The Foreign Service Journal, June 2005

sent actions have had both positive and negative consequences for its own security and for global security. Sharpening Our Tools Integrating the tools of statecraft is the first challenge. One of the singu- lar failings of U.S. national security policy today has been our inability or unwillingness to strengthen, integrate and fully use all the tools at our dis- posal. Over the past four years, diplo- macy has been set aside and used only sparingly and ineffectively. We hand- ed the job of planning Iraqi recon- struction and governance to an insti- tution — the Pentagon — manifestly unskilled at the task, and left the State Department out of the game. We handed the implementation of those policies to the military, untrained for and unskilled at the task and preoccu- pied, understandably, with security. Secretary of State Powell was embar- rassed by an ill-informed brief he pre- sented before the United Nations. The interagency turf struggle, normal in the best of times, became a scorched-earth battle like few have seen, to the clear detriment of an inte- grated approach to Iraq. Today it may be too late to recover from the dam- age. Winning without war, as the 62 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 0 5 The only positive security message the U.S. has is to promote democracy. But that is not enough to undo the damage of the past four years.