Money quote(s):
"(I)f you want to be paid to do a job, do the job as best you can (which is not always easy). If you have real qualms about the wisdom or morality of what you are told to do, go and get another job. Foreign Policy moves on, with you or without you."
It wasn't that long ago that I'd hear rumblings, from prospective FSO candidates, about their disagreements with the Bush administration's foreign policies, and about their moral qualms about it and how they'd have to resign in protest.
Generally, my advice to such is to maybe see about getting that job before deciding to resign in protest.
U.S. foreign service officers, and our British counter-parts, do not, by and large, make or set our nation's foreign policies. We carry it out, we communicate it, we implement it, but except at the very highest levels, we have Damn-all to say about what it's going to be on any given day.
FSOs do (or can) have some influence. We develop personal expertise in foreign areas and regions, obscure languages, personal contacts. We communicate, coming and going, what we learn and know to our superiors at post and, in our reporting, to Washington, D.C. And, until Wikileaks caused that conduit to dry up, our reporting cables could be accessed and read by analysts and policy-makers across the U.S. national security, defense, and intelligence communities.
So my advice to actual FSOs (not those wannabees in high dudgeon) is to make your reporting opportunities count. But tell the truth. Tell what you know and how you know it. Tell what you believe and why you believe it. Tell what you surmise and both its relevance and how you came to your conclusions. But above all tell the truth, not what you'd like to be true (though the Heavens fall).
"What's odd in fact is how few diplomats ever feel their bodily nerves a-rebelling against their instructions. Are diplomats insensate, wicked creatures little more than slaves whose servitude comes with better than average accommodation and lots of dull receptions?
Or is it that they know that as part of the way the world works and always will work there need to be ways for messages to be sent frankly between countries and leaders, even (especially?) when things get tough and unpleasant? A dirty job sometimes, but someone has to do it.
I report. You decide."
Remember the definition of a diplomat as an honorable man sent abroad to lie for his country? That honorable man retains his honor by never knowingly sending lies back to his country.
Policy-makers are going to make policy. It's what they do. And as frustrating as it sometimes is for intelligence analysts and for diplomats, your job is to serve as a conduit for information, adding whatever value you can along the way.
