State Slouches Toward Failure in Iraq

Recent articles in the NYT and WP paint a pretty discouraging picture of the State Department's future role in Iraq.  A serving Foreign Service officer has written a book about what a failure State's past activities have been, "We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People."  He also published an op-ed in the NYT, which says, "Iraq is still plagued by corruption, sectarianism and violence. And ... I don’t have much faith that the department can turn things around." 

Meanwhile, the WP reported on the huge undertaking that the State Department is committing itself to by taking over in Iraq where the military is leaving off.  After downsizing from hundreds of thousands of US military troops, about 50,000 remain in Iraq.  Their functions will supposedly soon be taken on by the State Department Foreign Service.  According to Wikipedia, there are about 15,000 Foreign Service officers total, staffing over 200 American embassies and consulates, as well as the State Department in Washington.  Thus, the only way the State Department can even hope to cope with this mess is by hiring tens of thousands of contractors.  The idea that State can manage tens of thousands of contractors, when according to the book mentioned above, it can't even manage the small scale programs it was running with its own officers , is ludicrous.  Hillary Clinton is being the good soldier by taking on the mess left behind by the military, but it is bound to impact negatively on what in other countries is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.  State's expertise is political and economic analysis, not program management.  The military managed not to lose in Iraq (at least not yet), but it is leaving a mess.  The op-ed above says:

When my team tried to give away fruit tree seedlings to replant ruined orchards, a farmer spat on the ground and said, “You killed my son and now you are giving me a tree?”       

and

One Iraqi I met observed that the United States had sponsored expensive art shows in his neighborhood three years in a row, but did nothing about the lack of functioning sewers, electricity and running water. “It is like I am standing naked in a room with a big hat on my head,” he told me. “Everyone comes in and puts ribbons on my hat, but no one seems to notice that I am naked.”      

The WP compares the Iraq undertaking to the Marshall Plan, but after World War II, the US had clearly won.  There was little danger of Americans being assassinated in Paris.  The French and other Western Europeans still had competent bureaucrats to administer the American aid.  Before the war, Western Europe had been more or less on a par with the US politically and economically.  They shared similar cultures.  None of that is true in Iraq. 

It's possible that nobody really expects this to work.  Maybe it's just a cover for the US to pull its military out of Iraq.  But State will be left with egg on its face.  And Iraq will still be a mess. 

I don't think the US is serious about helping Iraq, especially when I look back at my experience in Poland after the fall of Communism.  Newt Gingrich and the Republicans, with the cooperation of Bill Clinton and company, basically told the Poles, "You're on your own, unless there is some money-making deal we can line up an American company to get in on."  Poland came out okay, but I think it's because the EU became Poland's Marshall Plan.  America basically dumped Poland, but Western Europe came through.  Maybe Turkey or China (or Iran) will come through for the Iraqis. 

Why I Left the Foreign Service V

North Korean Nuclear Proliferation Issues.  One of my responsibilities in Rome was maintaining a dialogue with Italy and the EU on North Korean nuclear issues, in particular the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO).  During the six months more or less that I was in Rome, Italy held the presidency of the European Union, so that our dialogue was on sort of a double basis, one dialogue as the US to Italy, and the other as US to EU.  At that time the US was part of KEDO and had promised funding for proliferation resistant light water reactors for North Korea, and in the interim, funding for fuel oil to North Korea to generate electricity by conventional power plants.  As part of the Gingrich/Republican budget cuts, the US did not appropriate funding for its part of the fuel oil.  Therefore to prevent the US from breaching its agreement with North and South Korea and Japan, part of my job was to go hat in hand to the Italians and ask them bilaterally, or as the head of the EU, to help make up the difference between what the US had appropriated and what it owed under the agreement. 

I had just gone through a similar situation in Warsaw when the US cut off funding for our joint science cooperation program years before the agreement was to expire.  Once again, I was in the position of saying that the US would not fulfill its international agreements.  I always did what I was told, but I was not a happy camper.  I did not like representing an America that was a deadbeat dad, that made promises and then didn't fulfill them.  I don't remember where I left this matter.  The Italians were somewhat horrified that the US might default, and thus legally entitle North Korea to resume its proliferating ways.  But I don't recall that they said definitely that they would help.  I think we were only asking for about $2 million. 

But I didn't like it.  If I had wanted to do this kind of thing, I could have become a criminal lawyer or a bankruptcy lawyer.  I wanted to be a diplomat for the greatest nation on earth; I didn't want to be like Hitler's German diplomats negotiating the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.  The American government was too corrupt and dishonest for me, and so I left. 

Helms-Burton and Children's Visas.  Another nail in coffin of my career came late in my stay in Rome.  I was at a reception for a satellite launching, celebrating a satellite that the US was going to launch for Italy.  The launch did not take place as scheduled, but that wasn't the issue.  At the reception I struck up a conversation with a man who worked on communications satellites for the Italian phone company.  He said something like, "You must really hate me to deny a visa to Disney World to my daughter, just because I work for the Italian phone company."  I was taken aback and asked him what had happened.  He said his daughter had been denied a US visa under the Helms-Burton Act because the Italian phone company had some tenuous connection to Cuba through its cooperation with the Mexican phone company.  Later I went and talked to the head of the consular section in Rome, and it sounded like this was indeed the case. 

Unfortunately it reminded me of some books I had read when I first joined the Foreign Service.  One of my friends from law school had been reading them, and said they had quite a lot about the Foreign Service.  They were "The Winds of War," and "War and Remembrance" by Herman Wouk.  They are a fictional account of several families, some American military officers and diplomats, and one a Jewish family living in Europe.  A Jewish mother and child are trying to get out of Europe and go to Palestine, soon to become Israel, but she can't leave without a visa (shades of "Casablanca").  The German embassy in Rome is willing to give the mother a visa, but not her child.  It was just too close to what America was doing to this Italian engineer.  Punishing children for the crimes of their fathers is not something I am enthusiastic about, especially when the father's  crime is just working for a company that has some weak connection to Cuba.  I think by the time this happened, I had already decided to retire, but this made me glad that I had. 

This was not Ronald Reagan's "shining city on a hill." 

Why I Left the Foreign Service IV

Unwelcoming Reception in Rome.  When I agreed to go from Warsaw to Rome, Embassy Rome said that they had an apartment for me.  They said that I could not have my predecessor's apartment, which frankly I found a little odd, but I thought, "Okay, they say they have a nice apartment, and it's Rome."  When we arrived, however, after our contretemps with the government shutdown leaving Warsaw, it turned out that the embassy had given the apartment that they had promised to me to a DEA agent.  I was a little ticked, because I thought that the State Department, which ran the administration for the embassy, should have given a little break to one of its own officers, and told the DEA agent that this apartment was allocated and that he would have to wait for the next apartment.  That was my first clue that something was amiss in Rome.  It took months for the embassy to find us an apartment.  Meanwhile we camped out in temporary housing in an apartment house that the embassy had for people assigned temporarily to Rome to do short-term jobs. 

In addition, between by predecessor's departure and my arrival, the embassy had redesigned the science office suite.  The way they had set it up, all of my assistant's visitors had to pass through my office to get to her office.  The doors should have been arranged so that her visitors could enter her office directly from the reception area.  I don't know what the suite had looked like before, but by the time I got there, the construction was completed. 

Most importantly, the embassy did not want me.  I had not realized that my assignment by the State Department was the result of a fight between the Embassy and the State Department headquarters in Washington.  The previous Science Counselor had been a friend of the Ambassador's.  He had been a political appointee in Ambassador Bartholomew's office, when Bartholomew had been an Under Secretary of State, and had traveled to Rome, when Bartholomew as assigned to Rome.  However, the time he could serve as a political appointee, a Schedule C employee, ran out, and the State Department would not let him stay longer.  I presume there was a big fight between the Embassy and Washington to try to get permission for him to stay.  When that failed, the Embassy apparently decided that it wanted a particular Civil Service employee in Washington to replace him.  The Foreign Service tries to look after its own, and apparently tried to block a Civil Service employee from taking a plum Foreign Service position in Rome.  Thus, the call out of the blue to me in Warsaw asking if I would be willing to go to Rome.  But after I arrived, it became clear that the Embassy had not given up and still wanted to get rid of me and get the Civil Service employee.  Making my life difficult by not finding housing, for example, was part of that strategy.  The Ambassador succeeded.  I retired, and I think the State Department relented and approved the Civil Service employee as my replacement. 

I guess I sound pretty weak in this description, not fighting the Embassy harder, but in my defense, ever since I didn't fight the draft and agreed to go into the Army and off to Vietnam, my desire was to serve my country, not to have my country serve me.  I was willing to put up with hardships that were imposed by external forces, like the North Vietnamese Army, or living and working at an embassy in a poor country with few amenities.  But I was not willing to accept hardships or mistreatment that were imposed by the American Government itself, in the government shutdown, or by the unwelcoming reception in Rome.  It was not the government that I volunteered to serve.

I should add that in contrast to the unwelcoming official reception in Rome, several of the officers there were personally very welcoming, from the Deputy Chief of Mission (the #2 in the Embassy) to my assistant, who got furloughed when I got un-furloughed in order to travel from Warsaw to Rome during the shutdown. 

Why I left the Foreign Service III

Rome: Tethered Satellite. Firing of space agency chief.

One of the best parts of my job as Science Officer in various embassies was that I was the representative of NASA, and everyone loved NASA.  In addition to being glamorous, NASA had stuff to give away, like observation time on the space telescope, rides on the Shuttle, etc.  The local space agency always wanted to stay on my good side.  When I came to Rome, I inherited an agreement under which the Shuttle would carry a tethered satellite for the Italian Space Agency.  This satellite would be reusable.  It would ride in the Shuttle cargo bay, and when the Shuttle was in orbit, it would be released on a long tether to collect data away from the pollution of the Shuttle. Then, when the Shuttle was getting ready to return to earth, the satellite would be reeled in, much like a fishing line would be reeled in.  The satellite would be stored in the cargo bay and returned to earth until it was flown on another mission.  It promised huge savings because satellites are so expensive to build, impossible to repair in space, etc. 

On its first flight, however, the reel jammed, the tether broke, and the expensive satellite drifted off into space beyond the reach of the Shuttle.  For a change, being the NASA representative was not so great.  The crew of that Shuttle visited Rome, and while it was not billed as an apology tour for losing the satellite, that's basically what it was.  Meanwhile, the head of the Italian Space Agency was in political trouble.  While his problems were not directly linked to the failed satellite, losing the satellite did not help his position.  I was unhappy, because I was feeling snake bit.  I had had little to do with the mission, which had been planned long before I arrived in Rome, but I was there when it happened.  It turned out that because I was retiring, the head of the Italian Space Agency and I left Rome about the same time.  He was going to take some time off before moving on to his next venture.  While my only fault was being in the wrong place at the wrong time, it added to the dissatisfaction I was feeling about the job.  If the best part of my job, working with NASA, turned sour, there was not much left.