Say Anything Blog

Inside the Ring

By Bill Gertz

February 8, 2008

Bureaucrats in Iraq

A State Department official this week issued a blistering critique of Foreign Service bureaucrats at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad for undermining civilian stability efforts in Iraq.

“After a year at the embassy, it is my general assessment that the State Department and the Foreign Service [are] not competent to do the job that they have undertaken in Iraq,” said Manuel Miranda, a conservative former Senate staff member who is part of the office of legislative statecraft in Baghdad.

The Feb. 5 memorandum to U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan C. Crocker stated that the military surge is working, but State Department support for civilian efforts to pacify the country is a disaster due to bureaucrats’ “built-in attention deficit disorder.”

[PDF Available here]

Seems the striped pants brigade has lots of plans, but a severe paucity of action and follow up:

“The State Department bureaucracy is not equipped to handle the urgency of America’s Iraq investment in blood and taxpayer funds,” Mr. Miranda said. “You lack the ‘fierce urgency of now.’ “

Mr. Miranda’s most stinging accusation is that the State Department is an “albatross around the neck of the coalition command.”

The department “failed to assist coalition initiatives by delaying or failing to supply the civilian expertise needed in a thoughtful and timely manner and also delaying decisions on funding and staffing vital to GOI (and our) success,” he said, using the acronym for the government of Iraq.

Also, the embassy has blocked the flow of information to the White House and other policy-makers, the State Department in Washington, and the commanding general in Baghdad, fearing leaks to the press.

Foreign service officers sent to Iraq have “ludicrously little experience” in managing programs and hundreds of millions of dollars in funds and other resources used to help the Iraqi government, he stated.

“It is apparent that, other than diplomacy, your only expertise is your own bureaucracy, which inherently makes State Department personnel unable to think outside the box or beyond the paths they have previously taken,” he said.

Eighty people in Washington, for example, second-guess embassy officials, leading to paralysis and infusing embassy work with “the State Department’s culture of delay and indecision.”

Mr. Miranda said the State Department’s Iraq operations, judged by private sector standards, is “willfully negligent, if not criminal.”