Sept. 21, 2007 – 7:29 p.m.
Edward “Skip” Gnehm, a retired American ambassador who spent decades in the Middle East, recently addressed a class of newly minted State Department diplomats who were moaning and groaning about having to serve in Iraq.
Get over it, he said.
“I reminded them that I joined the foreign service in 1969,” Gnehm said in an interview. “Every class went to Vietnam.” It was the price of admission.
“These things pass,” he told them.
But not soon enough, evidently, for young foreign service officers, known as FSOs, who signed up to go somewhere with more cocktail parties than road mines.
To get them to go to Iraq — or anywhere outside the cozy playgrounds of Europe — the State Department is offering a mix of carrots and sticks that beg the question of exactly what the “service” in “foreign service” means.
For starters, the “volunteers,” as they are called, have to complete only short, six-month assignments in Iraq — a fraction of the normal foreign posting of three years or more. Their families can remain in their erstwhile duty post.
It’s hard to imagine mastering more than “goodbye” in Arabic in that amount of time. To rectify that, the State Department pays its FSOs bonuses to take Arabic and other “hard” languages. Scores have signed up.
Meanwhile, they also get extra pay for going to Iraq.
That’s not to be confused with combat pay.
Soldiers get combat pay. And they earn it by spending most of their time outside the Green Zone. About 3,800 have been killed in Iraq, and another 30,000 maimed.
Journalists also have been risking their lives outside the Green Zone. As of last week, 112 reporters and photographers, and another 40 of their local helpers, had been killed since hostilities commenced in March 2003. The total includes three Americans and 13 Europeans. Figures on the number of wounded journalists could not be found.
In contrast, only one of the approximately 1,000 foreign service officers, who are generally responsible for interacting with Iraqis of all kinds, including local officials on reconstruction projects, has been killed (James Mollen, a Bush 2000 campaign worker and political appointee working on computer systems at the Ministry of Education). Two non-FSO Diplomatic Security Service agents have been killed, according to the State Department.
Similarly, the CIA has not reported any deaths as a result of hostile action in Iraq (a civilian contractor thought to be an undercover CIA operative was killed in 2004). At least one CIA officer died in Afghanistan.
In comparison, 33 State Department employees gave the ultimate sacrifice in Vietnam during the two decades-long war. Unlike in Baghdad, however, American diplomats could somewhat safely walk the streets of Saigon and other Vietnamese cities, right up to the final days in 1975.
But it’s not safe for an American diplomat to go anywhere in Iraq, as vividly shown by the Sept. 16 incident when a State Department convoy came under attack in Baghdad while under the protection of private American security guards, who returned fire, killing eight civilians, according to news accounts. Two days later the embassy “suspended official U.S. government civilian ground movements“ throughout Iraq.
Even before then, though, it was so difficult for FSOs to get out of the Green Zone they had begun to stay inside, said Gnehm, who was ambassador to Jordan and Kuwait, among several senior State and Defense Department posts during a distinguished 35-year career. He now teaches at George Washington University.
It’s not that the FSO’s were afraid, he said: Whenever they want to go someplace outside the Green Zone, they have to arrange for military escorts, a procedure so cumbersome and time-consuming that many just give up trying.
“People who are over there tell me that there just isn’t any opportunity to get out,” Gnehm said a few days before the Sept. 16 incident. “By the time you arrange the security and determine if the person you want to see is available, the situation changes and someone preempts the security detail. And I think they are intimidated or deterred from going out because of the difficulties.”
Given all that, who wouldn’t prefer to serve in Paris, Rome or Berlin?
But according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office, today’s crop of young diplomats don’t want to go to anywhere hot and dirty.
“Overall, posts in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia continue to receive the lowest number of bids,” the GAO noted, “averaging about 4 or 5 bids per position, while posts in Europe and the Western Hemisphere receive the highest bids, averaging 15 and 17, respectively.”
In 2005, almost nobody applied for embassy or consulate slots in Saudi Arabia, Nigeria (half of whose 120 million people are Muslim) or Calcutta, India, the GAO found. In all, 67 positions in Africa and the Middle East went begging.
Unfortunately for U.S. national security, that’s where a lot of the action is these days.
Scratching to fill the posts, the State Department has too often had to fill critical, Third World slots with inexperienced and unqualified officers, the GAO found, who can’t read or speak the local language.
Not that that keeps them from approving visa requests and negotiating with local officials.
“For example, officials at one high visa fraud post we visited stated that consular officers sometimes adjudicate visas without fully understanding everything the applicants tell them during the visa interview,” noted the GAO report.
In another case, according to an ambassador the GAO interviewed, “a senior level embassy official who did not have sufficient speaking and reading language skills for his position met with a prime minister, but was unable to participate fully in the top-secret discussion without an outside translator present.”
In a classic diplomatic understatement, the ambassador related that, “because the prime minister would not speak freely with the translator present, the meeting was not productive.”
Some might say the Case of the Reluctant Diplomats is outrageous. Why doesn’t Foggy Bottom just order its weenies to Iraq and other critical posts?
It can, but it won’t.
It might hurt morale.
“Despite chronic staffing shortages at hardship posts, especially at the mid-level, State has rarely directed FSOs to serve in locations for which they have not bid on a position — including hardship posts or locations of strategic importance to the United States — because of concerns about lowering morale or productivity,” the GAO found.
Instead, the State Department uses “persuasion” to find “volunteers.”
One such persuasion is a requirement that rookie diplomats serve in hardship posts before they can be considered for promotion to the Senior Foreign Service.
Not exactly “Saving Private Ryan.” And hundreds of foreign service officers howled. But by the end of July, the department said it had filled “90 percent of our summer 2007 openings in Iraq, including those in Baghdad and in the Provincial Reconstruction Teams, and nearly all of our unaccompanied positions worldwide — all with volunteers,” foreign service personnel official Heather M. Hodges says.
Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs), one in each of Iraq’s four provinces, constitute the front lines of the U.S. “nation building” effort, a role that Bush administration officials once scorned.
And at least some FSOs really do think they should be lending a hand to the war effort, judging by the unfashionably patriotic remarks of two diplomats heading to Iraq.
Foreign service officers John Matel and Paul Wedderien, leaving for Iraq to be PRT leaders earlier this month, told reporters that the concept of duty, honor, country still counted for them.
“It’s not for the adventure, but it is for the mission,” Wedderien said at a State Department press conference.
“I’m going out there because I think this is an opportunity to do the most with what we have,” he added. “Certainly, the best use of my talents is to work with the top foreign policy priority of this nation.”
His colleague Matel said much the same.
“I mean, I’ll go there and I’ll stay as long as I can be useful,” he told reporters. “And I — you know, I think all of us, we believe in what we’re trying to do.”
“Most of the people in the class, myself included,” Matel added, “are doing it for mostly for patriotic or for responsibility reasons.”
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.