Al-Sijill
2009-03-12 15:02:59Set aside for a moment Hillary Clinton's mealy-mouthed assertion last week that expanding West Bank settlements is "unhelpful" to the goal of Middle East peace. After all, no one expected her to express anything more than wan protest at the colonizing of Palestinian land on her first Middle East visit as Secretary of State. Instead, let's focus on Mrs. Clinton's offering to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov during their meeting in Geneva: a "reset" button to illustrate President Barack Obama's desire to repair Washington's Bush-battered relations with Moscow. When Lavrov good naturedly pointed out that the inscription on the button was mistranslated - it came out as "overcharge" rather than "reset" - Clinton laughed off the episode and moved on.
Fair enough. But there was something revealing about the oversight. Think about it: the world's most powerful country, which maintains fortress-like missions staffed by thousands of people around the world, apparently can't come up with a Russian-speaker on the fly. Couldn't the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Gag Gifts and Witty Rejoinders put in a call to the US embassy in Moscow for a proper translation? Had I known, I could have phoned Strobe Talbott, a former Deputy Secretary of State and Russophile who hangs out at the same guitar shop I do, and appealed to him for help.
Trivial as it seems, the botched-button incident is symptomatic of a deeper malaise that afflicts America's diplomatic corps, one Clinton herself has vowed to remedy. It may not seem like it, given the enormous US embassy in Abdoun (assuming it hasn't gone into foreclosure), but America's diplomatic resources are stretched reed thin. In June 2008, according to F. Anthony Holmes of the Council on Foreign Relations, there were only 6,636 Foreign Service Officers in the State Department, just ten percent more than 25 years ago, when there were 24 fewer countries in the world. The gap between human resources and workload is so wide that FSOs receive little training because there is no one to cover for them in their absence. America's diplomatic missions suffer from a vacancy rate of 30 percent in Africa and 21 percent overall. Vital work is being neglected, particularly in post-conflict areas; the number of FSOs seconded to the United States Agency for International Development has declined by 75 percent since the 1970s.
True, President Barack Obama's fiscal 2010 budget calls for a multi-year effort to significantly increase the size of the Foreign Service at both the Department of State and USAID. Not only does the foreign service welcome such a reprieve, so do senior military officers. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has lamented what he calls the "militarization" of US foreign policy and has called for a strengthening of America's diplomatic muscle. Late last month, Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for a greater emphasis of "non-military instruments of international influence...and capabilities for American diplomacy."
How did the US Department of State, once the fountainhead of US foreign policy and the face of America overseas, become so diminished? It has been a long recessional, to quote Rudyard Kipling, one that intensified under Mrs. Clinton's predecessor, Condoleezza Rice. Having declared herself in a January 2006 speech for "bold diplomacy...that seeks to change the world," Ms. Rice failed to lobby for additional funding to underwrite her sweeping vision. As Mr. Holmes, a former ambassador to Burkina Faso, writes in the January/February edition of Foreign Affairs, "diplomats need well-funded programs in order to have more than a symbolic impact. These programs do no exist. They were never requested, and the 300 people reassigned to strategically important developing countries over the past three years have had virtually no new resources to work with."
Just as damaging to US diplomacy, according to Mr. Holmes, was a culture of fear that discouraged dissent. "Officers who dared to give unvarnished analysis of policy options," he writes, "have been ignored, penalized, or banished. In some bureaus, the number of politically appointed ‘special advisers' - who in effect function as political commissars by enforcing policy discipline regardless of events on the ground - has increased dramatically."
This became clear in the Bush administration's first term, particularly as it related to the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, its preserve of Arab experts. Officers like Ron Schlicher, for example, a veteran FSO and fluent Arabic speaker with experience in places like Cairo and Jerusalem, were the kind of diplomats who in another era would have been fast-tracked for senior posts in the Middle East. In 2004, Schlicher was awarded the American Foreign Service Association's annual prize for producing the Department's best "dissent" cables, part of a tradition of robust internal debate. But Schlicher was careful not to boast about his prize lest he provoke a backlash from the very White House whose policies he challenged in the State Department's once-proud Open Forum system.
Today, writes Mr. Holmes, "it has become increasingly difficult for the American Foreign Service Association, the exclusive representative of the entire Foreign Service, to elicit nominations for its annual Constructive Dissent awards, because voicing criticism of US policy is now so rare."
A shortage of personnel and a climate of fear is a weak platform for assertive, confident diplomacy. If Mrs. Clinton is serious about reviving America's civilian representation abroad, she'll need more money than Congress is willing to allocate and stronger leadership than her predecessor was capable of delivering. If anything, it's the Department of State that needs to be reset.
Full Article (in Arabic) (.pdf)