Fuckup in Ferragamos

Tristero draws our attention to a piece in today's NYTimes:

A top adviser to Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari said Wednesday that the visit this week by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw of Britain had backfired, prolonging a deadlock over a new government and strengthening Mr. Jaafari's resolve to keep his post. [...]

His comments were echoed by several political leaders on Wednesday, including Kurds and Sunni Arabs. [...]

The visit by Ms. Rice and Mr. Straw appeared to grate even on politicians who oppose Mr. Jaafari. "They complicated the thing, and now it's more difficult to solve," said Mahmoud Osman, an independent member of the Kurdistan Alliance, speaking Wednesday about Ms. Rice and Mr. Straw. "They shouldn't have come, and they shouldn't have interfered."

This article comes on the heels of an op-ed by Sidney Blumenthal in Salon, "Cannon Fodder at State," in which Blumenthal's State Department sources describe how deteriorating conditions in Iraq are matched by the "collapsing morale" of our diplomatic corps.

Since the Iraqi elections in January, U.S. Foreign Service officers at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad have been writing a steady stream of disturbing cables describing drastically worsening conditions, say State Department officials who have seen them. [...]

Rather than being received as invaluable intelligence, the messages from Foreign Service officers are discarded or, worse, considered signs of disloyalty. Rejecting the facts on the ground apparently requires blaming the messengers. So far two top attachés at the embassy have been reassigned elsewhere for producing factual reports that were too upsetting, according to the State Department officials.

As if ignoring the advice of our professional diplomats on the ground isn't bad enough, the administration is pushing State Department employees into "provincial reconstruction teams" to go out and win Iraqi hearts and minds--without benefit of military protection. The military has advised State to hire mercenaries for protection while it continues to withdraw into defensible redoubts. I suppose the cosmetics of it works for the administration: Fewer bad-news headlines on troop casualties vs. the endangerment of some faceless bureaucrats.

As a taxpayer, I have to wonder why we're footing the bill for a governmental service we no longer use. From the beginning of the Boy King's reign, it's been obvious that the diplomatic skill set is not one that's valued by the rootin' tootin' cowboys in power. The very appointment of Colin Powell as Secretary of State was a message that the State Department was not going to be a locus of power and influence in the administration. He was an outsider, wooed during the 2000 election as a marketing ploy to sweeten the deal for public consumption. And so it was proved, as the neocons presided over the trashing of treaty after treaty and the assault on our strongest alliances while Powell sacrificed his last shred of honor for Bush and got ditched as thanks.

The apex--or nadir, depending on your point of view--of the shift from diplomacy to bellicosity came during the runup to the Iraq invasion. When Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld tossed aside the 17-volume "Future of Iraq Project" prepared by State in favor of a hasty, politically-conceived Pentagon plan, our future failure in Iraq was sealed. It will stand, I believe, as the monument to Bush's belief in magical thinking over credentialed professionalism.

Now we have Condoleezza Rice over at State, and she's brought her consummate incompetence with her. That she is touted in some circles as presidential material is beyond laughable. Can we all recall her dismal performance before and after 9/11? The ignored PDA PDB, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.?" The "mushroom cloud" warnings? The wrangling and disarray among the intelligence services in the absence of strong leadership from NSA? Shoe-shopping in New York while New Orleans drowned?

So Condi pops over to Iraq, accompanied by Jack Straw, to fuck things up even more than usual. Does anyone believe this was Straw's idea?

Blumenthal again:

Amid this internal crisis of credibility, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has washed her hands of her department. Her management skills are minimal. She has left coercing people to fill the PRTs to her counselor, Philip Zelikow, who, by doing the dirty work, is trying to keep her reputation clean. Rice's trumpeted "transformational diplomacy" turns out to be a slogan justifying the transfer of U.S. embassy and consular positions principally in Europe to PRT positions in Iraq.

While the State Department was racked by collapsing morale, Rice traveled last week to northern England to visit the childhood home of British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. After landing at Liverpool's John Lennon Airport, she demonstrated bafflement about some lyrics in "A Day in the Life" ("Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire"), sang a few bars of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," and declared that though the Bush administration had committed "tactical errors, thousands of them" in Iraq, it is right in its strategy. Then, after her self-affirming confessional, she and Straw took a magic carpet to Baghdad to attempt to overthrow Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafaari in favor of a more pliable character. "I heard the news today, oh boy ... The English army had just won the war."

"Did you ever imagine in your wildest dreams that after Vietnam we'd be doing this again?" one top State Department official remarked to another last week. Inside the department people wonder about the next "strategy" after the hearts-and-minds gambit of sending diplomats unprotected to help secure victory turns into a squalid, overlooked fiasco. "Helicopters on the roof?" asked one official.