How It Works
Protesters in the US arrested. No propaganda value for the US Government.
Protesters in China imported to US for propaganda value for the US Government.Note to Mr. Chen: Welcome to the New World! Feel free to criticize any government you wish to here, except the US government. Even our version of free speech has limits. Watch your back around these parts, Chen.
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Should I Join the Foreign Service?
(A version of this article appeared recently on the Huffington Post, May 10, 2012)
Final tuition bills, spring in the air — it is commencement season, and soon-to-be graduates across the United States are poised to transition into unemployment. Many will seek jobs in America’s lone growth sector, government, and specifically with the Department of State as Foreign Service Officers. Should you join?
Before having my beard shaved off and being shunned, now in the termination process because of the book and blog I wrote, my last position in the U.S. Foreign Service was at the State Department’s Board of Examiners, where since returning from Iraq I administered the Foreign Service Oral Assessment (FSOA) and helped choose the next generation of Foreign Service Officers.
It was only after my book came out that State decided I could not work there. Something vague about not suddenly having judgement anymore, like losing one’s mojo I guess. I spent a lot of time around people interested in a Foreign Service career. They did not ask for advice and at the Board we did not offer it. However, also since my book came out, more people now approach me with the same question about joining the Foreign Service. Too much irony these days.
Intelligence Divorced from Innovation and Creativity
After 24 years of service myself, what I tell interested applicants is this: think very, very carefully about a Foreign Service career. The State Department is looking for a very specific kind of person and if you are that person, you will enjoy your career. I have come to understand that the Department wants smart people who will do what they are told, believing that intelligence can be divorced from innovation and creativity. Happy, content compliance is a necessary trait, kind of like being Downton Abbey-British but without the cool accent. The Department will not give you any real opportunity for input for a very long time — years, if ever. There is no agreed-upon definition of success or even progress at State, no profits, no battles won, no stock prices to measure. Success will be to simply continue to exist, or what your boss says it is, or both, or neither. You may never know what the point is other than that a visiting Congressional delegation conclude with a happy ending, whatever that even is. I spent the bulk of my second tour taking visiting Mrs. VIPs shopping (more senior third tour officers got to escort the VIPs themselves!). This will be your life trip.
At the same time, State has created a personnel system that will require you to serve in more and more dangerous places, and more and more unaccompanied places without family, as a routine. That sounds cool and adventurous at age 25, but try and imagine if you’d still be happy with it at age 45 with a spouse and two kids. What are your core obligations with a child who needs some extreme parenting as you leave your wife at home alone with him for a year so you can be a placeholder for State’s commitment to be as macho as the military?
Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?
Understand that promotions and assignments are more and more opaque. State has recently determined that even promotion statistics cannot be released. Changes in Congress will further limit pay and benefits. Your spouse will be un/underemployed most of his or her life. Your kids will change schools, for better or worse, every one, two or three years. Some schools will be good, some not so good, and you’ll have no choice unless you are willing to subvert your career choices to school choices, as in let’s go to Bogota because the schools are good even if the assignment otherwise stinks. You’ll serve more places where you won’t speak the language and get less training as requirements grow without personnel growth. As you get up there, remember your boss, the politically-appointed ambassador, can arbitrarily be a real estate broker who donated big to the president’s campaign. Make sure all these conditions make sense to you now, and, if you can, as you imagine yourself 10, 15 and 20 years into the future.
It is a very unique person who can say “Yes” truthfully and after real soul-searching. Make sure the juice is worth the squeeze before you accept that assignment.
Failed Choices
In the universe where you’ll work, the U.S. will face a continued stagnation on the world stage. When we, perhaps semi-consciously, made a decision to accept an empire role after World War II, we never built the tools of empire. No colonial service, no securing of critical resources, no carrot and sticks. We sort of settled on a military-only model of soft occupation. We made few friends or allies, accepting reluctant partners. As changes take place in the developing world, the most likely American the people there encounter now wears a uniform and carries a weapon.
America faced a choice and blew it. As an empire, we either needed to take control of the world’s oil or create a more equitable and less martial global society to ensure our access to it. We did neither. We needed either to create a colonial system for adventures like Iraq or Afghanistan along the Victorian model, or not try to invade and rebuild those places. We did neither.
Simply pouring more and more lives and money into the military is a one-way street going in the wrong direction. We can keep spending, but when millions of dollars spent on weapons can be deflected by terror acts that cost nothing, we will lose. When any hearts and minds efforts are derailed by yet another excused collateral damage episode, we will lose.
For most of the next century, America still has a big enough military that our “decline” will be slow, bloody and reluctant. But, inevitable nonetheless. By ideologicizing every challenge from Communism to the entire religion of Islam, we have assured ourselves of never really winning any struggle.
You can be a part of that if you’d like to join the Foreign Service and help Build the Wall.
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
State Department Won the Vietnam War
Remember the Vietnam War? You know, the one from Rambo, the war that was supposed to stop Communism from rolling Asia like dominoes? Fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here? Kennedy? Johnson? Nixon? Bueller? The US fought in Vietnam in one form or another from the late 1950′s until we gave up in 1975 and lost. Helicopters on the roof of the Embassy, hippies taking over the country, some history stuff went down, babies.
Vietnam was America’s first modern counter-insurgency war. There are a lot of definitions of counter-insurgency (COIN), but it boils down to a war that can’t be won and isn’t fought in the traditional Red Guys clash with Blue Guys and the winner seizes territory way, like Private Ryan and Tom Hanks did in World War II. A COIN struggle is characterized primarily by a “hearts and minds” struggle, a multi-spectrum approach to winning the loyalty of the people by protecting them, helping them, establishing a local government, that kind of thing. The failure to do this in Iraq is the subject of my book, and the ongoing failure to do this in Afghanistan will be the subject of some other person’s book to come.
If you check Wikipedia or ask the Vietnam Vet next door, you’ll find out that we did not succeed in winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese. If you want to read the best book written about how COIN and Vietnam, it is Street Without Joy
by Bernard Fall.
One of the crucial elements of the failure to win the real war in Vietnam was the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) program, run by the same State Department that flopped in Iraq. Formed in 1967, CORDS was headed by a State civilian, Ambassador Robert W. Komer. CORDS pulled together all the various U.S. military and civilian agencies involved in the hearts and minds effort, including State, USAID, USIA and the CIA (who tagged on the remnants of the Phoenix Program, just because). CORDS civilian/military advisory teams were dispatched throughout South Vietnam.
So how’d that CORDS thing work out for ya’all? It failed in conjunction with the whole war effort. We lost the war. Nothing four Presidents said about Vietnam was true and tens of thousands of people died for no purpose. We did not win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Looking Glass, according to the State Department’s slick self-congratulatory monthly magazine (thanks taxpayers!), CORDS “was a success” and in fact somehow contributed to the defeat of the Viet Cong in the Delta by 1972, where per the State Department, the wiley Commies couldn’t even muster a squad-sized action. It is true– read it all here in the State Magazine (p. 16) you’re paying for anyway.
The article is just spiffy, using words like “swashbuckling” non-ironically to describe State’s men in Vietnam, and claiming in 1967 State’s Vietnam Training Center was “the center of things” (1967 was the freaking “Summer of Love” so State thinking their Training Center was the center of anything is beyond nerd land.) We learn that many FS men “enjoyed their tours.” In fact, US military officers “watched in awe” as the first State Department troopers deplaned, just like in that movie Platoon no doubt.
Here’s a keen description of precisely how State won the Vietnam War (those in Afghanistan now, pay attention):
[We] would pick a house at random, politely ask if we could come in and chat, and enquire about the perspective of the resident on everything from the state of the rice crop to the price of cooking oil to the honesty of local officials.
Dammit! Why didn’t we know that before spending $44 billion and nine years trying to solve Iraq and win that war! All we had to do was “politely ask.”
OK, fun’s over. Here’s the problem. If State is still clinging to the bizarre idea that it succeeded in Vietnam, and propagandizing its own employees with the same, what hope is there that they will ever make any progress about the failures visited upon Iraq, and the failures now ongoing in Afghanistan?
Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it we’re told. But those who make up their own versions of history to fit present political needs are simply doomed in advance.
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Nipple Question to the State Department
In a statement to the Washington Post, State Department spokesman Mark C. Toner said the censored Foreign Service blog that addressed one breast cancer survivor’s story “has been restored” on the State Department’s recruitment page. “It had been taken down as part of a periodic effort by a contractor to review and freshen the blog links on the site.”
Does this mean I’m still getting fired for my blog? My story was also in the Washington Post but I am being punished, not rewarded, for the interview I gave.
It sure seems the primary difference between the blogs you endorse and mine is simply the content; judging based on what I write is why the ACLU admonished the Department for violating my first amendment rights. The current “Nipple-gate” story just enforces that.
Can I haz my job pleaz?
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Mrs. Clinton, you have a problem.
It was with great pleasure that I saw my friend at the Washington Post, Lisa Rein, bring more daylight on the latest anti-free speech action by the State Department, State’s censoring of a blog because it mentioned the writer’s battle with breast cancer. Lisa Rein has written about my own efforts to reform State’s unconstitutional practices, and I was pleased to bring the latest act of the Department to her attention. I am very glad she took the story.
It is now time for the Department of State to stand up and admit it: I have a problem with blogs. I need help.
The State Department has pressured numerous employees to quit blogging at the risk of their career. When I refused to cave in, they began termination proceedings.
Yet the State Department tries to use employee blogs it agrees with as bait to attract new recruits, even listing some on its own US Government website. State turns a blind eye to the fact that not all of those blogs include the proper disclaimer, and that not all of those blog adhere to the same pre-clearance regulations I am being fired for and which the ACLU has declared unconstitutional. I doubt all of those “acceptable” bloggers have been forced to sign a Compliance Letter as a condition of continued employment. Blogger Jen did not get pre-permission from State to speak to the Post yesterday, though I am being fired for not getting pre-permission from State to speak to the Post in the past.
All this double-talk because State wants the advertising bang such first-hand accounts provide to its recruitment efforts.
In Jen’s case, State was happy to pimp her blog on its own web site as long as she was writing plucky tales of life abroad. But, as soon as she mentioned her battle with breast cancer, State deep sixed her blog, disappeared it. State will break the rules for verbiage it likes, and enforce the rules right up to termination when it does not like what someone says.
Another State Department blogger puts it this way:
Simply put, the State Department has two completely opposite opinions when it comes to social media (like blogging). One side of State wants nothing more than to shut down all State blogs. Period. Blogs by employees, blogs by spouses, it doesn’t matter – all of them should be GONE.
My husband has personally seen this side of State many, many times, via many different official people, during the course of an uncountable number of official meetings over the last few years. As many of my readers know, my blog has been shut down twice…most recently, just a couple of months ago. The only reason why my blog is up now and still exists today is because my DS Special Agent husband feels most emphatically that: I am a private U.S. citizen, and my blog represents/is protected by my right to freedom of speech.
Believe me when I say that he has endured much in defense of his position.
Being on The Official Blog List actually painted an even bigger bulls eye on my back. And not just on my back, but on the backs of other State bloggers on The List. To date, to my knowledge, at least three State bloggers (and perhaps even up to five) on The List have since been shut down. And there were probably, oh, I don’t know, only about a dozen or so blogs on that List when it began. So, you know, not the best odds of bloggy survival.
So there it is. This is not an isolated incident, a disgruntled employee or two who can be disappeared to fix the problem.
Mrs. Clinton, you now have the Washington Post– twice– pointing out the hypocrisy your Department visits upon social media. You have the American Civil Liberties Union stating your policies are unconstitutional and that you violate the First Amendment rights of your own employees. You have droids in your organization who mistreat people with breast cancer because of blogs. This story is spreading now via breast cancer awareness sites. You have a lot of employees who think it is time for a more rational policy, one that is applied equally to all.
Mrs. Clinton, you have a problem. Admit it, and seek a solution. It won’t go away by itself. You have to do something about it.
(Inside baseball extra bonus: The State Department publishes daily an internal-only summary of Washington Post articles. Curiously, the WaPo article on Jen’s blog was omitted. One can guess why such self-censorship seems to make sense to the ever-skittish State Department)(Extra, extra bonus: In a statement to the Washington Post, State Department spokesman Mark C. Toner said the blog “has been restored” on the State Department’s recruitment page. “It had been taken down as part of a periodic effort by a contractor to review and freshen the blog links on the site.” Like everyone believes that. OMG, does he kiss his mother with that mouth?)
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
State Department Does Not Care for Breast Cancer Talk
Don’t bury the lede: The State Department disowned a blog by a Foreign Service officer’s spouse because it discussed her own struggle with breast cancer instead of the happy traveling tales they seek.I’m sure by now you’ve seen the ACLU statement, which basically says the State Department rules on blogs and free speech would not withstand a Constitutional challenge, and that my First Amendment rights were violated. In support of me, the ACLU did a deep dive into the books, and found State’s regulations wanting, particularly as they apply to new media/social media.
I am not the only Foreign Service blogger out here, of course. There are hundreds of us. In fact, to cozy up to “young people” who are considering a career in the Foreign Service, State even links to some illegal Foreign Service blogs on its own US Government web page. Have a look! Linking to those blogs is an attempt to show that the State Department is a “with it” place to work, a “groovy gig” for “teens” who Twitter or something.
Some are More Equal Than Others
Now the question is of course why are some blogs that violate the rules quite officially accepted by the State Department, and why are other blogs that violate the rules (mine!) fodder to get the author fired. It seems to have something to do with content; if what you write fits State’s agenda, you can break the rules all you want. You don’t even have to update– one linked blog hasn’t been touched for over a year but since it paints a happy-rosy picture of our 51st state in Iraq, it is all OK.
Since State refuses to join the current century and update its social media guidelines, and since writing down “we’ll screw you if you cross us” would not help attract job candidates, we in the blogosphere are forced to identify the boundaries by bumping into them, like walking through the house in the dark.
Cancer is Not Allowed
A new boundary at State is nipples. Can’t talk about them. Or breast cancer, don’t talk about that either. One long time Foreign Service blogger, Jen, was dumped from the official list of good blogs by the Department of State. She received an email from State explaining why:
Hopefully, you can understand that some topics covered in your blog are very personal in nature, e.g. nipple cozies, and wouldn’t necessarily resonate with the majority of potential candidates who are interested in learning about the FS life overseas. Through our years of recruitment experience, we found that FS prospects want to learn more about the work that’s conducted, the people and cultures with whom they will interact, the travel experiences, and the individual stories our employees have to share.
Jen’s response was straightforward:
So you mean describing stories about life after a diagnosis of breast cancer while your FS husband is serving in Iraq on an unaccompanied tour 6,219 miles away is not an individual story? You mean detailing how you got through said issue, how you managed to pick yourself up off the floor each day despite feeling like your world had completely fallen apart (oh, wait, it had) and managed to somehow dust yourself off and keep going with your Foreign Service life is of no interest? Guess that means I am the *only* one who will ever have to deal with such a thing.
The fact that we ended up doing a second unaccompanied tour? Booooring. Or that I had what, 4 surgeries in the past 18 months (scheduled AROUND my husband’s most recent posting, so that he would be able to complete his obligations?)? Um, hello, that’s *too* personal, repugnant even!
So, as a public service, all State Department personnel should in their blogs a) not mention nipples; b) pretend everything is as happy as pooping out unicorns and gold dust and c) tell spunky stories of adventure abroad so that gullible young people will continue to join the ranks of we few, we happy few.
Meanwhile, Hilary Clinton’s State Department will continue to pretend to support breast cancer awareness when it has propaganda value, while hoping any of her employees or their family members afflicted with the disease will just shut the hell up.
And to bring it all full circle, the State Department censored Jen’s blog about her breast cancer the day after they got the ACLU letter talking about first amendment rights.
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
A New Low: State Department Censors Internal Dialogue to Block ACLU Discussion
A comment on the story below of the ACLU’s support of free speech for federal employees humorously remarkedThe State Department has classified the ACLU letter and issued a warning to its busy workers in the hive not to read the letter: “federal employees and contractors who believe they may have inadvertently accessed or downloaded this letter without prior authorization, should contact their information security offices for assistance.”
Well, fiction became reality as the State Department has stooped to a new low, censoring comments on the ACLU from a purely internal discussion Intranet forum.
Sounding Board
Hillary Clinton initiated something at State called the “Sounding Board,” a forum available to State Department employees only on the internal Intranet. It is not available to the public. Clinton described the initiative as
I ask you to apply the same robust diplomacy and engagement inside this building and at other posts across the world, a willingness to discuss and debate, to be open-minded, forward-thinking, to share better ideas, better methods, better ways of executing the very difficult tasks confronting us.
And inaugurated the forum with the vision statement that it
Afford employees the opportunity to provide feedback on management ideas, programs, and initiatives, Promote open debate and discussion on innovation and reform, Foster discourse between employees and the Department’s senior leadership.
My Contribution to the Sounding Board
So it seemed to me that the world’s premier free speech advocate, the ACLU, declaiming that the State Department’s regulations blocking blogging and the first amendment rights of its employees were unconstitutional, might be of interest to other employees, and that the need to discuss changing those regulations is real. I posted this comment on the internal forum with links:
The ACLU, in reviewing State’s preclearance policies in relation to my case, has found them to be unconstitutional and to exercise unjustified restraint. Now, the question is, will the Department change, or again have to be forced to change?
Ok, right? No naughty words, nothing inflammatory. And so State censored it, deleted it, disappeared it so that no employee could see it, based on an anonymous accusation. Accusations at State are always made anonymously. Here’s what the moderator said
The Sounding Board wasn’t designed to handle individually-specific cases, or cases that are under formal review of any sort. Our publishing guidelines state this, but more honestly, there are issues that are much bigger than our two moderators can handle. And yours is one of them. We have to let the procedures set in place, that you’re exercising, run their course.
What it Means
The State Department now has fallen to the level of censoring its own discussion forum specifically designed to “promote open debate and discussion on innovation and reform.” They want to disappear ideas that they don’t agree with. I’ve resubmitted the comment in hopes that the Stasi at State are down at Starbucks and it’ll slip through. Jeez, grow a pair, will ya’?
Update
State, to their credit, has now allowed a modified version of my comment online, with a note that discussion of my specific case will not be allowed.
OK, cool. I don’t really care that employees talk about me (though they are welcome). My case itself is getting plenty of media and attention beyond the internal Sounding Board. My point is to discuss the use of social media by employees, and the ACLU statement is significant. I don’t recall in my own 24 years too many other instances where some of State regulations have been labeled unconstitutional. Social media will continue to grow, and the Department needs realistic, clear rules that are applied uniformly. Without them, you have the chaos that I have participated in for the past year or so. That does no one any good.
State dragged its feet on the treatment of women and African Americans, and suffered for it. State took the lead on rights for LGBT employees and has profited from it. State should step up on the issue of social media and let itself be seen as a model of the free speech it advocates worldwide.
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
ACLU: State Department Violates Van Buren’s Constitutional Rights
(This article also appeared on the Huffington Post, May 17, 2012)
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), in a letter to the Department of State, said today that the Department’s actions against my book and this blog are unconstitutional, that State’s actions “constitute a violation of Van Buren’s constitutional rights.”
Straight up, no qualifiers.
The ACLU reminds the State Department that the Courts have said that “Speech concerning public affairs is more than self-expression, it is the essence of self-government” and citing the numerous legal challenges the State Department has willfully ignored that grant government employees the same First Amendment rights all Americans enjoy.
Which is what we’ve been saying all along, here, in the New York Times, on NPR, CNN and elsewhere.
After reviewing the State Department’s policies and regulations, the ACLU states that “The State Department’s pre-publication review process, as it applies to blogs and articles raises serious Constitutional questions,” then goes on to detail those questions. The ACLU notes that State’s actions toward me are but one example of its unconstitutional actions and apply to other employees as well. They conclude that “it is highly unlikely that the State Department could sustain its burden of demonstrating that its policy is constitutional… There is no justification for such expansive prior restraint on State Department employees’ speech.”
Now them’s fightin’ words, folks.
Read the entire letter on the ACLU’s website. It is powerful stuff.
What It Means
The ACLU’s announcement that the Department of State has violated the Constitutional rights, the First Amendment rights, of one of its own employees comes to the day, 225 years later, that the Constitutional Convention opened in Philadelphia and the founders began writing an extraordinary document. The First Amendment was added later, but the spirit of free speech underlies every clause and sentence of the original document. It is embedded in the very parchment.
The Founders would retch to see what has become of the spirit of the Enlightment that drove them, simply because America got frightened after 9/11. Those beautiful words of the First Amendment, almost haiku-like, are the sparse poetry of the American democratic experiment. The Founders purposely wrote the First Amendment to read broadly, and not like a snippet of tax code, in order to emphasize that it should encompass everything from shouted religious rantings to eloquent political criticism. Madison and Jefferson were strong enough to give away the power of a government they would run, and place it in the hands of the people that government would serve. There’s courage most of us can never fully understand.
Now, very sadly, our first Cabinet agency, the Department of State, the part of the US government that speaks most directly to people abroad about freedom and democracy, is run by much smaller men and women. They are afraid of their own employees and afraid of what you– The People– will know the way they go about their wretched business. Hillary Clinton, herself a candidate to take over the seat once held by giants like Jefferson, Adams and Madison, has turned her internal security against a blog, and ordered her frightened followers to get rid of one employee because of a book. Her acts now have a label that will follow her and her Department long past my departure: Unconstitutional.
Every fluffy speech she makes to Syrian bloggers, or Chinese dissenters, will carry an asterisk– but Madame Secretary, as you criticize oppressive regimes for shutting down free speech, didn’t you order your own followers to silence a critic? Didn’t your Department act unconstitutionally? Are your actions somehow different than Bejing’s?
Did not you violate, willfully, clearly and repeatedly Madame Secretary the First Amendment rights of an American Citizen? How will you answer them Madame Secretary? Will you lie? Will you defame the ACLU? Will you apply your own legal skills to the analysis of your wrongs? Mumble about a disgruntled employee? Or will you remain silent?
Of course the State Department has not responded to all this. They have not answered me, they have not answered your letters and emails, they have not answered Members of Congress and they have not answered the ACLU. Why not? There is the ACLU letter, five dense pages of legal justification that leads to the core statement:
State’s actions constitute a violation of Van Buren’s constitutional rights.. That is the issue. Now, finally, Madame Secretary, how will you answer?
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
What it All Means: Is America Served Well by Silencing Dissent?
For those joining our story already in progress, here’s the Twitter-length summary: I’ve worked for the State Department as a Foreign Service Office for some 24 years. I spent a year in Iraq, wrote a book critical of the State Department’s waste and mismanagement in Iraq, blogged about it and now am being fired from the State Department for all that.
Diplopundit, still the best blog and perhaps the best news source on the State Department, has written a long piece trying to answer the question of what all that means:
Had Mr. Van Buren, a midlevel FS-01 quit after his return from Baghdad, then wrote his book, we probably would be talking about his book for like, 15 minutes, then forget about it. But that’s not how it happens. He got his 15 minutes of fame plus more. Along the way, we learned a bit more not only about how we spent $44.6 billion in taxpayer funds on rebuilding Iraq but also on the the shallowness of our convictions– from our tolerance to dissenting views, to our much touted push for Internet Freedom and 21st Century Statecraft, as long as they’re not our guys.
The State Department spends much money and effort to recruit and train the “best and the brightest” to represent America overseas, then proceeds to hammer and shape them into, I’m sorry to say, drones, who follow directions, not cause waves and most importantly, whose stingers are without barbs… How can we cultivate leaders, risk takers, innovators and independent thinkers for the 21st century in an environment that penalizes such traits?
No matter how Peter Van Buren’s case turns out, the signal had been sent loud and clearly. A Director General of the Foreign Service once testified in the case of a DS agent dismissed for “notoriously disgraceful conduct” and said, “I think it’s important to send a message to the entire State Department that. . . you cannot do this.” That’s the same message broadcasted now in Foggy Bottom’s billboard.
I’m sure the State Department can argue that “enforcing” the rules is done to promote the proper functioning of the Service. But does the proper functioning of the Service trumps everything else? If the State Department can make sure that another Peter Van Buren will never happen again in the future, that is good for the organization.
But are we, the American public better served?
Best to read the entire article, over at Diplopundit.
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Predator Nation
From TomDispatch: A devastating account of drone wars as our number one export of the twenty-first century and just how we’ve become a Predator nation, America as a Shining Drone Upon a Hill, On Staring Death in the Face and Not Noticing.
It was one of the great self-congratulatory speeches of our era — Obama counter-terrorism tsar John Brennan offering a full-throated defense of the administration’s “covert” drone wars. In his latest post, focusing on what author Tom Engelhardt calls his “shining drone upon a hill” speech, he considers the nature of American exceptionalism in our time and the way it blinds us to ourselves, to how we actually look to the rest of the world.
Engelhardt writes of an American dream of this country as a “shining city”: Whatever that ‘city,’ that dream, was once imagined to be, it has undergone a largely unnoticed metamorphosis in the twenty-first century. It has become — even in our dreams — an up-armored garrison encampment, just as Washington itself has become the heavily fortified bureaucratic heartland of a war state. So when Brennan spoke, what he offered was a new version of American exceptionalism: the first ‘shining drone upon a hill’ speech.
Tom Engelhardt explores his over-the-top language of self-congratulation, his fears of how others less wise, judicious, and moral than us might use drones in the future, and in the process the way a sense of American exceptionalism blinds our leaders to a changing American reality. He concludes that “What they can’t see in the haze of exceptional self-congratulation is this: they are transforming the promise of America into a promise of death. And death, visited from the skies, isn’t precise. It isn’t glorious. It isn’t judicious. It certainly isn’t a shining vision. It’s hell. And it’s a global future for which, someday, no one will thank us.”
Be sure to read the entire piece at TomDispatch. And keep a sharp eye out overhead.
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Secret Service Prostitution: From Reality to Farce
It used to take awhile for an event to morph into farce. I bet when Abraham Lincoln was shot it took weeks before Civil War-era comedians started telling inappropriate assassination jokes. Things just moved slower then.Now of course, with the Internet, reality becomes farce much faster. The Secret Service prostitution scandal from Colombia has already hit bottom, based on an interview from a Colombian radio station with the escort (pictured, at work, above) at the heart of it all.
To begin, she will be posing soon for Playboy. You can get a preview here (Sort of Not Safe for Work, unless you work for the State Department, as there are no Wikileaks references).
The Agent’s wife has stated she will stand by her now-unemployed whore mongering husband. For those of you outside the Beltway, this is a Washington-area thing, where political spouses profess loyalty to their low-life mates (Hillary and Bill!)
According to the escort, the Agent was too drunk to finish the job and that’s why he would not pay her in the morning (she later said he did the deed then passed out, so who cares). She said the other Secret Service staff took up a collection and handed her $250, begging she would not call the cops. “He did not feel he got what he was being asked to pay for,” said the Pretty Woman.
She was one of 20 professional women brought to the Secret Service party.
The escort also said that the Agent could not dance well. The escort said he liked to dance in a “disorderly” manner in which “he lifted his shirt to show off his six-pack.”
When the escort woke the Agent, he refused to pay, telling her “just go, bitch.”
Eight Secret Service officers have been forced out, the agency is “trying” to permanently revoke the security clearance of one. HINT: Forget the whores, have him look at Wikileaks online!
And lastly, the escort said no one from the US government has been in touch with her or interviewed her. Get this– the Secret Service (unlike the media) says they can’t find her. So much for intel.
This appears at odds with Obama’s stated desire for a “rigorous investigation.”
BREAKING: Apparently both the TODAY show and the US Secret Service have now interviewed the subject. Return to your business, citizens.
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Why Peace: Occupying Iraq, State Department-style
I was very happy to contribute an essay, “Occupying Iraq, State Department-style” to the new book edited by Marc Guttman, Why Peace
. My essay deals with the increasing narrow gap between the actions of the Department of Defense and the Department of State abroad, and the implications for America of a foreign policy devoted only to hostility.
This book is an exploration of aggression, and of the evolutionary (and revolutionary) process to peace. Through the insights of men and women, from a wide range of backgrounds, cultures, and perspectives, Why Peace presents stories of wars, invasions, and political repressions—down to the most basic levels of authoritarianism. These individuals share mind-opening and inspiring personal experiences with state violence: North Korean gulag prisoners, exiled journalists, soldiers at war (and some who refused to go back), Colombian campesinos displaced by drug war fumigations, people violently displaced by their government for private corporate interests in the Amazon, families run over by war, victims of cluster bombs in Southeast Asia, Guantánamo prisoners, a Cuban student denied the rights to speak and organize, and much more.
Read a review here or here to learn more.
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
New Reviews of We Meant Well
Two new reviews of We Meant Well you may be interested in. The first is from Demokracy.com. While the book has gathered its share of praise and angst over the core theme of phantasmagorical waste and mismanagement in the State Department-run reconstruction program in Iraq, about half of what I wrote deals with our military. Demokracy.com notes this:Van Buren certainly had this reader snickering out loud regularly, but there was one point where he elicited a gasp that was in no way mirthful – when he described an aspect of lifesaving training the soldiers had undergone back in the states.
“The guys at Falcon who had been selected for the training all started with a big 180-pound, man-sized hog,” he writes. “The trainers blew half the pig’s face away, slit open its belly, and cut the femoral artery. The idea was to get the soldiers to ignore the horrific facial wound and the slit belly and focus on the femoral. If you couldn’t stop it from pushing blood out, your pig/soldier/friend bled to death in minutes. The soldiers topped one another with ghastly descriptions of how messed up their pigs had been. The trainers were never done. As soon as you controlled one thing, they shot, cut, or tore the pig in another way. At one point they threw the bleeding pig into the back of a pickup truck and you had to continue to work to save its life as the truck bounced down a rutted back road in North Carolina. … Soldiers who had undergone the experience were careful when and how they talked about it. No one enjoyed seeing an animal suffer, and most left the sessions with questions in their heads about right and wrong. What was a pig’s life worth?”
Read the full review from Demokracy.com online.
The second new review comes from Chronicles Magazine. Entitled “The Best are Not the Brightest,” from David Halberstram’s epic book about the men who stumbled America into the Vietnam War, The Best and the Brightest
, the review straight-forwardly places the blame for the mess in Iraq on the ever-so intelligent men and women at State, Defense and the NSC who led us into the quagmire and then abandoned the task to others to resolve.
The review is not online at the Chronicles site, but you can read it here.
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Senate Passes Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act
The Project for Government Oversight (POGO) details the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act that the Senate passed for the fourth time. It is now up to the House to take a break from worrying about dudes getting married and renaming Post Offices and step up.The bill (S. 743) grants federal workers the protections they need to safely report waste, fraud and abuse. Which is good news because taxpayers, who rely on whistleblowers to disclose corruption within the government, are now one step closer towards saving billions of dollars. If people inside the government don’t tell you the taxpayers what is going on, how will you know? Always important to a democracy that depends on an informed citizenry, in the current age of over-classification, whistleblowers are even more important.
POGO tells us:
To put the bill in real-world terms: it could help prevent scandals like the General Services Administration (GSA) lavish spending binge, help protect important national whistleblowers—like Peter Van Buren and Mike Helms—and encourage would-be whistleblowers to step forward in the public interest.
The bill’s significance is clear. It modernizes the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 by expanding “free speech rights, specifically covering national security and intelligence community workers, federal scientists, and Transportation Security Administration officers. The bill also will strengthen failed procedures, close loopholes, create efficiencies, and affirm lawful disclosures. For the first time, some federal whistleblowers would have a real ‘day in court,’ since the bill provides access to a jury trial in federal district court,” according to a press release by POGO and allies.
Read more on the POGO website.
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Hillary Goes All Casual Friday Everyday; Bachmann a Well-Dressed Traitor
Anybody who still is not sure that Hillary Clinton is pretty much done with politics soon should check out her latest photos. Now here’s a person that pretty much walks the walk and talks the talk that she is way past caring. Check it out, at left. This new spirit of casualness opens the door for me to wear my Free Bradley Manning T-shirt to work at Foggy Bottom next week.
Meanwhile, the other person I am being fired by the State Department for mocking, complete idiot Michelle Bachmann, has just demonstrated her loyalty to the US of America by becoming a citizen of another country. Sure, it’s Switzerland, a kind of OK country with no reported US drone strikes at present. Nothing says “I love my country” like becoming a citizen of another country. Of course that should not matter to Bachmann, as she is only running for another term in Congress and making laws there could not possibly conflict with her loyalty to her new country, right?
Maybe Hillary’s State Department could look into whether or not Bachmann has lost her US citizenship by naturalizing as a danged foreigner now.
HuffPo reminds that Bachmann is a member of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Financial Services Committee. So the former now includes not merely a foreign citizen, but a citizen of a country not even allied with the U.S., and the latter includes a citizen of a country that just happens to have 1) an exemption for tax evasion in its extradition treaty with the U.S. (an exemption that some convicted American tax evaders took full advantage of) and 2) banking secrecy laws which frequently cause no small amount of frustration to various parts of U.S. government, including, of course, the House Financial Services Committee.
Perhaps Bachmann could check on patriot Mitt Romney’s Swiss bank accounts on her next visit “home”?
Awkward!
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
A Meditation on Irrelevancy in Kabul
To further the debate on the value of social media as practiced at taxpayer’s expense by the US Embassy in Kabul, here is one of their actual Tweets:
Newest order from the top for Embassy Employees: seat belts, you will be reminded, are mandatory.Stay safe out there.
— U.S. Embassy Kabul (@USEmbassyKabul) May 9, 2012
Robust is the Word
But wait, there’s more. You’ll recall that thanks to a whistleblower at the US Embassy in Kabul, we learned that the State Department wasted $80 million on a new Consulate building in Afghanistan that will never open. After initially stating they would not comment on leaked documents, the Embassy press office in Kabul manned up to release this statement:
The United States is committed to a long-term diplomatic presence in Mazar-e-Sharif. There is already a robust U.S. diplomatic presence in the City and we are evaluating our options as to how and when a permanent U.S. diplomatic presence will be established.
Now how helpful is that? Anyone, anyone… Bueller? Not a word on the wasted $80 million, not a word on the fact that we the taxpayers only know about the wasted $80 million because of a leak and not a single piece of actual meat, but they did slip in the word “robust.” Tip for aspiring diplomats: anytime someone at the State Department uses the word “robust,” grab your wallet and run away.
Afghanistan’s Next Generation of Law Professors Find Success at Home and Abroad
Ok, Ok, maybe some good news from the Embassy. In another social media coup, the State Department announces that “Afghanistan’s Next Generation of Law Professors Find Success at Home and Abroad.” This little speck of taxpayer-paid fluff is all about the success of a scholarship program, written by the same person who is responsible for running the program. Objectivity builds credibility in social media ya’all! LOL!
Unfortunately, even a puff piece like this reveals more than it should. Just by reading the propaganda, you find that the program has been running since 2004 and in eight years, all of 229 people have participated, just 28 a year from a country of over 34 million. Worse yet, of those 229 only 18 have actually graduated from the full program. As a topper, some of the law grads major in sharia law under our sponsorship. Nobody is saying how much all this cost us so far, but the best news (!) is that the entire program is going to be refunded for another five years. The measure of success, the metric used to determine whatever amount of money being spent is paying off for the US? The author and program manager herself sez “I know that these law professors and the students they teach back home will continue to reform Afghanistan’s justice system from within.” Done.
But wait (shout State’s public diplomacists) helping lawyers in Afghanistan is not a bad thing! And even if the numbers helped are not as robust as we’d like, isn’t it better to do something instead of nothing? Doesn’t every little bit help?
Yes, yes, the same tired rhetorical questions State trots out to justify its wandering-in-the-dark programs. The same tired response is that the US is supposedly engaged in a worldwide struggle and State is supposed to support the greater geopolitical goals of the nation. After eight years if the best you can do is say, well, it doesn’t seem harmful and maybe a few people benefited, that is a pretty piss poor justification for a program that costs millions of taxpayer dollars.
Measuring ROL Success
Absent self-serving resume fodder (above), the only possible attempt at assessing these so-called “Rule of Law” (ROL) efforts in Afghanistan I could locate was a 2008 Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report. That report concluded, inter alia:
– The many U.S. efforts to support ROL in Afghanistan are laudable for their professionalism and tenacity, but it is often not clear how, or even if, ROL efforts are being measured for success, and when the intense international attention wanes, whether these projects can be sustained.
– The U.S. government, through several agencies, is funding many programs related to ROL. This inspection team found no indication that the funds are being used improperly. However, no one source seems to have a clear picture of the scope of U.S. expenditure in this field.
I tried very hard to find out what the lawyer exchange program mentioned above cost, but failed. I did learn from the OIG report that from FY 2002 through FY 2007, the civilian side of the USG spent a whopping $110.4 million on such Rule of Law programs. It appears no one knows how much the military spent alongside the civilians on Rule of Law; the OIG report unhelpfully states
There was no way to determine what the many different elements of DOD (some under direct DOD command, some under NATO), were spending specifically on ROL, but the current military leadership in Afghanistan briefed the team that implementing ROL programs was important to them.
The OIG report, speaking of the civilian-military interface, not surprisingly reports that coordination is not as robust as it could be, and makes this staggering recommendation for success:
Embassy Kabul should demonstrate its commitment to the role of the rule-of-law coordinator, through a means such as having the deputy chief of mission attend at least one meeting of the Special Committee on Rule of Law each month.
Whooooa! No way, attend one whole meeting a month? Feeling better now?
It’s All About Relationships
And finally, just to clarify things, here is the actual wire diagram showing the relationships among the players in Rule of Law issues at the US Embassy in Kabul.
It becomes clearer each day why the State Department is sinking deeper into irrelevancy. Keep at ‘em boys and you’ll soon become the Vanilla Ice of foreign affairs!
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Does Public Diplomacy in Afghanistan Work? Go Tell the Marines
In my interview with John Brown about Public Diplomacy and social media at the State Department, reprinted here by the American Security Project and also on HuffPo and this blog, we talked about the need to measure in some way the impact of public diplomacy efforts.
On metrics, Van Buren argues that they are needed to help determine is a goal is being achieved. Furthermore, he perceives that the State Department has been using volume, not results, as a primary metric for success. Creating volumes of messages and projects is an ineffective metric, and new methods for actually measuring the achievement of goals must be developed to ensure effectiveness.
Metrics
The old saying, any road will get you there if you don’t know where you’re going, applies here. If I was to ask a question of someone important in Public Affairs, I’d ask this: why isn’t your whole “PD” strategy built around sending out messages in bottles dropped into the ocean? Now of course the analogy only goes so far, but just as the message in the bottle strategy can be dismissed with a quick thought experiment (who knows who reads what, and what they do after the read it), can anyone really make a different claim for the State Department’s current efforts?
Metrics start with a clear goal, an end state to use the military term, and work backwards from there. One of the core problems with the State Department, and the one that most significantly contributes to the Department’s increasing irrelevance in foreign policy, is that State seems just content to “be,” to create conditions of its own continued existence. What if instead the organization had more concrete goals? Then we could measure back from them. I’ll not trouble readers with my own list of foreign policy goals, but if the best you can come up with is something so broad as “engage the public” then you are pretty close to having no real goal at all. Best to throw notes into the ocean and hope for the best.
Several Public Diplomacists at State wrote in, claiming that they were “sure they were effective” but said that there was no way for them to measure their effectiveness, apparently apart from some gut instinct they acquired in training.
Yeah, right. Go tell that to the Marines.
The Marines Man Up
The Marine Corps decided their own public diplomacy strategy in Afghanistan (though they call it psyops, and other refer to it as propaganda) needed to be evaluated by a third party. They hired the Rand Corporation to review their programs, and then freaking published the results, good and bad, for the world to see. Some takeaways:
– An assessment of the effectiveness of various themes in prior U.S. military psychological operations revealed that certain messages were never effective, and other messages were effective for only a limited amount of time.
– Likewise, the methods used to disseminate these messages, as well as an understanding of the diversity and culture of target audiences, played a significant role in the reach and outcome of messaging campaigns.
There Have Been Both Notable Successes and Notable Weaknesses in the U.S. Military’s Messaging Campaigns in Afghanistan– The most-notable shortcoming has been in countering the Taliban’s propaganda campaign against U.S. and coalition activity, which has focused on civilian casualties and has found a broad national and international audience.
– While the success of Taliban propaganda efforts has not translated into widespread support for the movement, it may have weakened support for the U.S. and coalition presence and activities in the region.
The biggest successes have been in the area of face-to-face communication and meetings with key communicators, such as local councils of elders, local leaders, and members of the Afghan media.Warts and All
Now of course someone can bark that a third party consultant isn’t a proper metric, or that the report was biased or should have been written in Klingon, but the point here is that unlike the State Department, which conspicuously left even John Brown’s interview about metrics out of its daily media summary, the Marines were willing to seek an assessment, and then published that assessment, warts and all, on the internet. Sure, this is not perfect. But the assessment does include recommendations, and so now anyone concerned, including the entire Corps, is aware of the good and bad, and knows the way forward. One team, one voice kind of thing.
It is of course more likely that I will awake tomorrow with a third nipple than that the State Department would seek such an assessment of its efforts in Afghanistan and then go on to announce the results publicly.
In fact, with a great sigh of relief from the State Department, the US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy was shut down in December 2011, closing off even that modest portal of review.
Want $10 Million Dollars?
Meanwhile, the American Embassy in Kabul is moving ahead, offering grants of up to $10 million a project for things as vague and broad as “Strengthen people-to-people ties to deepen the partnership between communities within Afghanistan and between Afghanistan and the United States.” You can also get multi-million dollar grants to teach English to Afghans, a worthy goal considering the Government Accountability Office cited lack of language skills as one of the problems dogging State’s efforts in Afghanistan.
Assessment? How about this self-assessment from a Public Diplomacy practioner in Afghanistan, headlined “NATO can win the war in Afghanistan with Pubic Diplomacy” (her typo in the headline, not mine, check the link yourself):
This is a Facebook post from a young Afghan who just graduated from Kabul University. “Today was a beautiful day. Dancing, happiness, laughter and exchanging jokes, recording sweet memories, forgetting worries, and celebrating graduation from college… Life could some times be so beautiful and wonderful. What a feeling!!!!
You will NEVER see such sentiments about Afghans in any of the major news networks or read it in the international papers. You will only read or watch the road side bombing and how everything is falling into pieces in Afghanistan. But in reality there is progress in Afghanistan and young Afghans are the future of their country.
The Twitter Tells All
And finally, no discussion of Public Diplomacy at State is complete with a word on social media, the newest flavor of Kool Aid at Foggy Bottom. Winning hearts and minds? Maybe not. Here’s some messages from today’s American Embassy Kabul Twitter feed, following Obama’s victory lap into Kabul announcing a new dawn or whatever:
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
We’re Sorry: Six Afghans Dead, US Still Losing War it Fails to Understand
Since we said we’re sorry, this is OK, right?
The New York Times tells us the American military expressed regret for an airstrike that mistakenly killed six members of a family in southwestern Afghanistan, Afghan and American military officials confirmed Monday. The victims included the family’s mother and five of her children, three girls and two boys, according to Afghan officials. The American regional commander, Maj. Gen. Charles M. Gurganus of the Marines apologized.
It really should not be necessary to go over this again, but apparently some of you did not do the reading
Sure, in war, people make mistakes. That is true. It is also true that the side that keeps making the same mistakes over and over again loses.
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
James Bamford: State Department and Wikileaks “Alice in Wonderland”
James Risen of The New York Times, James Bamford, author of The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security Agency, America’s Most Secret Intelligence Organizationand Matthew Miller, former spokesman for the Justice Department, discussed the Obama administration’s crusade against leaks of government secrets – and against some of the journalists who report them – at the National Press Club in Washington on May 1, 2012.
I had a chance to ask Bamford and Miller a question about the State Department’s assertion that despite being available online to the entire world, the Wikileaks documents remain “classified,” and indeed government employees can be prosecuted for referring to them. Here is his reply:
(If the video is not embedded above, please follow this link to see it)
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Wishful Thinking and Poor Planning: State Department Wastes $80 Million in Afghanistan
The
(This article orginally appeared on the Huffington Post, and was reprinted on Top News Today and One News.)
Washington Post informs with a story out of Afghanistan about how the Department of State, after signing a 10-year lease and spending more than $80 million on a site envisioned as the United States’ diplomatic hub in northern Afghanistan, have abandoned their plans, deeming the location for the proposed compound too dangerous. Why does the State Department consistently make poor decisions like this?
Based on a leaked memo by Martin Kelly, the acting management counselor at the US Embassy in Kabul (we’ll expect to see his name again soon as Diplomatic Security no doubt begins an investigation into the leak, not the wasted $80 million), the story details how in an effort to “send a positive signal” of support to the Afghan people (who no doubt were unable to receive the message sheltering underground from US freedom drones), now-dead Ambassador Richard Holbrooke bullied the plans for the Mazar-e Sharif Consulate through State’s bureaucracy. All sorts of prudent security regulations were ignored because a VIP wanted it done. It is not that security conditions changed in Afghanistan– they remain uniformly poor– but that the State Department simply ignored the reality on the ground in favor of reality as they would prefer it to be.
The Post characterizes the process and the waste of the $80 million as “a cautionary tale of wishful thinking, poor planning.” Blogger Diplopundit offers more detailed analysis of the affair here. For her part, regarding Holbrooke, Secretary of State Clinton tossed off “Everything that we have accomplished that is working in Afghanistan and Pakistan is largely because of Richard Holbrooke. It may have to wait until I write my memoirs, but that is a fact.”
How do these things happen at State?
Reading the Washington Post article, the $80 million’s worth of mistakes are very obvious, things any idiot would notice like a lack of set back from the street, no place to land helicopters and a common wall with some nearby shops, and are not obscure problems that needed to be sleuthed out.
Why does State so consistently make poor decisions? The US Embassy in Baghdad cost close to $1 billion, and that was before then-Ambassador Hill spent another five million dollars to have sod imported so he might have a green expansive Embassy lawn in the middle of the desert. Other, gratefully less costly examples stand out from my own career– millions spent on live telephone operators in Tokyo because the Ambassador simply did not care for automated systems, Consulate staff who should have been helping American Citizens after a devastating earthquake instead detailed to inventory the Consul General’s chinaware, money for upgrading communications gear re-allotted for fix the boss’ TV reception, hyper-expensive contractors used in place of cheaper, qualified staff, political prisoners smuggled into the Beijing Embassy one day only to be dumped back out onto the street the next and so on. I wrote a whole book, We Meant Well, about a year’s worth of dumb decisions in Iraq. Everyone makes mistakes but what we have here is a long, long litany of obvious bad decisions, so obviously bad one cannot help but wonder how smart people made them so consistently.
Though not necessarily unique to State, the shut down of dissent and logic in the face of a senior person’s wishes drives far too many decisions at State. Good decision making takes a back seat to bowing to the wishes of people who may have status but not brains. Since dissent is neither sought nor, after the first few slap downs, offered at State, dumb decisions are allowed to proceed to their natural conclusions. This all tracks well in an organization that lacks clear goals and measurable results, and avoids 360 reviews of supervisors like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, meaning that actual success or failure is less relevant than “getting along,” what State Department insiders call their “corridor reputation” and what outsiders might call sucking up. In my own 24 years of managing at the State Department, convincing people I worked with to disagree with me and bring up problems was the hardest task I faced.
The whole mind set was summed up by a senior State Department official (page eight in the State Department’s in-house magazine) offering serious advice on how to get promoted:
Support your boss. “But my boss is a jerk!” That may be true, but this is about you getting promoted and the “jerk” is still the boss. If your boss lacks charisma, humility, a sense of humor and table manners, that is not so good. Being a jerk, however, is not a federal offense. You do not have to feign affection for your boss, but you do have to support the mission with vigor, which not incidentally makes the boss look good—perhaps in spite of him or herself.
Can anyone imagine executives at a well-run company like FedEx or Google encouraging employees not to innovate or save money or improve as the keys to success, but to suck up to their boss, at the same time allowing him to continue being a jerk as if it is a perk of rank?
How does such an institutional culture– almost a cult of personality– play out in real life? In cases such as the now defunct Mazar-e-Sharif consulate, it means $80 million drips down the drain as no one may declare the Emperor truly and utterly has no clothes on until the reality is so obvious that it appears in the Washington Post.
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Loyalty Day: This is Just Plain Creepy
Did you know that Obama and whatever passes for a Congress in these United States took a few moments out of celebrating the fact that bin Laden is still dead to re-declare May 1 “Loyalty Day”?
Here’s the official statement:
NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim May 1, 2012, as Loyalty Day. This Loyalty Day, I call upon all the people of the United States to join in support of this national observance, whether by displaying the flag of the United States or pledging allegiance to the Republic for which it stands.
That is just plain creepy. It is an actual law, 36 USC § 115, which is even creepier.
The history of this holiday adds to the creep factor like a pedophile at a cheerleaders camp. From the Veteran’s of Foreign Wars:
Loyalty Day originally began as “Americanization Day” in 1921 as a counter to the Communists’ May 1 celebration of the Russian Revolution. On May 1, 1930, 10,000 VFW members staged a rally at New York’s Union Square to promote patriotism. Through a resolution adopted in 1949, May 1 evolved into Loyalty Day. Observances began in 1950 on April 28 and climaxed May 1 when more than five million people across the nation held rallies. In New York City, more than 100,000 people rallied for America. In 1958 Congress enacted Public Law 529 proclaiming Loyalty Day a permanent fixture on the nation’s calendar.
So, as our nation rushes headlong into totalitarianism, it is good to know that Loyalty Day exists to protect us all from those filthy disloyal Americans who speak out, blow the whistle, stand up against torture and demand their First Amendment rights.
We loyal Americans will stand quietly to the side, thank you. Now God bless.
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
How to Keep/Lose Your Security Clearance at the State Department
As an aid to all current and future State Department employees, here are examples of how to keep/lose your security clearance. These example are important, because the Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS), which grants and withdraws clearances, operates as a type of black hole: information goes in and decisions come out, but nothing that happens inside is visible. One never knows why a decision was made, or on what basis.With DS, facts can be hidden from Freedom of Information Act requests and even court-ordered discovery in the name of “security,” and thus manipulated to document pre-determined outcomes. What is called an investigation can morph into an indictment, where the goal is to keep fishing until something, anything, comes up. Actions by Diplomatic Security at the State Department occur without any independent review, and are largely not appealable to the Courts. Diplomatic Security, unlike its counterparts at the Department of Defense and other agencies, even refuses to use the “substantial evidence standard” mandated by the Administrative Procedures Act.
Here is how to keep your security clearance:
Commit rape. Tracy Barker, who says a State Department employee sexually assaulted her in Iraq in 2005 has won $2.93 million in arbitration from KBR, the military contracting company that employed her. KBR denies a rape occurred while Ms. Barker remains clear that State Department employee Ali Mokhtare assaulted her in Basra, Iraq. Investigators asked that the State Department suspend Mokhtare’s security clearance, but that request was denied. Clearance remains.
Here is how to lose your security clearance:
Write a blog. You can read more here. Clearance suspended.
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Colin Powell has the Manhood of a Kardashian
Colin Powell, as Secretary of State, lent his considerable credibility and gravitas to the case for war with Iraq. Powell spoke publicly before the UN General Assembly, and privately in depth with America’s allies, about mobile biowar labs, weapons of mass destruction and the imminent danger Saddam Hussein posed. While many people considered Bush an idiot puppet, and Cheney and Rumsfeld psychopathic fibbers, as they beat the drums for war, Powell convincingly represented the United States’ case for war.
Of course, everything Powell said was a lie.
Now, pimping a new book, of course, Colin tells all:
A blot, a failure will always be attached to me and my UN presentation. I am mad mostly at myself for not having smelled the problem. My instincts failed me. There is nothing worse than a leader believing he has accurate information when folks who know he doesn’t don’t tell him that he doesn’t.
So why did no one stand up and speak out during the intense hours we worked on the speech? Some of these same analysts later wrote books claiming they were shocked that I have relied on such deeply flawed evidence.
Try to get over failure quickly. Learn from it. Study how you contributed to it. If you are responsible, own up to it.
Right Colin you gutless turd, it was all someone else’s fault. And of course as soon as you found out the intel was not just flawed, but completely made up, you resigned from the Bush Administration in protest, right? You went to the media and told everyone that the Iraq War was started on false pretenses, that you knew there were no WMDs as soon as you found out the truth in 2003? 2004? 2005?
Right Colin, you did all those things before 4484 Americans died in Iraq?
Of course you did not Colin, because you have the manhood of a Kardashian.
Enjoy your time in Hell, Colin, roommates with Robert McNamara, and please spend every day you have left on this planet meditating on the souls of the people who died in Iraq because of your lie, and your utter lack of responsibility to speak up.
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
BREAKING: BoA Mortgage Broker Seeks Asylum at my House
BREAKING NEWS – My Bank of America mortgage broker, who is blind and thus in charge of assessing properties for the Bank, sought asylum in my home. He told me he fears persecution, imprisonment and even physical beating if I return him to the Bank.The Bank of America, meanwhile, who holds my mortgage, told me to turn him over, so I had to. I’ll spend the rest of the news cycle trying to make this seem better than it actually is. Being in debt sure cuts back on your options.
P.S. The man on the far left of the photo is State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh. Dude, the 1970′s called and wants its hair style back. The other guy holding Chen’s hand is US Ambassador Gary Locke. No one knows why Koh and Locke decided to wear matching ties for this event, but it appears to be the only aspect of the fiasco that the State Department properly coordinated.Also, activists in Bahrain, Saudi and other countries the US has to suck up to, you’re also on your own.
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
State Department’s Alec Ross Solves MidEast
On almost the exact one year anniversary of Obama personally bringing bin Laden to justice by gunning him down unarmed in his pajamas, State Department innovator/gadfly Alec Ross has resolved the other remaining issues in the Middle East, with his mighty Twitter.
Look:
Now one could speculate that Alec’s and Bibi’s intellectual appreciation for Atheian Democracy probably revolves around the image of 300 oily Spartans standing bravely against the bastard Iranians. After all, if 300 guys in codpieces could do it, why couldn’t an Israeli air strike be just as tidy a solution? Of course, the Spartans were actually defeated and killed, but we don’t need to overdo the analogy; we’ve only got 140 characters.
However, since we are talking Athenian Democracy, I’d suggest Alec free up a hand from social media self-stimulation and re-read his Thucydides on the plane ride home, particularly the Melian dialogue from the Greek’s History of the Peloponnesian War. That portion outlines the Greeks’ abandonment of morality (torture, secret prisons, pointless invasions, loss of rights, Guantanamo, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must) in search of what they thought was an expeditious action in support of their war. It didn’t work out for the Greeks and as long as Alec is dialoging with Bibi on ancient history, it is not going to work out for the US and Israel either. Abandoning morality for expediency always fails in the long run.
Alec, and Obama, might also remember Pericles’ saying “Far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbor for doing what he likes” as a basic tenet of democracy, equal justice and the right to pursuit of individual happiness. “Equal justice under law” is carved on the Supreme Court building in Washington, though largely now regarded as a kind of hipster humor.
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
American Public Diplomacy
(This interview with John Brown originally appeared on the Huffington Post, April 24, 2012)
What is Pubic Diplomacy?
Public Diplomacy (PD) is a hard term to define. Some say it’s just a euphemism for propaganda. The Department of State’s definition is “engaging, informing, and influencing key international audiences.” For some traditionally minded diplomats and commentators, the term “public diplomacy” is an oxymoron (true diplomacy, they argue, is practiced behind closed doors, not in public). How would you define PD?
Any communications strategy, from advertising to propaganda to social media to whatever you want to call it, plays second to reality — actions really do speak louder than words. So as long as deaths in wedding parties from misplaced drone attacks, atrocities by soldiers and videos of Abu Ghraib exist, you are not going to fool anyone regardless of how many tweets you send out. In an age of increasingly prevalent media, the usual bullshit of the Secretary standing up in Geneva proclaiming support for human rights while people in their own countries see the U.S. overtly supporting nasty autocrats will dominate mind space. Here’s a graphic (not my work) that illustrates the point.
Look at the outcome of the Haditha massacre in Iraq: 24 unarmed Iraqis were slaughtered by an out-of-control group of Marines in 2005, and now, seven years later, the case is finally concluded and no one is going to jail. You can Tweet and Facebook until the end of time, but that story will resonate for even longer within the Arab world.
The Haditha outcome also illustrates the point of relevancy. While most FSOs and almost all of the American public are probably ignorant about what happened in Haditha, the incident is well known among politically minded Iraqis. On the day when everyone there was talking about the guiltless conclusion, U.S. Embassy Baghdad PD was bleating happily about jazz and some art exhibit. The appearance — to Iraqis — was one of trying to change the topic, change the channel, to distract from the real issue of the day.
So whatever PD is, it can only be less effective than what the U.S. is actually doing.
Pigs with Lipstick
Edward R. Murrow, the famed newsman and Director of the United States Information Agency during the Kennedy administration, is often quoted as saying that public diplomacy, as regards the formulation of policy, should be seriously taken into consideration at the take-off, not at the crash landing. More bluntly, you can’t put lipstick on a pig. What is your view on the relationship between public diplomacy and policy?
See above. Pigs look ugly with lipstick.
Is Pubic Diplomacy “Useless”?
As you know, the above-mentioned United States Information Agency (1953-1999), which handled public diplomacy during the Cold War, was consolidated into the State Department a few years after the collapse of Russian communism, thereby reflecting a historical pattern of the USG abolishing its “propaganda” (anti-propaganda?) agencies (e.g., the Committee on Public Information [1917-1919], the Office of War Information [1942-1945]) when a global conflict is over. Nostalgic USIA veterans tend to regret the dissolution of “their” independent agency, a relatively small organization (by Washington standards) giving its overseas officers considerable flexibility to act, on behalf of U.S. national interests, as they saw fit according general policy guidelines and local conditions (as an ex-USIA senior official told me over lunch not long ago, “we got away with murder”). Not amused by such declarations of independence (often unspoken), strait-laced State Department employees referred to USIA as “Useless,” a play of words on USIA’s overseas designation, USIS (United States Information Service). What’s your take on PD now being, bureaucratically, a State function? Does it make PD more manageable and streamlined?
You can see the themes of relevancy and credibility running through this interview.
State Department output, what we say out loud, is characterized by caution above all else, a weird play on the Hippocratic Oath. But the “safest” things to say (we urge all sides to reconsider, Mistakes were made) have little value outside Foggy Bottom. A bit of vitality is needed, and PD lacks that now. In what foreign country do people routinely turn to a PD news source? Anything that flows into the State Department gets filtered out into the equivalent of “male pale and Yale,” usually three days after the story has moved off the front pages. Safe, for sure, but also irrelevant. Often, irrelevant by choice if not by policy.
For example, to enflame my ulcer, I just flipped over to Twitter. Several Embassies are tweeting “Happy Earth Day” in unison, obviously a central command meme of the day from Washington. So what? Nothing wrong with Earth Day, but so what? Is the U.S. not still the world’s predominant carbon fuels burner? What is the specific goal of sending Happy Earth Day tweets out in English to whomever?
Alec Ross, State’s alleged social media king, tweets today, “97 years ago today, modern chemical weapons 1st used in war. German troops released chlorine gas on the front lines at Ypres, killing 5,000,” with no link or explanation. I am not even sure what the point of that is, never mind how it might play into any of the national goals of the U.S.. Alec tweets out these odd “fun facts” regularly, to what point I do not know.
The lack of content, of vitality, also means that State only practices half of the social media equation. I see little evidence of interactivity, though people do try and break through the screen and ask visa questions, usually very specific to a person/case type questions because they cannot get them answered from inundated Consular sections. Posts crow over how many people watched or viewed something, but very rarely entertain true interactivity. I am sure they are afraid of it, afraid of saying anything that hasn’t been cleared by several layers above them. That may be great for career security (the goal) but it does little to really put social media to use. Just the opposite, really.
The invasion and occupation of Iraq is considered by many a public-diplomacy disaster. Your own book on your one-year Foreign-Service experience (2009-2010) in that country has, as part of its title, “How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People.” For those who have not had the opportunity to read your admirable volume, where/how did U.S. PD go so wrong in Iraq? Is it possible to say that America did, on occasion, do certain things right in its attempts to remake (in its own image) the cradle of civilization?
My experience with PD in Iraq was all propaganda all the time. PD’s conception of PRT work was simply to over promote any small thing we did that wasn’t a complete failure. If we dug a well, not necessarily a bad thing, the headline was “Bringing Water to Mesopotamia.” Every PRT project had to include an interview with some Hollywood backlot Iraqi praising the United States, because as we know only White People can help the Brown Skinned of the world. PD didn’t even try to balance or nuance a story; they wrote entirely for themselves and their bosses and Washington. People in Iraq certainly knew the truth, living it 24/7 in a world without water, electricity or sewers or schools, so who was PD trying to fool if not themselves? I wrote about this in more detail here and included a PD video piece so your readers can see for themselves what their tax dollars paid for.
The new social media, some argue, are redefining public diplomacy, with the buzzword “public diplomacy 2.0,” coined during the Bush administration, still quite à la mode inside the beltway. Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Alec Ross, according to a twitterer attending his recent talk at American University, stated that “I don’t think of myself as a public diplomacy official. I think … public diplomacy is more old-school American propaganda.” In your view, how important/effective are the social media as a tool for the State Department to engage (a favorite word of the current administration) “key international audiences”?
To begin, you must have a goal — sell soap, get people to switch from Coke to Pepsi, turn out to vote, stop joining al Qaeda, something you can use to know if you have succeeded and completed what you started out to do. Social media as practiced by the Department is amateur hour. A bunch of people led by the State Department’s oldest living teenager Alec Ross think they understand media because they are banging away and getting weirdly excited by numbers. Success seems to be measured in how many followers an Ambassador has. Yet no one is interested in looking into the substance of social media. When I comment on interactive Embassy web pages or State Twitter accounts on my own blog at wemeantwell.com, what I see are desperate people trying to get a Visa question answered. They have no outlet to ask such questions because Consular sections are under siege, so they bombard social media. When I do see some questioners try and aim for more substantive topics, the replies from State are canned official language, statements that are “clearable” only because they are content-free or simply ape the party line.
So what is social media as practiced by State able to accomplish? You’d think given its emphasis and the money spent that someone would be interested in a Return on Investment study, a way to map out what was accomplished. But State does not work that way — it is all about the “doing” and not about the “getting done.” Social media as practiced is just another flim-flam, foisted on State this round by another short-timer political appointee whose connections to the Secretary mean he can do no wrong. Or, perhaps more honestly, no one has the guts to question his pronouncements. Anyone who has been at work in Foggy Bottom for more than a few years can recall similar flim-flams when faxes and email were going to reduce the need for overseas personnel (we can do it all from Washington!), or web home pages or video conferencing. All can be useful tools, but you have got to have a goal and you have got to measure your way toward that goal. Otherwise it is just flavor of the month stuff. Didn’t we have virtual embassies for awhile in some 3-D online world game thing?
Credibility
The USG-supported Broadcasting Board of Governors, which (according to its homepage) became “the independent entity responsible for all U.S. Government and government-sponsored, non-military, international broadcasting on October 1, 1999″ (e.g., Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Sawa) and whose mission is “to inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy,” is under considerable criticism these days for management failures and for intending to cut back on staff and programs. Based on your foreign-service experience of over two decades, what do you think is the reaction of overseas audiences to USG -supported broadcasting such as Voice of America? Are such broadcasts still necessary for U.S. national interests in an age when information is becoming more and more readily available? In a broader sense, can a journalist, in your view, be a true, objective master of her trade (and can her reports be trusted as reliable) if her paycheck comes from Uncle Sam (to cite Kim Andrew Elliott, a fast-media guru, “Journalism and public diplomacy are very different, indeed adversarial, endeavors”).
Credibility is the key. If you look at the very successful penetrations of American society by foreign “public affairs,” you see sources of news and entertainment that are clearly allied with a foreign entity (China Xinhua News, RT.com, al Jazeera, the BBC) and do not try to hide that fact. Yet, at the same time, they are aggressive in presenting a side of news that is missing in America’s mainstream media, often pointing out the “other side” to a story or not shying away from reporting U.S. Government mistakes and misjudgments. Their credibility comes not from being pro-Russia, but from tapping into a need in the U.S. for alternative news sources.
People are too sophisticated now, even in the developing world, to be reached via crude propaganda — America=Good, al Qaeda=Bad. That costs those sources their credibility and thus their audiences. Who cares what U.S. broadcasting into the Arab world has to say, or crap like Radio Marti? Most of the time it is just self-referential: Obama made a speech and PD says “Here’s Obama’s Speech” in case you missed it elsewhere or really want to plod through 1500 words on Earth Day. No one independently quotes their opinions, no one considers them vital or important the way al Jazeera became simply by filling a real gap in what people wanted to hear.
If the U.S. would try and learn a bit more about what people want, they might find a more ready audience. Instead, our “public diplomacy” programming seems designed more to please our bosses in Washington than to really reach people abroad.
Try it now — go here and imagine yourself a young, politically charged Iraqi. What is on that page that demands your attention? The Cold War ended years ago and we are still talking about jazz.
Propagandizing Amerika
The Smith-Mundt Act (1948), the legislation that provides the statutory basis for U.S. public diplomacy, prohibits the State Department from disseminating domestically USG information intended for overseas audiences. Do you think this firewall, in the Internet age, is anachronistic? Or is there something to be said about prohibiting the U.S. government from “propagandizing” the American people? Would you abolish/amend the Smith-Mundt Act (or, since so few Americans know anything about it, simply let it live on, untouched, in its obscurity, letting sleeping dogs lie)?
I think Smith-Mundt died on the vine already, whether it exists as a law still or not. Given both the ubiquity of the web and the fact that almost all of the U.S. public diplomacy spew is in English, I think we already know who the target audience is. For example, all the phony grief that gets expressed every time a new round of terrible atrocity photos emerge from Afghanistan certainly is not fooling the mothers of the dead Afghans; it is designed to make us feel better here at home. The Afghans know exactly what is happening in their homes and villages, even if the U.S. government can get away with calling each atrocity just another act of some bad apples. By the way, how many bad apples does it take before you have a whole pie full of them?
Not Measuring = Not Knowing
In the how-many-angels-can-dance-on-a-pin tradition, there is quite a lot of talk, among the PD community both outside and inside of academe, about how to measure the results of public diplomacy. Do you think that there is a scientific way to gauge the impact of PD, both short-term and long-term? Or is the practice of public diplomacy, in the words of scholar Frank Ninkovich, essentially “an act of faith” that, in its often-flawed attempts to make our small planet a better world through greater international understanding, cannot be reduced, in well-intentioned efforts to evaluate it, to statistics on a chart or an executive summary on yet another think-tank report?
The old saying, any road will get you there if you don’t know where you’re going, applies here. If I was allowed back into the building and to ask a question of someone important in Public Affairs, I’d ask this: why isn’t your whole “PD” strategy built around sending out messages in bottles dropped into the ocean? Now of course the analogy only goes so far, but just as the message in the bottle strategy can be dismissed with a quick thought experiment (who knows who reads what, and what they do after the read it), can anyone really make a different claim for the State Department’s current efforts?
Metrics start with a clear goal, an end state to use the military term, and work backwards from there. One of the core problems with the State Department, and the one that most significantly contributes to the Department’s increasing irrelevance in foreign policy, is that State seems just content to “be,” to create conditions of its own continued existence. So, if social media is a new cool thing, and Congress will pay for it, then social media it is. What if instead the organization had more concrete goals? Then we could measure back from them. I’ll not trouble readers with my own list of foreign policy goals, but if the best you can come up with is something so broad as “engage the public” then you are pretty close to having no real goal at all. Best to throw notes into the ocean and hope for the best.
Bonus: One cheap and easy way for a non-thinker to dismiss these points is to say “Well, sure, it is easy to ask the questions, but where are Van Buren’s answers? If he wants metrics, what does he propose?”
Of course that is a silly line of reasoning. Change begins with the questions, the point of asking is to stimulate the search for answers and solutions. It would be easier if all the solutions to all of the PD problems could be laid out in a short interview, but life ain’t that way cowboys. Don’t dismiss important questions for lack of easy answers. Instead, realize there are higher goals than obedience and career climbing and at least allow room for the Questions and admit the need to look for Answers.
As a starting point, perhaps consider this: When you get a machine that is so immense and so bureaucratic and so career promotion oriented, the mission will be lost and truth and honesty are mere bystanders eventually wrecking any positive mission. The whole concept of institutions and how they are managed and sized needs to be examined big time. The solution, if there is any, is breaking it down into small autonomous offices or missions or programs that link together but are managed separately eliminating an immense hierarchy.
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Pakistan to Resume Drone Strikes in US; Yemen on Deck
Following the US decision to resume killing people by remote control drone in Pakistan against the demands of Pakistan’s alleged sovereign government, Pakistan has announced that it will too resume drone strikes inside the United States against what it labels “suspected terrorists or somebody.”After almost eleven years of victories in Afghanistan, the United States has come to believe most terrorists in the area now seek refuge in Pakistan. After learning that during the Vietnam war bad guys ran away into the neighboring countries of Cambodia and Laos and needed to be bombed there, President Obama has ordered repeated drone strikes inside Pakistan. It is uncertain who is being killed, but the White House has been clear that once drone struck, the targets magically do morph into suspected terrorists. A spokesperson described it “kind of like Avengers superpower transformation.”
Failing to get the US to quit doing this despite asking pretty please twice, Pakistan has purchased its own drone from eBay and will soon begin launching strikes in the US mainland. “There are a helluva lot of Americans in the US who have killed people in Pakistan,” claimed an unnamed source in Islamabad now being circled overhead by a Predator. “Many of them are CIA and military with Pakistani blood on their hands, so we will smite them.” The US Congress took a short break from not approving anything to vote to say “No” to the Pakistani drones, only to be met by a rude gesture from the Pakistani Ambassador sent via Twitter and read by an intern.
Meanwhile, the new US policy of signature killings in Yemen, where targets that are people are terminated which means killed based on suspicious actions which means being in Yemen without being identified first is reportedly paying off well. “We have killed dozens of suspected terrorists in Yemen,” claimed a visibly stimulated Obama on an unannounced visit to Afghanistan to urinate into the skull of bin Laden preserved just for such a moment, “And we will keep killing them until I get re-elected. And then maybe some more. Man, once upon a time this shit counted as going to war, but now I can just freaking do it. Cool.”
In other news, the suspected terrorists of Yemen are seeking to raise $12.5 million dollars on Kickstarter to purchase their own drone.
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Proud Moments in Diplomacy: Prostitution
Another victory for “smart power” as a Brazilian prostitute sues the American Embassy in her country. Our diplomats and staff abroad truly due represent America, so let’s all get behind this action.CNN interviewed Romila Aparacida Ferreira, who claims an Embassy van ran her over after the Embassy Marines and an unnamed diplomatic person threw her out of the vehicle after negotiating a price for sex.
The official State Department version of events reflects much, much better on the United States:
“My understanding is that she (Ferreira) was initially in the car, she was asked to leave the car, she got out of the car, the doors were closed, as the Pentagon guy said, the vehicle was at rest, and then, as they started to drive away, she chased after the car, tried to get back in and that’s when she was hurt,” said spokeswoman Victoria Nuland. “I do not have that she was run over by the car.”
Well, we can all breathe a sigh of relief.
Now Brazil is an important country for the US, a huge source of tourism (their economy is not in shambles like ours and it is Brazilian tourists who are basically keeping Disney World afloat at present). The US has already enhanced tourism by raising the price of a visa to America to $160 a pop. Brazilian tourists are also required to make an appointment, fill in an application online that, among other things, asks them if they are a terrorist or a prostitute, stand in line at the Embassy, have their fingerprints taken for freedom and be photographed and interviewed. After that, their money is welcome in America. Ms. Romila Aparacida Ferreira is unlikely to qualify as a former prostitute, so any money she gets from the Embassy is not going to be spent in the US of A.
It is not like whoring around abroad is limited to Brazil. Ace blog Diplopundit wins the day with a post on all things prostitution over at the State Department, including a sampling of diplomats disciplined for whoring around, one apparently with a 13 year old paid for sexy time fun fun fun.
Please note that these State Department prostitution cases are wholly separate from any State Department employee sex tapes, or any State Department employee Playboy pictures or any State Department employee pedophile cases or any Secret Service prostitution cases you’ve read about in Columbia and El Salvador.
It is also safe to say that no prostitutes anywhere look or act like Julia Roberts in the movie “Pretty Woman,” nor do any of the Foreign Service buyers resemble Richard Gere.
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Iraqi PM Maliki Sucks Iranian: This is Important
Here’s a story worth repeating in its whole, as it will be one of those articles you wish you had read a few years from now when everyone is wondering how Iraq ended up a vassal state of Iran. Note the important parts in bold, particularly the final paragraph which reminds again that the US failure to reconstruct Iraq will continue to have far-reaching consequences for the US in the Middle East.
A pubic relations stumble between Tehran and Baghdad has intensified speculation that one of Iran’s most senior clerics is about to extend his power – and Iran’s theocratic system – into Iraq.
On his return from a visit to Tehran, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s office released statements on his meetings with several senior Iranian officials – but it was silent on Mr Maliki’s encounter with 63-year-old Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi.
Despite a Baghdad blackout on what is understood to have been their third meeting in recent months, Iran’s government-run news agency IRNA released a photograph of Mr Maliki and Ayatollah Shahroudi – who is Iraqi by birth – greeting each other warmly. An accompanying report on the visit barely mentions Mr Maliki, but quotes Ayatollah Shahroudi urging Baghdad to support the ”Islamic Awakening” currently under way in the Middle East.
Ayatollah Shahroudi, a powerful member of Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei’s inner circle, is positioning himself to become the next spiritual leader of Iraq’s Shiite Muslim majority, a move observers say would be impossible without Tehran’s blessing and funding. The Iraqi religious establishment, based in Najaf, south of Baghdad, opposes religious intervention in day-to-day government. But in Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s theory that God’s authority is vested in the supreme leader and senior religious scholars is law.
Speaking privately, a senior official in Baghdad described the meeting as ”extremely significant”, revealing at least tacit support by Mr Maliki for an Iranian plan to have Ayatollah Shahroudi replace the ailing Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani as spiritual leader of Iraq’s Shiites.
Reidar Visser, an Oslo-based analyst of Iraqi affairs, sees formidable obstacles to the Shahroudi bid, but warned: “By visiting Shahroudi, Maliki did nothing to kill the rumours about some kind of Iranian design on the holiest centre of Iraqi Shiism. “If Shahroudi should succeed … those arguing that Maliki is moving towards even greater co-ordination with the Iranian clergy would feel vindicated – and rightly so.”
The plan seems to be inspired, in part, by a breakdown in relations between Mr Maliki’s government and religious authorities in Najaf. Despite remaining aloof from day-to-day politics, the ayatollahs wield significant power in their real or perceived endorsement of the government and its policies.
For months now, all the senior clerics in Najaf have been abiding by an edict from Ayatollah Sistani that they not meet with politicians or government officials. Referring to the cloak-like robe worn by Arab men, a spokesman for one of the senior ayatollahs in Najaf told The Saturday Age: “We will not continue to cover their mistakes with our abaya.”
Ayatollah Sistani’s surrogates have recently become even more confrontational, openly attacking the Baghdad government during Friday prayers. One cleric widely linked to Ayatollah Sistani, Ahmed al-Safi, blamed government corruption for the failure to restore Iraq’s electrical generation system.
“When patriotism is absent, officials sell themselves to foreigners for their kickbacks,” he said while preaching at the holy city of Karbala.
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Quality of Discourse
My recent discussion with John Brown about Pubic Diplomacy at the Department of State on HuffPo is, I hope, interesting reading. Like any such discussion, the point is to raise issues, take positions, generate thought on the readers’ part, that sort of thinking stuff. John Brown is one of three courageous Foreign Service Officers who resigned rather than support the Iraq War. He has over 20 years in the Foreign Service. I am whatever it is I am now, but also have over 20 years experience. Both of us are in a position to have opinions about public diplomacy. All of this should be sort of obvious, and it was to most readers.But not to a State Department Foreign Service Officer who’ll we’ll call “Dan” (which is his name), who wrote to John Brown:
I’m personally saddened and disappointed by this. Van Buren can say what he wants, but what makes him qualified for a single-source extensive presentation on public diplomacy? I know you are an expert historian, and would have expected better from you. Speak only as a private individual, but thought you would want honesty. Sincerely, Dan
Ah, yes, the old attack ad hominen, one the limpest forms of argument: attack the person and ignore the things the person said. I wrote back to “Dan” telling him this, and offering him space on this blog for a factual rebuttal. Dan said:
If John Brown or anyone else wishes to interview you and put out that interview, that is up to you, him, and whoever else you might wish/need to deal with. If John wanted to present an interview with you as a discussion of diplomacy, or diplomacy’s use of social media, then fine. But for him to prominently present this interview in a way that suggests it is a description of American Public Diplomacy — as practiced in the past or as it is being practiced today – is, in my mind, a disservice to former and current Public Diplomacy officers. John has both the extensive knowledge and connections to ask the same questions of a variety of individuals with experience at different periods and in different parts of the world, which could have resulted in a very interesting discussion of those topics — he chose a very different, and less fruitful, approach by simply publishing the interview with you. I regret this decision, and the opportunity that was lost by it. Sincerely, Dan
Now we are into primo State Department Public Diplomacy strategy: waive the flag. Still without saying a word about my arguments and points, Dan has now declared that the whole thing is a disservice to the thousands of Pubic Diplomacists beavering away in obscurity at State. If you think you’ve seen this kind of thing before, you have. It’s called the Otter Defense:
So I tried again, writing to Dan:
Still haven’t heard a word about what I said. This has been my unfortunate experience with State in recent months, all attacks ad hominen and not a peep about what I have to say. It is a cheap way to argue, and all too typical of State’s failing to connect with the world. Such inward viral reactions are what my interview focused on, so thanks for helping demonstrate my point. State’s social media thrives in a controlled environment; I bite back.
If you can construct an argument, I’d be happy to put it on my blog as well. Unlike State, I thrive on the give and take and do not fear others’ well-argued ideas. John has the courage to present varied points of view, and the interview clearly was labeled as mine. If you prove me wrong, I learn something. Put up or shut up. If you can get something cleared, of course.
And finally, because I got bored, I let Dan wrap up the intellectual discourse he started on behalf of his colleagues in Public Diplomacy:
I can only be bemused (and amused) by your histrionics. Your individual opinions concerning the Department of State, foreign policy, or social media are of little interest to me. But social media do not equal public diplomacy, and John’s decision to present his interview with you as a serious discussion of public diplomacy results in a distortion of what American public diplomacy really is, and thus is a slap in the face to past and present practitioners of public diplomacy.
So, for those wondering why the US is losing the propaganda war in Afghanistan to a bunch of hillbillies in turbans, or why Congress wants to cut the State Department budget by $5 billion, well, it’s all about the quality of the people, no doubt, in Secretary Clinton’s own words, “our greatest asset.”
Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Twitter!
Buy the Book:
- RT @reidarvisser: @kingston314 @LubnaNaji I recommend @iraqoilreport for keeping track of GKP and Iraq/Kurdistan
- American dissenters in Chicago arrested; blind Chinese dissenter welcomed. Another import.
- RT @TomDispatch: Judge rules unconstitutional a section of the #NDAA that would allow the indefinite detention of US citizens. http://t.co/SAs4j3Bz
- RT @SamwiseOccupies: I used to hate people who threw around the term #Orwellian, then I read about the #Nato3. #ochi #nonato #nato #FTP
- The hardline stand against reporter's privilege is a hallmark of Obama's unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers. http://t.co/PiSJPBtE
