The Foreign Service Journal, September 2003

that “we must have effective and reliable policy instruments beyond the Defense Department, and that can only occur with a serious and long overdue transformation of the State Department. Without bold and dramatic changes at the State Department, the United States will soon find itself on the defensive everywhere, except militarily.” Before getting to his solutions, how- ever, there is the matter of his evi- dence. In both the speech and the article, his charges seem to have fallen like rotten apples into his hands, rather than having been cul- tivated by research. For instance, he says that France’s “campaign seeking to defeat U.S. foreign policy objectives articulated by Bush” was, somehow or other, the direct result of an “accommodation worldview” that reacted to Libya’s winning the vote as chair of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights and the U.S. being voted off the commission. But the United States was voted off the commission in May 2001 and Libya became chair this spring, whereas U.S. difficulties with France didn’t begin till the fall of 2002 and by this spring we were in Baghdad. Contrary to good scholarly princi- ples, he also fails to mention the inconvenient fact that the U.S. came back on the panel in April — whereupon it sought to block debate on the human rights situa- tion in Iraq under American occu- pation. The article reflects fundamental misunderstandings of how foreign policy is made and conducted. For instance, he is angry that a classified Bureau of Intelligence and Research report last March warning that “democracy would be difficult to achieve [in Iraq]” conflicts with the “vision” of President Bush, who said at the same time that “the Iraqi people can flourish in democracy.” S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 3 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 65