The Foreign Service Journal, December 2007

D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 7 The Iraq War Blame Game In an Oct. 12 speech to the Military Reporters and Editors Forum, former U.S. Iraq commander Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez condemned the mistakes of others in Iraq — though not his own. We’ll hear more such speeches from recently retired senior officials as the war winds down in failure and the blame game heats up. The general’s comments were candid, accurate and brave regarding the role of the press and the highest echelons of this administration. But in trying with an almost casual and unsup- ported “one-liner” to throw much of the blame for the Iraq debacle on the State Department, he erred. That record must be corrected. His complaint (implicit because never voiced in detail) is that the State Department has not “been there” enough — a common complaint now from the Defense Department. That is ironic, given that the bulk of prewar planning for a postwar Iraq was conducted by the State Department, only to be trashed by Defense Secre- tary Donald Rumsfeld and his civilian coterie. They shoved the State De- partment aside during the initial period of occupation in favor of a seemingly total laissez-faire policy. Then the Coalition Provisional Authority appeared in Iraq — not a State Department creation, but a hodgepodge of professionals heavily diluted by incompetent political ap- pointees headed by a former State Department official, whose only signi- ficant posting abroad (as distinct from 7th floor and National Security Coun- cil service) was as ambassador to a be- nign, unchallenging post, The Hague. Paul Bremer made disastrous deci- sions and bears a heavy responsibility. But he was not a State Department appointee in Baghdad; he was a politi- cal appointee favored by this admini- stration due to ideological considera- tions, not relevant experience. Is the State Department still ab- sent from the field, as Gen. Sanchez implies? Roughly a quarter of all current FSOs have rotated through Baghdad or Kabul. I’ll admit that I think the Service should have gone to directed assignments long ago, instead of using an elaborately baroque set of incentives for loading onward assign- ment bidding criteria. That said, Gen. Sanchez errs if he expects unarmed civilians — including diplomats — to perform the role of soldier or point of the lance in venturing into the middle of free-fire zones that the military has been unable to pacify. That is not to blame our military, who have been given a difficult, if not impossible, task in Iraq, due in part to insufficient resources and a lack of real national mobilization. But what American soldiers cannot achieve against armed insurgents on the battlefield, unarmed diplomats cannot achieve either. Those of our colleagues who seek to persuade or rebuild cannot get very far if they cannot move about and do their jobs, or if their Iraqi contacts cannot be assured of survival. Marc E. Nicholson FSO, retired Washington, D.C. Our Lost Voice for Human Rights I commend the Journal ’s focus on human rights in the September issue. The articles by Ed McWilliams, Ken Roth, Sarah Sewall and, especially, Craig Murray were right on target. I wish our timid public media would give them a wider airing. I was one of the officers assigned in 1976 to the State Department’s new human rights office, which Con- gress insisted we create. Under the leadership of such legislators as Don- ald Fraser, Tom Harkin, Jonathan Bingham and Ted Kennedy, Con- gress passed the Foreign Assist- ance Act of 1976 over the veto of President Gerald Ford. (Yes, more than two-thirds of both houses of Congress voted in favor of human rights measures!) The law included the Harkin Amendment, which called for the withholding of U.S. foreign assistance to any country that engaged in a consistent pattern of gross violations of human rights. It also required the department to submit annual human L ETTERS