The Foreign Service Journal, February 2004

mally some of these goals with AFSA, and I know, as a career-long AFSA member myself, that it is important to reach an agreement with AFSA in order to make things last. AFSA President John Limbert recently has come back from a tour in Iraq, so I think he has a very good understand- ing of the kinds of demands that are being placed on the Foreign Service and the State Department now and for the future. Without trying to pre- empt discussions in any way, I look forward to discussing all these issues with him and the AFSA leadership. FSJ : Let’s turn to Iraq, then. One of the first trips you made after being confirmed as director general was to Baghdad. How do you assess the Coalition Provisional Authority’s use of FS personnel there? WRP : Well, in the first month after the war, everything was happen- ing at once. But there was an excel- lent response from the State Department. When I visited our col- leagues there, they were at work in CPA headquarters and in the field. Some of them were embedded with military units doing various kinds of humanitarian assistance and political action. There were a number of untenured officers, including four people on their first tours. And I also should say that they included not only Foreign Service employees but Civil Service employees as well. These were people who responded to the call and were able to do jobs immedi- ately and with considerable versatility. There were political officers doing economic reporting, and economic officers doing essentially political work. There was even one employee who was an Information Resource Management specialist but was refur- bishing a building. What we’re looking at now is the next phase, where we’re finding peo- ple and assigning them more in terms of the skills we need for the longer term and for definitive periods of time: at first six months, subsequently a year, and moving on in an organized way. From talking to Ambassador Bremer and others in Iraq, I think the State team has done a magnificent job. I also might mention Pat Kenn- edy, a friend and colleague who served in Iraq for many months, who by all accounts has done absolutely splendidly. FSJ : Is the current expectation that an embassy will open in Baghdad sometime in the summer of 2004? Where do preparations for that stand? WRP : Well, we’re working hard to be able to stand up an embassy on time. That’s why we’re focusing now on more organized tours of duty, more defined job descriptions and tasks, and getting the personnel in place. I’m happy to say we have a list of about 350 volunteers so far and are finding the people we need to fill the positions. We are adding 117 posi- tions in Iraq to the bid list in January, and I am sure there will be more to come. Our goal there is to mirror the Secretary’s commitment to have the right people, trained and supported, on the right tasks. FSJ : That raises a question a lot of people are asking. It sounds like you are operating on the assumption that people will continue to come forward to serve in Iraq. Do you have any sense yet of how many positions you will need when the embassy is official- ly unveiled? WRP : I don’t have an exact num- ber now, but we obviously will have the traditional embassy sections and will provide the traditional embassy functions. The embassy also will have extraordinary functions to perform, like economic construction coordina- tion and democratic development. Baghdad probably will be our largest embassy in the Middle East, and we’ll have to be prepared to sustain that commitment for a long time to come. So, yes, the short answer is that I think we will have enough people to staff it, but at the same time we recognize that we need to look more generally at how we can build a State Department and Foreign Service that can respond readily and appropriately to crises. FSJ : Given the relative paucity of fluent Arabic-speakers in the Foreign Service, are there any plans to beef up language instruction staffing at FSI? WRP : Well, I won’t try to answer for FSI, but I believe they are. I do believe it is important to develop an approach that allows us to train for language capability beyond the cur- rent system where you can’t take a language at FSI unless you have an assigned position. That has held us back in the past, and I think every- body would recognize that it would be a good idea to train people for contin- gencies. But again, these are just ideas right now; they’re not proposals, and they have to be thoroughly vetted with many others, including AFSA. FSJ : How much, and in what ways, has the war on terror changed the Foreign Service? WRP : The war on terror definite- ly has changed things for the Foreign Service. First of all, it underscores the F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 53 The war on terror underscores the need to develop a capability to anticipate and to respond to crises.