by Charlie Edwards | Feb 27, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, Influence and networks, Middle East and North Africa, North America
In late 2006 Manuel Miranda accepted an offer by the Department of State to join their diplomatic mission in Baghdad as a Senior Advisor to the Iraqi Prime Minister’s legal office and the Government of Iraq on legislative process. In the following year he established the Office of Legislative Statecraft. When he left in 2008 he wrote a memo to Ambassador Crocker. Not surprisingly the memo (which can be read in full here) has caused a sensation…
To: Ambassador Crocker
From: Manuel Miranda, Office of Legislative Statecraft
Date: February 5, 2008
Re: Departure Assessment of Embassy Baghdad
- After a year at the Embassy, it is my general assessment that the State Department and the Foreign Service is not competent to do the job that they have undertaken in Iraq. It is not that the men and women of the Foreign Service and other State Department bureaus are not intelligent and hard-working, it is simply that they are not equipped to handle the job that the State Department has undertaken. Apart from the remarkable achievements of Coalition forces in the pacification of Iraq, the few civilian accomplishments that we are presently lauding, including the debathification law and the staffing of PRT’s are a thin reed.
- The purpose of the Surge, now one year old, was to pacify Iraq to allow the GOI to stand up. The State Department has not done its part coincident with the Commanding General’s effort. The problem is institutional. The State Department bureaucracy is not equipped to handle the urgency of America’s Iraq investment in blood and taxpayer funds. You lack the “fierce urgency of now.”
- Foreign Service officers, with ludicrously little management experience by any standard other than your own, are not equipped to manage programs, hundreds of millions in funds, and expert human capital assets needed to assist the Government of Iraq to stand up. It is apparent that, other than diplomacy, your only expertise is your own bureaucracy, which inherently makes State Department personnel unable to think outside the box or beyond the paths they have previously taken.
- As managers, the Embassy’s leaders may be talented regionalists and diplomats, but they do not have the leadership profiles or management experience called for by the nation’s high sacrifice of blood and treasure. It has been impossible, at any time this year, to believe that the pacification and standing up of Iraq is America’s No. 1 policy consideration by observing the leadership of the U.S. Embassy, the State Department’s negligent manner of making decisions, or the management priorities and changing goal posts of the State Department and Embassy leadership.
- The American people would be scandalized to know that, throughout the Winter, Spring and Summer of 2007 the Embassy was largely consumed in successive internal reorganizations with contradictory management and policy goals. In some cases, administrative and management goals that occupied our time reflected the urgencies and priorities that could only originate in Foggy Bottom and far-removed from the reality or urgencies on the ground. The fact that over 80 people sit in Washington, second- guessing and delaying the work of the Embassy, many who have been to Baghdad, is an embarrassment alone.
- Likewise, the State Department’s culture of delay and indecision, natural to any bureaucracy, is out of sync with the urgency felt by the American people and the Congress in furthering America’s interests in Iraq. The delay in staffing the Commanding General’s Ministerial Performance initiative (from May to the present) would be considered grossly negligent if not willful in any environment.
- The Embassy is severely encumbered by the Foreign Service’s built-in attention deficit disorder, with personnel and new leaders rotating out within a year or less. Incumbent in this constant personnel change is a startling failure to manage and retrieve information. The Embassy is consequently in a constant state of revisiting the same ground without the ability to retrieve information of past work and decisions. This misleads new personnel at senior levels into the illusion of accomplishment and progress. This illusionary process of “changing goal posts,” as one senior official put it, helps to explain why so few goals are scored by us on those benchmarks codified by Congress, the President, or by the GOI itself.
- Most notable, there is a near complete lack of strategic forethought or synchronization between Embassy staffing and program initiatives and funding. This is also true of PRTs. Only the military takes seriously the Joint Campaign and its metrics of achievement, while State Department leaders use it only when advantageous.
- The impulse to transform the American Embassy into a “normal embassy” displays most starkly the State Department bureaucracy’s endemic problems, including inflexibility and the inability to understand alternative management principles, use expertise and funds in any manner outside the State Department’s normal experience, the inability to respond to the urgency of America’s presence in Iraq, and the inclination to make excuses and blame the Embassy’s failures on others. At the keystone moment that America’s leaders and people were pained over the debate of our continued national sacrifice, the Baghdad Embassy was doing a bureaucratic imitation of the Keystone Cops, counting chairs and desks and reviewing decisions over and over again.
- The second mantra, that political success in Iraq depends entirely on Iraqis, amounts to little more than excuse-making by people who cannot imagine alternative paths and who are limited by their own limited experience in government and economic development. The Foreign Service’s gripping culture of excused inaction is also framed and exacerbated by the paralyzing question of the “buy in” of Iraqi officials in some of the areas in which they most need, and that we can offer, assistance. The obvious reality that nothing can happen without Iraqi support is over-used as an excuse by bureaucrats who simply do not have the ability of conceiving or executing scenarios of institution-building assistance that does not comport with their past experience and over-cautious diplomatic instincts.
- Another cavity in the Foreign Service culture is in the flow and management of information in both a greater and lesser degree. In the greater degree of importance, the Foreign Service culture has created a situation where important information is kept from vital decision-makers. In my year in Baghdad, I have seen the Embassy intentionally keep information from The White House and relevant policy-making agencies; The State Department in Washington (because “we cannot trust that they will not leak to the press”), and The Commanding General (because “we do not wash our dirty laundry in public”.)
- I have also witnessed a relentless culture of information-hording within the Embassy. The dysfunctional failure to communicate and share information is beyond anything that can be imagined under any circumstances. It is endemic of a bureaucracy that is far beyond its pale of competence and experience
- I have also witnessed the failure to coordinate and communicate with allies and international organizations. In the lesser degree, despite the countless and deeply-researched written products created by the Embassy over 5 years, and by contractors who are paid millions of dollars for the work product, the Embassy has no system in place to retrieve vital information about Iraq, its government and laws, and past experiences and decisions. In light of the turnover in personnel, this lack of management forethought is an expensive negligence. Embassy (and Coalition) personnel are in a constant state of information-gathering that relies mostly on luck and personality, and is always retaking the same ground. One of the most commonly heard phrases in the Embassy has to be “I had no idea that document existed,” or “I did not know that was done.”
- Two Washington Post articles caught my attention this past year. One reported on a memo of yours noting that the Embassy was staffed with young and inexperienced people. Presumably you were referring to the Foreign Service personnel at the Embassy and not to the experienced experts still at the Embassy at the time in larger numbers than now. A more recent article, reported on the rebellion of the Foreign Service to serve in Iraq. Both articles disguise a false premise.
- America’s success in Iraq will not be had with older or more Foreign Service officers doing the little that the Foreign Service is competent to do. The last thing that we need in Baghdad is more Foreign Service officers. We need experts, experienced human capital managers, and leaders who can think outside the box to synchronize staffing, funding, and urgent needs.
- In addition, you should note that there is no lack of other Americans who are willing to come to Iraq. At the Embassy today, there are Americans who have foregone incomes five times greater than what they make now and who put aside careers to serve. If I thought the State Department were competent, I would have been glad to sign on for more than a year. Recruitment is not your problem. Your system of staffing is.
- The State Department would do the nation a service if it admits that it is not equipped to the job you have undertaken. Our Congress has an obligation to give you the oversight our national sacrifice demands. We are now living our latest error.
by Charlie Edwards | Feb 25, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is situated more than one hundred metres deep inside the mountain permafrost on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, some 620 miles south of the North Pole deep inside the Arctic circle.
It’s pretty barren.
No trees grow on the archipelago, which is home to some 2,300 people. It was selected because of its inhospitable climate and remoteness. The average winter temperature on Svalbard is around minus 14C. The vault is protected by high walls of fortified concrete, doors armoured with steel plate and a home guard of free-roaming polar bears.
As the world’s first global seed bank, it has the capacity to hold up to 4.5 million batches of seeds from all the known varieties of the planet’s main food crops and has been designed as a latter-day Noah’s Ark, or insurance policy, for the planet in the event of a catastrophe such as devastating climate change induced by global warming.
The vault aims to make it possible to re-establish crops and plants should they disappear from their natural environment or be wiped out by major disasters. Cary Fowler, of the Global Crop Diversity Trust which set up the project together with Norway’s Nordic Gene Bank yesterday described the vault as the “perfect place” for seed storage.
The vault is made up of three large, airtight, refrigerated cold-storage chambers which are housed in a long trident-shaped tunnel bored through a layer of permafrost in to a mountain of sandstone and limestone on the archipelago.
Scientists involved in the project point out that some of the world’s biodiversity had already been lost as a result of war or natural disaster with gene vaults disappearing in Iraq and Afghanistan following the conflicts there and while seed banks in the Philippines and Honduras have been wiped out from natural disasters. The vault is the world’s last line of defence against extinction.
‘Every nation has been invited by the Norwegian government to place its seeds in this vault. It’s the last line of defence against extinction for all the crops we have, and the most long-lasting, most futuristic and most positive contribution to humanity being made by the international community today.’
Each country’s seeds will be stored inside heat-sealed, four-ply aluminium envelopes originally designed for use by the military, placed inside sealed boxes, stored on metal shelving and secured inside an air-locked chamber. Each packet will hold one representative crop sample, and about 500 seeds depending on their size. They will remain the property of the country that donated them. This last part is very important as according to researchers at the World Vegetable Centre (I kid you not) in Taiwan, up to 27 “orphan” crops with a value of US$100 billion are grown on 250 million hectares (618 million acres) in developing countries. Orphan crops like cowpea and groundnut are not minor or insignificant crops but are crucial to regional food security.
by Richard Gowan | Feb 23, 2008 | Europe and Central Asia, UK
Further to my rant against the legion of poltroons who have made comments on Kosovo on the Guardian website, Martin Kettle has restored my faith that there’s still some room for nuance on the British Left:
Surely British liberals have room for more than one idea in their heads at a time. How can a sense of shame over Iraq really justify getting into an anti-Kosovan menage a trois with Vladimir Putin – the Slav Ahmadinajad – and with the Islamophobic states of the southern Balkans? How can liberals from a country that was forced to concede the independence of Ireland, our very own Kosovo, less than a century ago – a move which their predecessors championed – now become ideological fellow travellers of Putin and Hu Jintao?
Britain was right to play its part in the Kosovo intervention. We have to stick with the consequences. And we have to uphold the difficult principle of humanitarian intervention now and in the future, as circumstances arise – as they well might under President Obama. Don’t throw the interventionist baby out with the post-Bush bathwater. The world is a difficult place – but we don’t make it any easier by pulling up the drawbridge, hoping it will all go away and then wringing our hands when the next call for justice goes unheeded.
by Richard Gowan | Feb 22, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia
Our chum Daniel Korski has been good enough to cite my recent Dashboard post on Kosovo in a new article on the Guardian website. It’s a typically tough piece from him and you should read it. But as well as learning about the Balkans, you should take a moment to scroll through the comments left by other readers – a greater accumulation of bile it would be hard to find. Unless, that is, you take a look at comments on an earlier Korski op-ed on Kosovo.
Combined, the two pieces have garnered 87 comments. The vast majority take issue with Daniel’s thesis that Kosovo should be independent and the EU is right to back it. Like this:
I wonder how many people here would fall for the crap produced by characters like author of this column. Have you not realised, pal, that all your bullshit trying to twist illegal land grab (in the form of neo-colonisation via proxies and military bases) in a strategic position in Europe into something “noble” and “unique” is not swallowed so easily anymore. You are just a bunch of cynical criminals and murderers. Any wonder, then, that you support the biggest narco-mafia in Europe, and their newly found “state”? Well done there, but you are now exposed as liers, criminals and moral scum.
One can only presume that the collective “you” in this case must refer to the European Council on Foreign Relations, Mr. Korski’s current domicile, where I also have an affiliation. And, hey, I am quite a cynical person of variable morality, though I’m not in fact a murderer. (On a serious note, a quick glance at the ECFR site shows that the staff there have differing views on Kosovo, and it’s worth checking out this particularly thoughtful piece by Ulrike Guerot).
But back to the Guardian readers. They don’t all just hate Korski. Some hate the Serbs too. While I’ve been typing, the moderator has removed this comment by a Mr. (or Ms.) BugHunter:
Sorry, I just can’t work up any sympathy for the Serbs. Once again they show they aren’t ready to join the civilized world. The best thing for the region would be to turn Belgrade into a glass pavement.”
Well, that deserved to go. Though I’m not sure why it gets nixed while well-known South East Europe expert DancingSlag is allowed to get away with rank Islamophobia:
What about the historically important Christian sites in southern Kosovo? There are aged monks and nuns with no way of protecting themselves. We know what the Taliban did to the religiously significant Buddha statues in Afghanistan, so I suppose here comes some more cultural vandalism to witness.
I know that I shouldn’t be bothered by the sort of people who spend their days sticking this stuff on the web – and there are a few decent contributions amid the general pig-swill. But the sheer awfulness of this stuff reminded me of Alex’s recent post on George Packer’s despair at the standard of “informed” debate on Iraq in America:
What Packer describes is how participatory media can produce incoherence: chaos, disorder, cacophony, where the very idea of any objective truth is lost amidst the blizzard of commentary, opinion and white noise.
That now goes for Kosovo talk in the UK too.
by Richard Gowan | Feb 20, 2008 | North America, Off topic
Readers of this blog will, almost by definition, be well aware of the thoughts of Mr. Alex Evans on global risks, resilience, the new dynamics of international cooperation and so on and so forth. So they’ll be pretty used to this sort of stuff:
I think we face three challenges currently: The disappearance of the nation-state; the rise of India and China; and, thirdly, the emergence of problems and challenges that cannot be solved by a single power, such as energy and the environment. We do not have the luxury to focus on one problem; we have to deal with all three of them or we won’t succeed with any of them.
Yeah, yeah, give us a break. Except those sentiments don’t come from Alex but from, er, Henry Kissinger in a remarkable new interview with Der Spiegel Online (the best English-language news source on the web that nobody knows about).
Old Mr. Realpolitik hasn’t exactly turned that cuddly. He has wise things to say about how the Bush administration gives European governments an easy excuse for avoiding hard questions on foreign policy – and weird ones on Bush himself:
SPIEGEL: Isn’t German and European opposition to a greater military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq also a result of deep distrust of American power?
Kissinger: By this time next year, we will see the beginning of a new administration. We will then discover to what extent the Bush administration was the cause or the alibi for European-American disagreements. Right now, many Europeans hide behind the unpopularity of President Bush. And this administration made several mistakes in the beginning.
SPIEGEL: What do you see as the biggest mistakes?
Kissinger: To go into Iraq with insufficient troops, to disband the Iraqi army, the handling of the relations with allies at the beginning even though not every ally distinguished himself by loyalty. But I do believe that George W. Bush has correctly understood the global challenge we are facing, the threat of radical Islam, and that he has fought that battle with great fortitude. He will be appreciated for that later.
SPIEGEL: In 50 years, historians will treat his legacy more kindly?
Kissinger: That will happen much earlier.
But back to the whole “problems and challenges that cannot be solved by a single power” malarkey. I’ve just returned from a week in the UK talking about Managing Global Insecurity, and although there were a lot of interesting conversations involved, I was struck by the deeply-embdedded European assumption that U.S. policy-makers just don’t get the twenty-first century risk agenda or concepts like human security. Well, piffle. As I noted late last year in a short piece for the Stanley Foundation, the whole presidential campaign has been shot through with this sort of thing:
One of the most prominent foreign policy themes of pre-presidential debates has been the need to get UN troops to Darfur. Hillary Clinton has “an aggressive plan to support public schools in developing countries” while Mitt Romney’s anti-jihad strategy centers on a “Special Partnership Force” that will win over foreign communities and leaders through “humanitarian and development assistance and rule of law capacity building.”
Such proposals leave outside observers scratching their heads. Ask the average anti-American to name the pillars of US international policy, and they’ll pick two: military power and unbridled capitalism. But the country’s leaders-in-waiting are promoting social democratic goods like public schooling and development aid. Is the US turning into a gigantic Sweden?
As I said at the time, no, not really. But think back to Super Tuesday. Here’s the key foreign policy paragraph from Obama’s speech that night:
And when I am President, we will put an end to a politics that uses 9/11 as a way to scare up votes, and start seeing it as a challenge that should unite America and the world against the common threats of the twenty-first century: terrorism and nuclear weapons; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease.
And here’s the equivalent from Clinton’s speech the same night:
I see an America respected around the world again, that reaches out to our allies and confronts our shared challenges – from global terrorism to global warming to global epidemics.
And now the McCain-supporting Kissinger is in on the act. I’m off to go and watch the primary results roll in from Wisconsin – but if these guys are even semi-serious, the Europeans may find they’re behind the ideological curve in 2009.
