by Frank James
Reports this morning indicate the State Department will order hundreds of its diplomats to Iraq or they face being asked for their resignations. That’s diplo-speak for they will be fired.
The same reports say this is the first time mandatory assignments of such size have been made since the Vietnam War.
This isn’t a surprising development. Ever since it became apparent that the U.S. had opened a Pandora’s Box of violence after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there’s been a debate inside State that push might come literally to shove, that the agency might have to force its diplomats to abide by the agreement they made on entering the foreign service that they would be “worldwide available,” even to serve in a war zone.
Until now, those within State who wanted to rely on volunteers doing one-year tours, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, have won out.
But State has simply run out of qualified volunteers to work alongside the U.S. military to assist the Iraqis in making the kind of political progress the Bush Administration says is needed for the U.S. to significantly reduce troop levels to below pre-surge levels.
The decision to begin ordering foreign service officers to Iraq vindicates the sentiments expressed last year by Henry S. Ensher, a long-time Foreign Service officer who as director for political affairs in State’s Office of Iraq within the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs wrote this in the March 2006 issue of the Foreign Service Journal:
The Foreign Service is becoming increasingly irrelevant to the highest priority foreign-policy issue — winning in Iraq — because it has refused to take the one step that would guarantee it a key role, demonstrate seriousness of purpose to the military, and develop a cadre of true area specialists with extreme diplomacy skills. Specifically, the Foreign Service has refused to recognize that service in wartime necessitates a complete commitment by all its personnel.
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Such a commitment requires, at minimum, the unambiguous authority to order Foreign Service personnel to serve in Iraq through directed assignments. While some Middle East specialists and Arabists have served with distinction and courage in Iraq, others have not shown up at all. They should be told clearly that they are needed by their Service and their country now in Iraq, or their services are not required at all. The Foreign Service, State Department and U.S. taxpayers did not spend the money to teach Arabic and develop area expertise to enable the
beneficiaries of that training to avoid using their skills where they are most needed.
You get the sense Ensher keeps a list of names in his computer of people he’d like to see shipped out immediately.As Ensher says, there’s been concern at Foggy Bottom that forced assignments to Iraq could wind up breaking the foreign service since diplomats would quit instead of risking working in such a hostile environment.
He argues that the way the world is headed, U.S. diplomats are going to increasingly find themselves in dangerous territory. Get over it, he essentially tells them.
Many reasons for this institutional failure can be heard in corridor conversations: that Foreign Service personnel did not sign up to work in combat zones; that the disagreements of some officers with Iraq policy would force them to resign if they were ordered to go there; and that such resignations would damage the Service, as some say happened during the Vietnam era.
The problem with all these arguments is that they rest on the assumption that Iraq is an anomaly in both policy and practice, rather than the paradigm it is likely to become. In an ever-more-chaotic world in which we face a multiplicity of relatively small-scale threats, all of which require a multifaceted and integrated response from the United States, this assumption seems unfounded.
This latest development is bound to give some college students considering entering the Foreign Service second thoughts, to say the least.