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Foreign Service Whiners and So-called Success

By Larry Johnson on November 3, 2007 at 3:51 PM in Current Affairs

I received a couple of inquiries  regarding my take on the State Department uproar about Foreign Service officers whining about being coerced to take posts in Iraq.  Melissa asked:

I am curious of your opinion about the State Department Field Service employees refusing to serve in Iraq.  It is an interesting happening as the White House has a serious media blitz about Iraq being safer and more controlled.  Don’t you find it very interesting that Condi’s employees who have first hand knowledge of the daily happenings in Iraq don’t find Iraq safer and controlled enough to serve positions in Iraq?

And then there is Hans Binnendijk’s piece in today’s Washington Post, At War but Not War Ready.

I am not without empathy with the plight of the Foreign Service Officers, but they were not promised cushy assignments in Paris or Rome.

They do have a right to insist that the Department provide them with robust pre-deployment training appropriate for a combat zone.  They are entitled to full medical expenses for all ailments acquired as a consequence of serving in a combat zone.  And the Department really needs to take a hard look at the job requirements.  Creating this behemoth of an embassy in Baghdad does not make a lot of sense when one considers that the ability of diplomats to travel outside the Green Zone remains highly constrained.

Which brings me to the broader point of the so-called success in the surge.  No matter how you look at the stats, the number of fatalities–US and Iraqi–have declined significantly in the last six months.  While this is a promising trend, it has not been accompanied by a comparable political opening.  To the contrary, the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad continues, and the sectarian rifts dividing Iraq remain veritable chasms.

Will the media celebrating the “success” of the surge today still be popping champagne corks in December if the number of U.S. soldiers killed in attacks doubles the forty killed in October?  I doubt it.  We need to recognize that the number killed and wounded, looked at in isolation, tells us little about the progress in the war.  We have to look at other “metrics”.  So in the coming weeks let’s see what happens to refugee numbers, legislative action, and integration of Sunnis and Shias in the national police force.  Declining violence while refugees continue to flee, while the legislature remains deadlocked in sectarian strife, and the police continue to be a front of Shia militias means little of note.  Keep this in mind as you hear the silly claim that the surge is working.  So far, it ain’t.