Scapegoating US Diplomats For Failures In Iraq?

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Scapegoating Us Diplomats For Failures In Iraq?
Thursday, 08 November 2007
by William Fisher

Facing growing scrutiny of the State Department's shortage of experienced diplomats in Iraq - and the Department's announced intention to force Foreign Service Officers to serve in Baghdad against their will — the leader of America's diplomatic service is charging that critics, "including people who urged the 2003 invasion," are seeking to blame the State Department for their own failures.

"No country's diplomatic corps has people with many of the skills now needed in Iraq: oil and gas engineers, electrical grid managers, urban planners, city managers and transportation planners. If any US defense planner in 2003 thought that the State Department and other civilian federal agencies had such people on staff in large numbers (Arabic-speaking or not) ready to rebuild Iraq, they were wrong," says John Naland, president of the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA).

AFSA represents America's 11,500 professional diplomats. Of these, 6,500 are Foreign Service Officers while 5,000 are Foreign Service specialists, including Diplomatic Security agents. There are another 1,500 or so Foreign Service members at the US Agency for international Development (USAID), the Commerce Department's Foreign Commercial Service, the Agriculture Department's Foreign Agricultural Service and the International Broadcasting Bureau, an independent agency closely allied with State.

Naland points out that between the US invasion in 2003 through 2007, all of the more than 2,000 career Foreign Service members who served at the US mission in Baghdad and the expanding Provincial Reconstruction Teams around the country "did so as a volunteer."

Naland termed it "unfortunate" that late last month the Director General of the Foreign Service, Ambassador Harry K. Thomas, Jr., declared that "the well of volunteers had finally run dry." Thomas announced that, if volunteers could not be found for 48 remaining positions by mid-November, diplomats — under threat of dismissal - would be ordered to serve at the embassy in Baghdad and in so-called Provincial Reconstruction Teams in outlying provinces. If carried out, it would be the largest diplomatic call-up since Vietnam.

AFSA contends that "directed assignments of Foreign Service members into a war zone would be detrimental to the individual, to the post, and to the Foreign Service as a whole. AFSA urged the State Department to find ways to increase the pool of qualified voluntary bidders."

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http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/2796/81/