.
June 6, 2007 10:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm amazed and in total agreement with Linda Swearengen. The exam process is incomplete - you couldn't enter the service if you wanted to right now. The reason? Condi wants to politicize the hiring process at State and to dumb down the meritocratic structure that it has had for so long. So while she slowly works her way torward a more perfect process, there is a gigantic hiring gap.
Great timing and great leadership once again.
June 6, 2007 10:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
"The council said Rice has required diplomats to carry out a more aggressive mission of "transformational diplomacy" to prod other countries to adhere to democratic principles."
This requires the State Dept. to send people away from the main urban areas, something that most of them have no intention of doing because very few of them "do rural living." But of even more importance is that the whole purpose is to push "democratic principles." The Bushies don't realize it although everyone else does, that PR is counterproductive if the product being pushed is not what it is purported to be. People are not stupid. They see the way the Bushies have trashed every democratic principle imaginable from fraudulent elections to prohibition of dissent to abuse of power to abrogation of treaties to selective enforcement and lack of enforcement of laws to claiming to be above the law. There is NO WAY you can sell democracy if that is the way the US government is behaving, and the FSO people know it, so why should they waste their time pushing rocks uphill?
June 6, 2007 11:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
"The council said Rice has required diplomats to carry out a more aggressive mission of "transformational diplomacy" to prod other countries to adhere to democratic principles."
This requires the State Dept. to send people away from the main urban areas, something that most of them have no intention of doing because very few of them "do rural living." But of even more importance is that the whole purpose is to push "democratic principles." The Bushies don't realize it although everyone else does, that PR is counterproductive if the product being pushed is not what it is purported to be. People are not stupid. They see the way the Bushies have trashed every democratic principle imaginable from fraudulent elections to prohibition of dissent to abuse of power to abrogation of treaties to selective enforcement and lack of enforcement of laws to claiming to be above the law. There is NO WAY you can sell democracy if that is the way the US government is behaving, and the FSO people know it, so why should they waste their time pushing rocks uphill?
June 6, 2007 11:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
As the article notes, 900 of the positions are training slots "needed to give diplomats language and other job skills." Bad enough, of course, and a sign that State is, again, not investing in things known to be needed. Or more likely, that State doesn't have the money to invest in things known to be needed.
Where's the money? Across the river at the Pentagon, of course. Explicit militarization of US foreign policy has been the story since the Repubican takeover of Congress in 1994. Compare the resources a regional CINC has versus what an ambassador to even the largest country has available. Compare the continuity in DoD personnel versus rotations at State. Foreign leaders certainly make these comparisons and certainly draw conclusions.
June 6, 2007 12:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
Doesn't Regent University have a School of Foreign Affairs?
June 6, 2007 12:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
As a retired Foreign Service Officer, I find the possibility that political affiliation may be about to be, or already has been, taken into consideration in the FS examination process or in hiring or assignment practices horrendous to contemplate. Ever since the former United States Information Agency was absorbed into the Department of State some years ago the politicization of our public diplomacy efforts became more conceivable with the advent of a more partisan foreign policy establishment. I've often wondered, for example, about the possibility of encroachment on the (relative) independence of the Voice of America. If this subject has ever been covered in the media, I'd be interested in a reference or link. If it has not, it should be.
June 6, 2007 12:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
TheraP @ June 6, 2007 10:38 AM,
But . . . But . . . But Dr. Rice is an accomplished pianist and ice skater . . .
Yes, Condi needs to quit her day jobs and focus on her hobbies.
June 6, 2007 1:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
When we invade Cuba, whose gonna speak the Spanish?
June 6, 2007 1:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
Security code: cloth. As in: pay no attention to that woman behind the curtain...
The Source Beyond Rove - Condoleezza
Rice at the Center of the Plame Scandal
by Roger Morris
July 28, 2005
We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." It was September 2002, and then-National Security Advisor, now-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was fastening on CNN perhaps the most memorable and frightening single link in the Bush regime’s chain of lies propagandizing the war on Iraq. Behind her carefully planted one-liner with its grim imagery was the whole larger hoax about Saddam Hussein possessing or about to acquire weapons of mass destruction, a deception as blatant and inflammatory as claims of the Iraqi dictator’s ties to Al Qaeda.
Rice’s demagogic scare tactic was also very much part of the tangled history of alleged Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger, the fabrication leading to ex-Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s now famous exposé of the fraud, the administration’s immediate retaliatory “outing” of Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame as a CIA operative, and now the revelation that the President’s supreme political strategist Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff Lewis Libby were involved in that potentially criminal leak—altogether the most serious political crisis Bush has faced. In fact, though her pivotal role has been missed entirely—or deliberately ignored—in both the media feeding frenzy and the rising political clamor, now-Secretary of State Rice was also deeply embroiled in the Niger uranium-Plame scandal, arguably as much as or more so than either Rove or Libby.
For those who know the invariably central role of the NSC Advisor in sensitive political subjects in foreign policy and in White House leaks to the media as well as tending of policy, especially in George W. Bush’s rigidly disciplined, relentlessly political regime, Rice by both commission and omission was integral in perpetrating the original fraud of Niger, and then inevitably in the vengeful betrayal of Plame’s identity. None of that spilling of secrets for crass political retribution could have gone on without her knowledge and approval, and thus complicity. Little of it could have happened without her participation, if not as a leaker herself, at least with her direction and with her scripting.
Continued here:
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0728-25.htm
June 6, 2007 6:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
Please refer to http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/6/6/182434/8934 about Fred Malek's plan developed under Nixon to rid the government of career service employees, which seems to be alive and well under Bush. Looks like leaving no stone unturned.
June 7, 2007 12:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Rice has required diplomats to carry out a more aggressive mission of "transformational diplomacy" to prod other countries to adhere to democratic principles."
Why do I interpret this as interfering with the sovereignty and the internal workings of other countries?
June 7, 2007 9:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
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August 30, 2007 12:02 AM | Reply | Permalink