It looks like we will avoid a government shutdown tomorrow,
but one still hangs over us before the end of the year.
The 1990s government shutdown broke faith with the American
people, and particularly with me as a government employee, and I have not
forgiven the Republicans for bringing it on, although the Democrats were not
guiltless. Nevertheless, as a result of
the shutdown, I am disposed never again to vote for a Republican, unless he is
clearly the best qualified of the candidates in any election, local or
nation.
As a Foreign Service officer, I was sent to the American
Embassy in Warsaw, Poland, to administer a science cooperation agreement, the
Maria Sklodowska Curie Fund, that was signed before I arrived, but that was to
run for a total of five years, which would have been for four years after I
arrived for my three year assignment in Warsaw.
It should have spanned my whole tour of duty. When I arrived the fund for the agreement,
which was financed by matching grants from the US and Poland, had about $4
million in the bank. My predecessor had
spent very little of it on cooperative projects. Most of the money that had been spent had gone
for meetings of administrators in the US and Warsaw. I undertook to spend almost all of the money
we had in the bank by funding projects, which we did.
After we had funded our first round of projects, the
Republicans cut off the next year’s funding.
Although there was an international agreement obligating both sides to
contribute for five years, the US invoked an escape clause that had been
inserted for the Poles, in case they ran into a financial crisis following the
fall of the Communist government there.
It said that either side could fail to fund the agreement if it was
impossible. The US declared that it did
not have the money to fund the agreement, which had been about $2 million in
previous years. Clearly the US
government had $2 million that it could have contributed, but the Republicans
would not.
The Polish equivalent of an assistant secretary of State who
was in charge of all Western Hemisphere affairs called me in periodically to
berate me, on behalf of the US government for not honestly fulfilling the terms
of a promise we had made in writing to the Polish government. As someone who was brought up to be honest
and pay his bills, I was embarrassed and humiliated to be the recipient of
these demarches. I told him that if he
really wanted to change things, he should raise the matter with the Ambassador,
or have his Ambassador in Washington raise it with the Secretary of State, but
at that time, Poland main foreign policy objective was membership in NATO. Poland was not yet a member, and was
unwilling to do anything that might jeopardize its chances of becoming a
member. So, he complained to me, but
would not raise the issue with higher officials, whom he needed to support his NATO
application. While I understood that I
was not personally responsible, I was ashamed of my country, and I can still
remember squirming in his office while he accused the US of dishonesty. I inwardly agreed with him, but never
admitted it to him or to anyone else in Poland.
I adhered to the instructions I received from Washington.
Meanwhile, I was working on another project funding
environmental projects in Poland. An
agreement on Polish debt said that instead of paying part of the debt it owed
to the US, the Poland could pay a small part to fund environmental projects in
Poland. I was the US representative and
sponsor of a Polish environmental NGO called the Ekofundusz, or Ecofund. This was a small group of about 20 people who
identified, funded and administered environmental projects around Poland. The leaders were former senior Polish
environmental officials, including a former Minister of Environment, who were
on the outs because they had supported Solidarity’s overthrow of the Communist government. After the initial change, many of the old
Communists were back in government while I was there, including the current
Minister of Environment. The Ecofund
served as sort of a Brookings Institution or American Enterprise Institute, giving
a job and an opportunity to keep working on their issues to these
anti-Communist leaders while they were out of power.
It had taken me much of my first two years in Poland to get
the legal and financial provisions in place for the Ecofund to stand on its
own. About the time that the Congress
was refusing to fund the Maria Sklodowska Curie Fund, I got the pieces in place
to authorize the Polish treasury to pay part of its US debt to the Ecofund,
setting up the Ecofund for ten or more years of funding.
Because there was no more money for the Maria Sklodowska
Curie Fund, and the Ecofund was set up to get its future funding from the
Polish government, the Ambassador said that he was going to recommend
abolishing my position. I was
disappointed, because in addition to working on science and environment
funding, I also worked on nuclear non-proliferation issues, but because of the
division of labor in the embassy, and because my predecessor had not been
interested in these issues, non-proliferation issues usually went automatically
to the political section. Sometimes I
did not even get the cables from Washington about those issues. For some reason, the one issue that
automatically came to me was the Nuclear Suppliers Group. Because of this, I formed a relationship with
the Polish special ambassador for non-proliferation issues, Ambassador
Strulak. He became the rapporteur for
the five year review conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty while I was in
Poland.
Another embarrassing moment involved Ambassador
Strulak. He often visited the US and met
with many American non-proliferation officials.
Although I had spent many of my Washington assignments dealing with the
Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), it was an issue that seldom came to
my attention at the embassy in Warsaw, because the cables and the action
automatically went to the political section.
On one of my visits to Amb. Strulak to talk about Nuclear Supplier Group
issues, he told me that during his last visit to Washington, he had been
inquiring about the MTCR. He told me
that Poland wanted to join, but that the US had blocked their membership. He said he had asked the experts in
Washington who understood the issue, and my name frequently came up. It was the first I had heard about the
matter. When I inquired about it after Amb. Strulak
had told me about it, it turned out that President Clinton had personally
decided to blackball Poland. I
understood the reason. The MTCR had
initially been set up as a somewhat informal arrangement among friendly
nations, thus the administrative structure was relatively relaxed. But it had begun to grow by leaps and bounds,
making the informal structure difficult to work with. Thus, the US wanted to put a more structured
leadership in place before expanding the MTCR even further. Although I understood, I was deeply disappointed
that what was to some extent my baby had offended Poland while I was in Poland,
and I had been completely cut out of the discussion.
While I was stewing because my job would be eliminated with
the end of the Maria Sklodowska Curie Fund, and I was being cut out of non-proliferation
policy issues, I got a call from Washington asking if I would be willing to go
to Rome to take on the Science Office there in a few weeks. Rome was about to take on the rotating
presidency of the European Union, and the current science officer in Rome was
leaving or had already left. I agreed to
go, rather than just sort of hang around in Warsaw, but in retrospect, I should
have looked further into the offer, which at the time seemed too good to be
true. I later found out that the man I
was replacing was a political appointee, a “schedule-C” who had been with the
Ambassador to Italy Bartholomew for the maximum allowed eight years, and the
State Department had not allowed him to convert over to become a career Foreign
Service officer. Thus, he had been forced
to leave, and when I arrived in Rome, I discovered that various people in the
embassy, probably notably including the Ambassador, were not happy about
it. But I didn’t know that while I was
in Warsaw.
Rome wanted me to come right away, but the first annual
meeting of the Ecofund under their arrangement with the Polish treasury was about
to take place in a few weeks. I said
that I could not leave until after the meeting, because I wanted to make sure
that everything was in place for the Ecofund’s future existence. It turned out that the date I was to leave
was exactly the date of the government shutdown. Preparing to move to Rome, my wife and I had
packed everything. Big things had been
shipped to Rome, and our car was packed with clothes and two dogs, planning to
drive to Rome as soon as the embassy closed for the day. In the afternoon I was saying my farewells,
and I was in the Defense Attaché’s office, when I got a call from my assistant
who said I had an urgent call from Rome.
When I came down to take it, the caller said that I should not leave
Rome because the government had been shut down.
After all the disappointments I had been through, it was the last
straw. I usually tend to follow orders,
but this seemed too much. My wife and I
had no place to live in Warsaw; we had already moved out of our house. We had already shipped our belongings to
Rome. It seemed to me that the US
government had abandoned its troops in the field. Its word was no good, either in promises to
foreign governments or to its own Foreign Service officers.
The only comparison I can come up with goes back to my days
in the Army in Vietnam. My artillery
battery was stationed at Fire Base Barbara on a mountaintop near the Laotian
border just a few miles south of the DMZ with North Korea. We received an intelligence report that enemy
troops were massing at the bottom of our mountain and were about to
attack. Our main defense was a group of
old air defense artillery duster guns, twin 40-mm cannons that had been used
against planes, but now were used against troops on the ground. Because the duster crews were often stationed
in dangerous places, they had a reputation for not being too disciplined and
not playing by the Army rules. We got a
call from out battalion headquarters saying they heard that our dusters were
low on gas, and we should not lend them any because it was too hard for our battalion
to supply us out on the Laotian border. We
were not going to keep the dusters from firing at the enemy just because our battalion
did not want to resupply us. But I was
not happy that headquarters apparently thought it was better for us to die to
save gas than for them to have to resupply us a week or two early. There is a history of expendable troops in
war, and if you have to sacrifice your life, so be it, but it you don’t HAVE to
sacrifice your life, you shouldn’t do it just to save the US government a few
bucks. The fact that my life was not
worth a 55 gallon drum of gasoline, or a continuing resolution to keep the
government open until a long-term agreement could be reached, was too
much.
It turned out that the deputy chief of mission, the embassy
number two, was an old friend from my assignment in Brazil. He said to go ahead and leave Warsaw and come
to Rome, and he would work out the bureaucratic details. So we went, but I had pretty much lost faith
in the US government for not keeping its word, and in the Republican Party in
particular for abandoning me in the field.
I was mad with the government when I left Rome for trying to strand me
in Warsaw, and apparently Rome was mad with the government for firing my
predecessor in Rome and sending me instead.
It did not make for a happy assignment.
I decided after a while that I would stay for as long as Rome held the
presidency of the EU, but then I would retire from the Foreign Service. I did not feel welcome in Rome, and I had
lost respect for the American Government.
It was sad for me as a Vietnam veteran and a Foreign Service officer
with more than twenty years of experience.
In any case, as the US faces the potential of another
government shutdown, whether now or in December, it brings back a lot of bad
memories, and a huge contempt for the Republican Party. It claims to be the party for a strong
American defense, but I see it as the party that abandoned me in the
field. I keep trying to remind myself
that as much as I dislike the party, there may be some good individuals in it,
but I have a hard time finding any.
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