re: "Mission"

CAA (that's me!) continued his response to Jeff Emanuel's post at RedState:, responding to Adjoran's comment of Wednesday, February 8th at 11:27 PM EST
(link).

Adjoran said:

"but it doesn’t have to be more than a Secretary and a couple dozen support staff. There is no need for embassies anymore, only consulates to serve Americans abroad (but those getting the services should be paying for them). They don’t conduct any “diplomacy” besides throwing parties for corrupt despots and their pals, and haven’t for decades.

Most of the State Department deserves the description they earned long, long ago: “a nest of traitors.”"

Response:

"The U.S. diplomatic mission in Iraq (including activities in places like Basra, Mosul, &tc.) are doing what the elected government in Washington sent them there to do.

You raise a debatable point about the need for embassies in today’s modern world, one that gets hashed over every few years when somebody notices that it’s easy to make a long-distance call to a foreign capital and decides we don’t need embassies and should just have a web site instead.

So the point gets debated, all sides are heard from, and eventually the decision makers realize they weren’t aware of what those embassies had been doing all along and maybe we should shutter them just yet.

State has virtually no domestic political constituency, because the work force is do diffuse (from all over) that the votes don’t impact any one congress member, because the money gets spent overseas mostly, and because visiting members of congress searching for facts abroad get the red carpet rolled out for them so they have no idea what day-to-day life is like in that embassy.

(It’s really not four star hotels and restaurants all the time; those are for when congress members visit.)"


2/9

re: "For God's sake Amb. Munter, don't Go Native on us now"

Pundita ("US foreign policy for the 21st Century") has some sharp criticism of the Department.

Money quote(s):

"In yet another sign that the U.S. Department of State should relocate to Brussels U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter advised White House officials that President Obama should deliver a "formal video statement," according to White House officials interviewed by the New York Times, regarding the NATO air strike inside Pakistan on November 26."

Amb. Munter is a career professional diplomat who gave, from his in-country vantage point, foreign policy advice tempered by knowledge of local politics, sentiment, and conditions.

That's kinda/sorta his job.

(Disclaimer: CAA met, briefly and in passing, the aforementioned ambassador a few years ago.)

He was notably one of the senior FSOs who, fairly early, volunteered for service in Iraq, where he lead the first PRT in Mosul in 2006; he also served at the Baghdad embassy in 2009-2010.

I recall him stating publicly (paraphrase follows) that if senior leadership was going to ask FSOs to volunteer for service in war zones it would behoove them to lead by example. Or word to that effect.

"As to how Munter's highly sensitive discussion with White House officials came to be made public, I'd say that the U.S. Department of State is the prime suspect."

Leaking to the press is simply outside of CAA's area of competency. I got nothing.

"As to how State arrived at the idea that any advice they could give on Pakistan would be helpful to the United States is beyond me. State's track record on Pakistan since the Afghan War heated up has been awful"

Frankly, the United States' track record on Pakistan is something that needs to be examined holistically, from top-down decisions down to our working level relationships. The State Dept. doesn't set policy. It implements it, it provides advice beforehand and feedback as implementation proceeds.

"Moving along, Munter's advice was given on the 28th, just two days after the NATO air strike, when the U.S. Department of Defense was still trying untangle how the strike came about and exactly what had happened during the strike. So it's almost beyond belief that a career diplomat of Munter's experience would ask the President of the United States for a formal apology before the strike had been properly investigated.

Yet when it comes to State not much is beyond belief anymore. State officials have come to think of themselves as 'policymakers' even though State is only supposed to advise the White House on policy."

See my comments above. That being said, at a certain level and above, senior officials are not only implementers and advice-givers, they are policy-makers. This is just as true at DoD, the CIA, and the DoJ as it is in Foggy Bottom.

"This is no way to run foreign policy; this is no way to conduct any kind of policy and certainly not the way to run a war. This is headless horseman thinking, which means there is no real thinking at all; there is just a bureaucracy's obsession with expanding its turf by attempting to please scores of competing factions."

Part of the problem is the pretense that Pakistan is not part of a.) the larger campaign in Afghanistan; and b.) the larger "war on terror."

That being said, while we do send our honorable diplomats abroad to lie for their country, they must always take care to tell only the truth when reporting back to Washington, whether that is to the Department or to the White House.

12/1