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We have nearly the same number of State Department personnel in Germany, a country of 82 million people, that we have in India, a country of one billion people.
—Secretary Condoleezza Rice
January 18, 2006
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THE WASHINGTON ROOM WAS THRUMMING WITH negativity. The civility implicit in the phrase “town hall meeting” belied what had turned into a nasty no-confidence vote from foreign service rank and file on the George W. Bush administration’s effort to staff a diplomatic offensive in Iraq four years after coalition forces had removed Saddam Hussein from power. Officers angrily challenged Harry K. Thomas Jr., the director general of the foreign service, on the threat to use the tactic of directed, or forced, assignments.
At issue was the immediate need to fill forty-eight positions in Iraq, but, as is often true in quarrels, much more was in play. The State Department had determined it needed 250 foreign service officers in Iraq by summer of 2008, and at the time of the town hall meeting on October 31, 2007, it had filled only 202. In an e-mail notice to officers around the world, Thomas said the department would begin directed assignments to fill the anticipated shortfall. Additional messages were sent to about 250 officers who were told they had been selected as “highly qualified” for the vacant positions. If enough of them did not volunteer, the letters said, some would be ordered to serve in Iraq.
By tradition, officers have always volunteered for postings. They are “worldwide available” and routinely go to some of the most challenging countries in the world. But until Thomas’s directive, the only time the State Department had ever resorted to directed assignments was in the Vietnam era. Technically, the State Department has the right to send its diplomats anywhere. Officers agree to be worldwide available when they join the foreign service.
Posts are classified as nonhardship, hardship, and greater hardship according to a complex scale weighing danger, health, and living standards. There are rules governing “fair share assignments,” ensuring that officers cannot hop from Paris to London to Rome. In reality, ambitious officers often avoid those cushy and touristy spots. It’s hard to make an impact, and the mostly routine kinds of issues the United States manages in Western European embassies are unlikely to earn promotions. At the meeting in 2007, the point of contention was really over hardship and greater hardship posts. The latter are sometimes unaccompanied assignments, meaning married officers must leave spouses and children behind. The rise in the number of unaccompanied posts caught officers by surprise. Many had made a life in Africa or Latin America, exposing their children to international schools, foreign languages, and a deep dive into foreign cultures. For some, the idea of leaving family behind was unthinkable.
The meeting reverberated like an earthquake and revealed a wide rift between the State Department’s leadership and the officers, unusual in an organization that values tradition and collegiality. A poll taken by the American Foreign Service Association, a professional group that is the exclusive bargaining agent for the foreign service and perhaps best known for its Foreign Service Journal publication, revealed that only 12 percent of FSOs believed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was fighting for them. She had followed the highly popular Colin Powell, whom many officers felt had taken a hit for the White House after he told the United Nations in 2003 that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Some felt Rice was too close to President Bush and lacked sufficient independence and managerial experience to run the building. The anger at the town hall, if nothing else, exposed a simmering communications problem between Rice and her FSOs.
Objections to Iraq service came down to three factors: proportion, preparation, and purpose. Some officers charged that the size of the Baghdad embassy, vaunted as the world’s largest, was Bush administration hubris at its worst. Why, they argued, should it be bigger than the U.S. embassy in China? Within the Middle East, how could it compare with America’s long-standing relationship with Israel, or with the strategic importance of Egypt or Saudi Arabia?
The number of diplomatic positions in Iraq had increased every year since the new embassy opened in 2004, and the expansion of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) outside Baghdad—from ten to twenty-five—required still more foreign service officers. Each PRT was a multi-agency unit comprised of military officers, diplomats, and reconstruction experts with skills ranging from medical, electrical, water, agriculture, and more. The PRTs, led by the State Department, were meant to serve as a counterinsurgency bulwark by taking resources far outside the capital and shoring up provincial and municipal civil society. The staffing requirements were rapidly creating an unsustainable demand, especially as these twelve-month assignments meant the State Department was dealing with near-constant turnover in-country. Officers argued that simple arithmetic made it impossible to fill Iraq slots, given an officer corps of fewer than seven thousand and nearly two hundred diplomatic missions worldwide.
Preparation was also a divisive issue. At the time of the town hall, most officers were getting only a few weeks of training before departure, clearly inadequate for a post with so many challenges. Typically, training would last several months and include at least courtesy-level language lessons and area studies, but need dictated that nearly all officers were sent without knowledge of Arabic. This runs contrary to foreign service culture, in which acquiring a language is often an indispensable part of the job. Officers invest years working on hard languages such as Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, or Korean, and most assume they will serve multiple tours and become regional specialists, building political and economic knowledge to go with the language. Forcing, for example, East Asian language speakers to do tours in Iraq seemed to devalue their expertise and place them in a region for which they had no preparation. Longtime Latin American and African hands felt the same way.
The biggest objection concerned the purpose and goals of the United States’ mission in Iraq. Having heard the domestic political debate over the futility and distaste for nation-building, the U.S. embassy in Iraq symbolized nation-building on a grand scale, and in 2006–2007 the military clearly had the lead role. This was a significant shift for many diplomats, whose work with military personnel began and ended with the routine presence of a defense attaché office at embassies. Foreign service officers were uncertain about what they would be allowed to do, what would be safe to do, and to whom they would report. Who was the real chief of mission—was it the ambassador, Ryan Crocker, or the general, David Petraeus?
This was not a silly question. Former Iraq ambassador Christopher Hill, who succeeded Ryan Crocker and served in Iraq from 2009 to 2010, analyzed the pressure points between the diplomatic and military presence at some length. “U.S. goals in Iraq, increasingly economic ones, were often set by senior U.S. officials, including senior military generals, who had neither the expertise nor the patience to slog through the no-man’s land of economic development projects and capacity building. The military had become the largest dispenser of foreign aid in Iraq for programs whose primary and more sober purpose was to convince the Iraqis not to shoot at our soldiers.” 1 Hill said the embassy had “a reputation for being supersized” out of a misplaced need to keep pace with the military. “Story after story came back from Iraq of people having little to do, of sitting around in endless meetings and writing telegrams that no one wanted to read.” 2
Apart from the tension between diplomats and the military, there was mounting evidence that the State Department had not adequately prepared for the consequences of Iraq service. The department’s medical unit had yet to ramp up to assist officers with war-related ailments such as posttraumatic stress, and support for officers’ families staying behind was minimal. FSOs had an overall sense that despite lofty talk at the top, the department was just as unprepared as its officers, asking something it had not fully thought through, and which it had certainly not communicated to them.
A small resident press corps works out of the State Department building, and to the everlasting woe of the foreign service, the disastrous town hall was covered by reporters whose subsequent stories portrayed foreign service officers as shallow, spoiled, and selfish.3 What might have been a valuable opportunity for State Department leadership to explain the idea behind a new “expeditionary” foreign service degenerated into a scene in which management looked arrogant and FSOs looked whiny, especially in comparison to troops who served multiple tours without complaint. While the news stories mentioned legitimate problems, such as a recently returned Iraq officer who said the State Department would not authorize her medical treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder, other comments were less helpful, ranging from the much-publicized complaint that Iraq service is “a potential death sentence,” to “who will care for our children?” 4
It was a bad day for the foreign service. No amount of blogs, op-eds, or letters to the editor from FSOs enthusiastically serving in Iraq could undo the damage. A little-known fact is that fifteen hundred diplomats had already served in Iraq from 2002 until the day of the meeting in late 2007. Many officers disagreed with those who had been most vocal. By the end of the day, fifteen more had volunteered for the forty-eight unfilled positions, and soon all forty-eight had been quietly filled with no need for directed assignments.
The real story is that many FSOs went to Iraq because they wanted to serve there and were intrigued by the policy challenges and attracted by the resources at their disposal. In an organizational culture in which promotion is predicated on an ability to manage people and money, Iraq service offered plenty of opportunities. Many of those who served were enthusiastic about their stints, and some went back for more. Hill’s memoir supports the notion that many officers were glad to go, and he described his office colleagues volunteering and his phone ringing with offers from FSOs who wanted to serve with him in Iraq even before his ambassadorial nomination had been made public.
Of course some officers were attracted by the danger and hardship pay, which allowed them to double their salaries. Hill noted that the bureaucratic pressure to fill Iraq slots had begun to have unintended consequences.
The people who served repeated tours in Iraq as opposed to those who simply wanted to check that box, were often seen as those who could not get jobs elsewhere, or who viewed Iraq as a place to go to line up a next assignment to a cozy job in Europe. The State Department’s personnel system had been skewed as a result of Iraq, with those who had returned being offered jobs ahead of everyone else . . . Iraq, it was said, had also become a kind of French Foreign Legion, where after a particularly unsuccessful assignment somewhere, a person could wipe the slate clean and start afresh. 5
The era of the “expeditionary” foreign service seemed to have arrived almost overnight.
Hill’s predecessor in Iraq, Ryan Crocker, who served from 2007 to 2009, had exerted enormous pressure on the State Department, Congress, and anyone who would listen for more resources, especially in the form of FSOs. Crocker served as the Iraq surge began in 2007 and was determined to ramp up the embassy’s capacity to match the military. This meant staffing twenty-five PRTs as well as the large embassy. The cables he sent reveal exasperation with a bureaucracy that was overwhelmed by personnel demands and slow to meet his needs. All ambassadors try to be advocates for their posts and seek more resources from Washington on the theory that it never hurts to ask, but Crocker was unique in having the world’s largest embassy along with Washington’s affirmation that staffing Iraq was a policy priority. That didn’t mean it always worked well.
Crocker’s desire for more officers embraced nation-building at its most fundamental level. “The success or failure of the Iraqi government will depend in large part on its ability to function well and to deliver services to Iraqi citizens. That makes ministerial capacity building an essential part of our strategy,” he wrote in 2007, following up with a torrent of numbers explaining and describing the work of some 214 officers he said were essential—just to work on ministerial capacity building.6
In another cable, he excoriated the State Department’s personnel system for its failure to meet a staffing deadline. Crocker took this issue so seriously that he ordered his embassy’s Office of Provincial Affairs (OPA) to update the staffing document twice a day. His enumeration of the problems illustrates the bureaucratic challenges of such ambitious staffing goals. Crocker was incensed to learn that PRT team leaders were rejecting a significant number of candidates, sometimes because of qualifications and sometimes because they lacked the facilities to support them (billeting, transportation, security, etc.). “Under no circumstances will a position not be filled or diverted without the express permission of the ambassador,” he wrote. He fulminated over bureaucratic snafus. “Furthermore, various offices in Iraq and Washington were keeping their own tallies of surge staffing that were often inconsistent and resulted in confusion. To address this problem OPA now has a single transparent manning instrument that is maintained by one person, with a back-up, and accounts for the status of each position in each phase.” 7
But as an illustration of how quickly personnel needs can shift, just two years later Embassy Baghdad was describing to Washington how it would handle a drawdown from sixteen PRTs to only five, and a reduction of some seventy officers. Three of the PRTs—Basrah, Erbil, and Kirkuk—became full-fledged U.S. consulates. Drawing from President Obama’s February 27, 2009, speech at Camp Lejeune, the embassy focused on timing, coordination, pace, and sequence. In a prescient observation, it noted, “It has become clear that security issues (and related costs) are going to be among the most difficult. If, in 2012 and beyond, we assess that diplomats require a security footprint as heavy as is required in 2009 (but without military support) we will need to annually reassess the viability of some of the enduring presence posts.” 8
WORKING IN A WAR ZONE
Against the contentious backdrop of staffing, security, and the vagaries of Washington politics, the leaked cables provide day-to-day details about the actual experience of serving in Iraq. They demonstrate that it was indeed possible to perform traditional diplomacy along with diplomatic outreach work—meeting diverse groups of contacts and running programs. Timing helped. Iraqis had been coping with multinational forces since the initial invasion in 2003, and many yearned to form a more normal relationship that would exchange boots for books. By 2008, they were about to get their wish.
The Iraq cables paint a complex but surprisingly upbeat picture. Officers clearly found plenty to do, and their reports offer an eloquent rebuttal to some of the more outlandish statements at the town hall meeting. Iraq service, while of course dangerous, was full of meaningful opportunities to do what many officers hope for when joining the foreign service—to make an impact and a difference. For officers who had spent much of their careers competing for scarce programming resources, Iraq represented a bonanza—more than enough. Even rarely funded cultural programming was encouraged.
Public diplomacy officers faced a great challenge, since they were tasked with creating and running programs designed to reach the people of Iraq, rather than the government. The success of their work depended on access to students and professors, journalists, think tanks, democracy-building NGOs, and communities of artists and intelligentsia. The security situation complicated many aspects of their work, as hazards fluctuated from one month to the next and from one part of Iraq to another. Multiple cables reflect officers’ frustration at canceling, postponing, or circumscribing programs solely for security concerns. They clearly wanted to do more. Yet just as often, their cables reported successful events in which U.S. experts spoke to a wide range of audiences or offered artistic productions that resonated with all kinds of Iraqis.
In the province of Wasit, south of Baghdad, the PRT sponsored a comedic play performed by actors from the Iraqi television sitcom Mud House in a municipal auditorium with a seating capacity of eight hundred. The Iraqi police estimated more than forty-five hundred people showed up, and they somehow crammed fifteen hundred into the hall. When the PRT public affairs officer and the PRT commander walked onstage to open the show, the crowd “erupted with wild and unexpected applause . . . that mirrored the way Iraqis receive their soccer stars.” The officers described the play as a comedy set in agrarian Iraq in the 1950s, as seen through the characters in a family headed for the city of Baghdad. The actors performed a second night to accommodate those who had been turned away. In a cable, the post celebrated the success, writing that “no PRT member that attended has ever seen so many Iraqis smiling and laughing.” 9 This tentative foray into the world of theater marked a new opening for imaginative officers, who began using Iraqi theatrical troupes to perform plays that were recorded for broadcast and mass media distribution.
The Wasit play was hardly a one-off. Another cable describes, in hilarious detail, the PRT’s valiant effort to provide musical entertainment in the multicultural town of Ain Sifni, in Ninewa province in northern Iraq. Hoping to hook readers back in Washington, the post asks rhetorically:
What do you get when a US Army band plays an Eastern Orthodox wedding hall in a Yezidi town with Arabs, Christians, and Kurdish musicians under the watchful gaze of the Barzani patriarch, a crucifix, and the Iraqi flag, plus a banner celebrating the anniversary of an anti-Saddam uprising?
The presence of five wonderful American ambassadors—on tuba, trombone, French horn, and trumpets—made this gathering possible and helped it morph into a pinkie-dancing conga line to a caterwauling beat—a fleetingly inclusive Kurd-a-palooza in which we clearly danced to another’s tune.
The cable describes in giddy detail the PRT’s first-ever attempt at performing arts diplomacy and the lengths officers had to go to to overcome all manner of problems—both silly and serious. The stage, set for a variety show for local musicians, provided an irresistible platform for smuggled Kurdish flags. The public affairs officer solved the problem by ordering the town scoured for an Iraqi flag, “from whence it came we may never know.” The performance hall was “a barn-like venue with a lousy sound system and 250 people who would have been arrested in the Kennedy Center.” The PAO resolved the sound system distortion by having the PRT team turn off the electronic countermeasures employed against remote-detonated IEDS. The lack of signal meant no phone service, a by-product of which was an undistracted audience.
The writer described the town’s complex cultural crossroads, with competing Orthodox and Catholic churches, tombs of two prominent Islamic scholars, and security provided by Kurdish Peshmerga. The PRT leader met with nervous members of varying minority groups, all of which looked to the United States to guarantee their safety, a prescient request from the Yezidis, who came under horrific attack from Islamic State five years later and were driven to a mountaintop. The cable ended on a sober note, reminding readers that the Yezidi, a minority in a heavily Kurdish region that is itself a minority in Iraq, are “a group of people whose continued daily existence in a twice hostile world is their daily accomplishment. The power of our instruments . . . can quiet the crowd when we are all in harmony, but it cannot long overpower the indigenous noise of this place.”10
Another important aspect of engagement involved bringing American scholars to Iraq. Professor Mike Hannahan, director of the Civic Initiative program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, went to the Kurdistan region to discuss the American electoral system with more than 1,100 Iraqis at universities, ministries, and in the media. He hosted an election-themed video teleconference in English between his own students in Amherst and those at the University of Kurdistan–Hawker (UK-H), causing a faculty member to marvel, “I’ve never seen the students so excited about something.” At another regional university, students sat in the aisles once the auditorium seats were filled. The embassy told Washington to bring on more speakers. “Hannahan’s host institutions and the KRG (Kurdistan Regional Government’s) Ministry of Higher Education have a simple message for the USG: thank you for making the visit possible and please send more professors!” The embassy was eager to dispel security concerns and pleaded for longer visits. “The success of Professor Hannahan’s program demonstrates that American academics can and should come to Northern Iraq for extended periods for the purpose of building stronger ties between Iraqi and American institutions.” 11
Six months later, the University of Kansas Political Science Department chair Burdett Loomis had an equally successful visit to several universities in the Kurdistan region, discussing political transition issues for the new Obama administration. The post described unheard-of access for an academic, with Loomis invited to meetings with the regional governor, a luncheon hosted by the Minister of Education, media interviews and a rock star reception from deans, faculty, and students at several universities.12
Despite these triumphs, security trumped all other factors. The embassy outlined a three-day program request for Bard College’s Walter Russell Mead, with an ambitious schedule of meetings ranging from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, dinner with Iraqi authors, meetings with faculty and students at the University of Baghdad, events with Baghdad-based NGOs, and media interviews. Mead was no stranger to hot spots, having traveled previously as an embassy speaker to places such as Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. The officers were frustrated. “Post has attempted to bring Walter Russell Mead to Iraq two times previously but security considerations have prevented the implementation of the trip . . . post believes it is time to engage Iraqis with high-level discussion on these matters with a well-regarded, non-Embassy source” (emphasis added).13
The embassy had made a point well known to State Department insiders. There is only so much talking and representing that diplomats can do. For decades, the State Department has turned to America’s best-selling writers, academics, journalists, former high-level officials, and even Supreme Court justices to engage foreign publics through lectures, workshops, and seminars. This classic illustration of soft power connects illustrious Americans with their foreign counterparts. They willingly travel to tough destinations and forgo their usual speaker fees for the chance to represent the United States in a unique way. The State Department has featured musicians such as Wynton Marsalis and Yo-Yo Ma, who have performed concerts and offered master classes; writers such as Tom Wolfe and Frank McCourt; athletes such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and figure skater Michelle Kwan; dancer and choreographer Debbie Allen; architect Daniel Libeskind; photographer Joel Meyerowitz, and many more.
These cultural and intellectual ambassadors are an invaluable part of the State Department’s outreach. Embassies have learned that speakers can make an impact, but only if they are part of an overall strategy of engagement that includes the less exciting work of building audiences and laying groundwork. A famous cultural figure doesn’t just show up—the visit is the culmination of months of work by cultural affairs officers who cultivate audiences through frequent contact, demonstrating genuine interest in their art, and occasionally through small grant support when the art links to a higher purpose such as multiculturalism or promotes the values of civil society. While much lip service is paid to the goal of “mutual understanding,” showing interest and respect for the artistic endeavors of other cultures is a way in which diplomats actually fulfill that mission.
Such strategic planning happens as a matter of course in most embassies, but in Iraq, nothing was routine. The embassy was in need of a framework through which the work of diplomacy—including cultural and educational exchanges—could be institutionalized. The November 2008 signature of the Strategic Framework Agreement (SFA) was a watershed, the single most important document for how U.S.–Iraqi relations would be managed. After five years of operating under UN Security Council Resolution 1790 (which extended the mandate of the Multi-National Force–Iraq until 2008, the third such extension of the original mandate from 2004), the SFA was meant to normalize the bilateral U.S.–Iraqi relationship into one in which two fully sovereign and equal states would cooperate.
The SFA was built on seven key areas, including a pillar for cultural and educational cooperation. It offered public diplomacy officers an opportunity to think strategically about all the programming tools available—the cultural and academic speakers but also academic and nonacademic exchanges, English language teaching, and cultural programming. Officers were tantalized by the promise of making public diplomacy programming part of the routine work of the embassy, and in July 2008 newly arrived Public Affairs Officer Adam Ereli wrote to Assistant Secretary Goli Ameri, who headed the State Department’s ECA Bureau (Educational and Cultural Affairs), passionately calling for a higher level of programming and investment.
Ereli, an Arabic speaker and public diplomacy officer who had previously served as U.S. ambassador in Bahrain, saw the SFA as an important crossroads.
To Iraqis, this means that they are getting their country back and joining the community of nations as a full and respected equal . . . One of the prime minister’s inner circle said to me recently, “We want to be like any other country. Instead of American soldiers and checkpoints, we want to see American doctors and professors and students.” ECA programs are the peace dividend that Iraqis for so long have been waiting.14
In his cable, Ereli outlined ambitious possibilities for the Iraqi Fulbright program, calling for a ten-fold increase in the number of scholarships, already a hefty thirty-five per year. He asked for a Fulbright binational commission, a full range of other academic and citizen exchanges, English language teaching, and arts and cultural heritage programs, arguing that military engagement must be replaced with public diplomacy.
The Fulbright program is often seen as the jewel in the crown of academic exchanges. It was founded in 1946 by Senator J. William Fulbright, and over the years some 325,000 people—Americans and foreigners—have received grants. Each year the program awards about four thousand grants to foreign students and about an equal number to American students, scholars, teachers, and professionals. Embassies play a critical role in administering the program. They liaise closely with Fulbright binational commissions, and in countries where no commission exists, they administer the programs themselves through their public diplomacy offices. Talent spotting is a point of pride. As of this writing fifty-three alumni from thirteen countries are Nobel laureates; thirty-one are heads of state or government. This is enlightened self-interest—a Fulbright alum in a position of power or influence speaks English and has had years of living in the United States as a graduate student. That familiarity (and hopefully fondness) for American society and culture pays dividends when the person is sitting across the table in a high-level negotiating session.
Ameri came to Iraq three months later, bringing a delegation of key State Department ECA officials to meet with the deputy prime minister, minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research, and several Iraqi university presidents. The deputy prime minister offered to match U.S.-funded Fulbright scholarships one-for-one, doubling the Fulbright program. The president of an Iraqi university told Ameri and her delegation that student and faculty exchanges were crucial to democracy. “Students need to see democracy to believe it,” he said. An important subtheme, reiterated in many cables, was that Iraqi officials were not asking for a handout. They were prepared to pay for their part of these exchange programs.15 The expansion of the flagship Fulbright program became real in a ceremony announcing Iraq’s $2.5 million contribution. Ambassador Christopher Hill and Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih signed an agreement doubling the number of student grants from thirty-five to seventy.16
Public diplomacy officers seemed to be on a roll from 2008 to 2010, describing in cable after cable triumphant programs, first-ever accomplishments, and standing-room-only audiences of all kinds. A workshop for English-language teachers would normally be a routine part of the job, but thirty years of academic isolation “has left Iraqi English teaching professionals starved for contact and resources. The level of English language ability is generally dismal.” The post rhapsodized that the participants committed to resurrecting English language learning and that distribution of the State Department’s English Teaching Forum magazine was “riotous,” while a returned Fulbright Language Teaching Assistantship (FLTA) alumna, “mesmerized the conference” with tales of her Fulbright experience. “We believe there is a pool of excellent qualified candidates in Iraq for the FLTA.” The desperate tone in the reporting reflected that, inexplicably, Washington had dropped Embassy Baghdad from the program, and the post ended the cable strongly requesting Iraq’s immediate reinstatement.17
By 2009, Embassy Baghdad was proudly enumerating a catalog of exchanges and programs that would be the envy of any U.S. embassy, including the largest International Visitor Leadership Program in the world with one hundred and seventy participants; the largest Fulbright program in the region; a Young Leaders Exchange program, which sent more than two hundred Iraqi high school and university students to the United States each summer to focus on leadership, conflict resolution, and team building; the MEPI student leaders program, sponsored by the U.S.–Middle East Partnership Initiative; plus English-language teaching, student advising, and much more.
The embassy supported Iraq’s cultural heritage through a program for twelve Iraqi archaeologists and conservators who attended a six-month workshop on conservation techniques at Chicago’s Field Museum. The United States also provided funding for the Future of Babylon Project, where experts from the World Monuments Fund and the Iraq State Board of Antiquities and Heritage collaborated to develop a site management and conservation plan for the ancient site of Babylon.18 This was no doubt motivated in part to make amends for the fact that Iraqi antiquities were poorly protected in the 2003 invasion and were subject to damage, vandalism, and theft.
All these great exchanges would be for naught, Ambassador Crocker warned in early 2009, if the United States did not improve visa processing time for Iraqis seeking to visit the United States. Crocker railed against the 120- to 150-day waiting period required for most Iraqi visa applicants. “The SFA’s Joint Coordinating Committees are off and running. For example, this week seven Presidents of Iraqi universities arrived in Washington for meetings with U.S. counterparts to create educational partnerships. In January, representatives of 25 American universities came to Iraq to recruit students. This fall, the first several hundred of an eventual 6–7,000 Iraqis per year will come to U.S. universities on government scholarships.” He went on to lambaste the process of requiring a Security Advisory Opinion, the cause of the long delays. “We have the opportunity to bring thousands of young Iraqis every year for university degrees in the U.S. and in doing so, build the long term partnership we have never had with Iraq. We risk losing that opportunity due to our visa regulations.”19
FIGHTING THE WAR OF IDEAS
In a key allusion, Crocker mentioned “the relationship we never had,” and the cables offer evidence that FSOs were eager to meet ordinary Iraqis and build a foundation for mutual understanding. Learning another culture is a long-term endeavor, but officers wanted to take the first step and, one conversation at a time, deepen and broaden America’s knowledge of a country that everyone had heard of but few knew.
A cable from Erbil profiles Kurdistan’s so-called 1991 Generation, those born after the March–April uprising of that year, which followed the Gulf War and nearly succeeded in toppling Saddam Hussein, thanks to a rough alliance between Kurds and Shi’a forces. When the tide turned, Saddam’s reprisals against both the Kurds and Shi’a were heavy. In the Kurdistan region, the median age was twenty, with more than 50 percent of its population under the age of twenty-five, and officers believed this demographic was the key to its future. Through interviews with the education minister, several university presidents, faculty, business leaders, and students, they found a Facebook-savvy generation frustrated with limited higher educational opportunities and even fewer career options.
They reported that educational institutions lacked adequate labs, computers, and other tools of educational technology. One frustrated student asked, “How can I learn biology from a book?” A greater problem was lack of opportunities for graduates, most of whom used to go into government service for lack of alternatives. But government jobs are no longer the sinecure they once were, and students felt caught in a world in which old ways had withered without being supplanted by newer and more exciting options. “Students have been told since they were small to work hard, go to university, and plan to get a nice, secure government job. They are unable to think of a world in which that might not happen,” explained the chairman of a local Chamber of Commerce. University leaders who profited from Fulbright grants or other academic exchanges said the answer lay in curriculum reform and expanded vocational training. “We are not training students to perform different types of work that have to be done here. We are training students to get degrees,” said one university president, “and they have no idea how they will use what they have learned.”
In higher educational systems with such limited opportunities, study abroad takes on added importance. While the cable enthuses about the intense interest among young people to study in the United States, it also notes competition from other countries. Even students with full scholarships from the Iraqi government were having a hard time deciphering the U.S. system and deciding where to study. “Conversely, for students looking to study in the UK, a very large and active British Council office in Erbil provides first-rate advising services.” 20 Thanks, perhaps, to cables such as this one, Iraqi students soon benefited from State Department–sponsored EducationUSA advising centers in Baghdad and Erbil, with trained advisors walking students through the many steps of the American college application and selection process.
Another 1991 Generation—this one in Dhi Qar, a province in the Shi’a heartland of southeastern Iraq between Wasit and Basrah—fared far worse, educationally. PRT officers found that young people were less likely to be literate than their parents. Post believed the illiteracy rate was a legacy of Saddam’s reprisals targeted at southern Shi’a provinces that had also taken part in the 1991 uprising. They found that dropping out of school was a growing trend. About 20 percent of primary school students stayed away as poverty forced children to work, security risks and tribal disputes dampened attendance, and administrators lacked the legal authority to compel schooling. The cables described schools that were often overcrowded, with shabby facilities, incompetent teachers, and corporal punishment.
Coalition forces had built many new schools in the province and refurbished others, but the PRT got a unique opportunity to address the problem when the Iraqi Army administered literacy tests and 50 percent of its soldiers in one division failed—a cause for dismissal. The division’s general asked for help, and two Iraqi-American PRT staff members volunteered their time and soon had a class of forty.
“The PRT literacy effort, designed to prevent twenty-something soldiers from joining the swelling ranks of Dhi Qar’s unemployed, was done on a shoestring, with photocopied articles for the more advanced and photocopies of three dog-eared adult literacy books for beginners.” As word of the class got out, the ranks swelled to sixty. Then one day, only two students showed up for their lesson. “Basim, one of the hardest working students, reported that his brigade was moving to Amara, and everyone else was packing up to go. But he packed early so he would not miss class. His teacher didn’t bat an eye. He taught Basim and the one other student for an hour and a half.”
Pride in being able to help suffuses the cable, but so does incomprehension at why the province leadership was not more committed and engaged in the literacy problem. “The PRT program to reach young men at risk of being kicked out of the army is aimed at a critical group that could potentially feed insurgent or militia troops . . . Iraqis blame educational institutions and facilities for poor education, but many poorer countries with worse facilities do better at educating pupils.” 21
The thirst for improved education at all levels was nationwide, and the need in Iraq was so great that embassy officers could have easily filled their calendars with nothing but visits to schools and universities. While they were surprised at the high levels of illiteracy, they also had opportunities to interact with well-educated university students. Political officers visiting Baghdad University’s political science department found their encounter with students and professors challenging. They heard some frank views and what they described as “hard versus soft” power issues: in the Iraqi context, it meant students advocated for a reduced U.S. military presence and more cultural and educational initiatives.
The cable set the scene: Baghdad University is Iraq’s leading institution of higher learning and one of the largest universities in the Arab world. The deputy president recalled the dark days of sectarian violence that were recent (2006–2007) and real—seventy of its three hundred and thirty faculty were murdered. “Classes continued to be held in order to keep the university alive; the studying never stopped.”
Students questioned U.S. involvement in Iraq, touching on sectarianism, the long-term role of the United States, and its commitment to repair environmental damage caused by the invasion. One of the professors referred to former Coalition Provisional Authority administrator Paul Bremer’s book My Year in Iraq, in which the former American official conceded he knew little about Iraq. The professor argued, “Americans would only really understand Iraq by talking to its poor and ordinary people,” a comment that was met with loud applause by the assembled students.
The officers commented, “Our two hour engagement with the animated gathering of political science students showed that while most had seen a lot of American hard power since our 2003 invasion, not enough had experienced (or received answers to tough questions) our soft power and overall policy objectives.” 22
Not all outreach was academic in nature. PRT Najaf members attended an Expo Najaf business promotion event organized by the Small Business Development Center, a partnership between USAID and the Najaf Chamber of Commerce. The idea behind the event was to diversify Iraq’s economy away from oil, encourage expatriate Iraqi businesspeople to return home, and build a foundation for a thriving and diversified private sector. Iraqi business had struggled under years of international economic sanctions targeting the Saddam regime along with a dangerous security environment and lack of connections to overseas markets.
In the way of things in Iraq, the event was organized with the explicit support of the national spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Bashir Al-Najafi. An internal tug-of-war over the guest list led to an invitation for the PRT leaders, followed by one faction’s move to disinvite them. That decision was overruled by the head of the Chamber of Commerce, who had recently returned from a Najaf-Minneapolis sister-city program and insisted on U.S. participation. Sister Cities International was started in 1956 by President Dwight Eisenhower to encourage people-to-people diplomacy. It works by pairing an American city with an overseas counterpart. The partnership is meant to promote mutual understanding and foster economic development, culture, education, and humanitarian assistance. Najaf is one of eleven sister cities paired with Minneapolis, part of a global program with 2,100 partnerships in 145 countries. The power of citizen diplomacy is easy to see in the case of the Najaf Expo. The trip to Minneapolis gave the head of the Chamber of Commerce the insight to see that U.S. support for the Najaf business community could be enormously helpful. In the end, the keynote speakers publicly praised the PRT and USAID’s support for the business community.23
To understand why a business promotion event might need the blessing of a grand ayatollah, a cable from Najaf provided extraordinary background on all four grand ayatollahs, referred to collectively as the maraji. For Americans used to separation between church and state, the description of how these religious leaders flowed seamlessly between religious and public life was a revelation. One was deeply concerned with economic development and was the biggest supporter of an international airport in Najaf. Another was outspoken on electricity shortages and anticorruption efforts. Still another asserted that while clerics should not be politicians themselves, they should communicate important messages to politicians. Given the description of the constant stream of visitors to the ayatollahs and the media’s willingness to grasp at any hint or rumor of their pronouncements on laws or proposed reforms, this seems an easy task. Such a nuanced account suggests that here, too, FSOs were making steady and valuable inroads in their understanding of the complexities of Iraqi society.24
Not every effort was instantly successful. A report covering summer 2010 (just after the end date of the leaked cables) disclosed the embassy’s embarrassingly inadequate outreach efforts through social media, especially Facebook and YouTube. After an initial burst of interest with “friends” and “likes,” the number of active users plummeted from a peak of four thousand in February 2010 to just over one thousand six months later. The author cited problems with English versus Arabic, embassy efforts to control what was posted, and, worst of all—Facebook management by committee. With careful neutrality, the author noted that the Public Affairs Section required the committee’s clearance for every item, twenty-four hours before posting. 25
Eventually the embassy learned from its errors and banished the Orwellian Facebook committee, broadened the content to include non–U.S. government material, increased the frequency of postings, and, perhaps most important of all, expanded Arabic language content. Instead of nameless administrator posts, the Facebook page used first names and pictures of the administrators—a challenge in a high-turnover post with high security threats. The embassy also began making better use of its YouTube site, posting films of cultural events. Hits went up when the embassy revamped its postings into Arabic and called them “Window into the Embassy.” In both cases, the embassy regrouped quickly and took (for government) breathtaking risks to get the approach right.
Of course, not all public diplomacy efforts engage the soft side. Officers also worked to combat violent extremism. In a 2008 cable enumerating a depressing number of violent and deadly attacks on different ethnic groups, the embassy argued, “The pattern of violence demonstrates that Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) has absorbed the blow of the surge, adapted its tactics and introduced a new phase to its continuing campaign to undermine public order. We have initiated an information campaign to highlight this threat, including television spots, op-eds, interviews and talk shows. The message is simple: Al Qaeda remains a ruthless, relentless enemy that can change its tactics but will stop at nothing to destroy those who oppose it . . . Virtually the only significant ethnic-sectarian violence in Iraq today is that perpetrated by Al Qaeda itself.”
The cable posed three questions:
How do you break these extremists and their apparatuses throughout the region? How do we talk about Al Qaeda’s setbacks, how they have responded and what this says about their continuing capabilities and intentions? What are we and others doing (and need to do) to stay one step ahead of the enemy? The answers to these questions—and how we and our partners talk about them—lie at the intersection between the operational and public diplomacy communities. To do this right will require some creative thinking and coordination between operators and communicators.26
A second cable discussed how the United States might help to extricate Iraq from its vicious cycle of extremist violence.
Public Diplomacy can do its part through programs that promote strong, enduring linkages between Iraqi and U.S. institutions . . . There is no shortage of credible, persuasive Iraqis, who speak out publicly against extremist violence.
At the largest embassy in the world, many different offices and agencies support programs to identify, support, train, equip, and empower voices for moderation and tolerance . . . There is always more that can be done. Our national leadership has called this struggle “the long war” which means that we have to take a long-term approach to the problem. For most of its modern history as a state, and certainly since 1958, Iraq has defined itself in opposition to, if not open hostility with, its neighbors and the West. We have now an opportunity to change history and reorient Iraq.27
THE COSTS
The cables make clear that the work in Iraq was absorbing and all-consuming, but it was also dangerous and occasionally cost lives. One of the more poignant personal stories is that of Paula Wikle, an office management specialist who had been serving in Guatemala. Long before the town hall meeting, she answered the State Department’s call in 2003 for volunteers to go to Iraq. In her first few days on the ground she thrived in the intensive environment, efficiently handling more tasks in a day than most people would complete in a week. Early in the morning of October 26, 2003, a rocket tore through the Rashid Hotel where she had been staying. She nearly lost her arm and would endure dozens of reconstructive surgeries. After recovering enough from her injury to work again, she went on to become a public diplomacy officer and continues to serve both at overseas postings and in Washington, DC.
Others were not so lucky. For example, the name of Terrence Barnich, deputy director of the transition assistance team and co-chair of the New Electricity Projects Working Group, surfaces in many cables that detail the crucial effort to bring power to all parts of Iraq. Sadly, Barnich was killed in a bomb attack on May 25, 2009.
Iraq is a challenging operational environment in many ways, and not every Iraqi is a charming and earnest future Fulbrighter, anxious to learn all about the United States. Every idealistic embassy officer proud to meet the challenges of rebuilding Iraq soon confronted a staggering level of corruption among venal officials. These unsavory characters were quick to take advantage of the U.S. presence. Their behavior, along with a pervasive culture of corruption that long predated the Iraq War, could dampen the morale of even the most gung-ho officers.
A cable from PRT Muthanna, in the southernmost part of Iraq, reveals officers getting wise to the ways of Southern Iraqi tribal sheikhs, men who wield power and influence in a social structure in which loyalty is based on families and clans, rather than given to elected officials. One who had returned from a visit to Iran scolded the Americans for failing to purchase his loyalty. After he and other tribal sheikhs visited the White House and met President Bush in 2008, he expected to benefit financially but was disappointed that Americans had “done nothing” for him.
By contrast, he described how Iran had catered to his needs. Ostensibly there for a medical checkup, he told the PRT’s local political advisor that it was really a pleasure trip with short-term “marriages” with state-sanctioned prostitutes among the entertainment. He said other tribal leaders had enjoyed similar privileges while guests of the Iranian regime.
The post commented acidly, “Southern Iraqi sheikhs are well known for shifting their loyalties based on financial considerations. PM Maliki’s Isnad/Tribal Support Councils are particularly noteworthy in this regard. Susceptible sheikhs will trade their influence for financial support especially if the sheikh is not independently wealthy. In turn the sheikh can mobilize supporters when needed. The influence, however, is rented and not bought. If the financial contributions suddenly stop, much of the support may also cease. The PRT considers this true for Iranian influence in the region as well. If Iran continues to pay for support among influential sheikhs, the Islamic Republic will likely increase its influence. If and when the money dries up, so will the cooperation among these rented sheiks.” 28
Between 2006 and 2010 more than a thousand cables described the various aspects or impacts of corruption. Some focused on election politics and coalition building; others dealt with the judiciary and rule of law; still others described how corruption tainted various administrative tasks inherent in running a modern state. A cable on efforts to secure Iraq’s borders predicted that the U.S. military drawdown, completed at the end of 2011, would decrease U.S. visibility on progress, noting that the borders “are clearly porous, and the administration of borders is clumsy (multiple agencies are unable to coordinate) and riddled with corruption.” 29
These cables are especially telling given the collapse of Iraq in 2014, the rise of the Islamic State, and former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki’s troubled era. While U.S. political leaders focused on a military exit strategy, few imagined that such a massive investment could be undone so quickly and the earnest work of thousands of Americans and coalition partners would leave so little lasting impact. Within the United States, there was confusion over the role of the military (short-term) and the role of nation-building through State, USAID, and countless other agencies (long-term). Cable after cable describes the Iraqi people’s disgust with their own officials and their distrust of the system. While U.S. policymakers in Washington were certainly aware of the corruption, they were perhaps too willing to accept it as inevitable without understanding that it was in fact a fatal flaw that would undermine every effort to move Iraq to a functional democratic and multiethnic state.
SOFT, SMART, OR TRANSFORMATIONAL? WHICH KIND OF DIPLOMACY?
The on-the-ground realities for American diplomats serving in Iraq played out against a swirling intellectual debate in the foreign policy community on whether post 9/11 America should embrace soft power, smart power, transformational diplomacy, or some combination of the above. Joseph Nye’s 2004 refinement of his earlier soft power concept argued that the United States could accomplish more through attraction or persuasion than coercion.30 The term soft power had morphed by the time the Obama administration came into office to the new phrase smart power, also used by Nye to mean combining the tools of both hard and soft power.” 31 Hillary Clinton used the term smart power throughout her tenure as secretary of state, beginning at her confirmation hearing on January 13, 2009.
“We must use what has been called ‘smart power,’ the full range of tools at our disposal—diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal, and cultural—picking the right tool, or combination of tools, for each situation. With smart power, diplomacy will be the vanguard of foreign policy.” 32
In between soft and smart power came Condoleezza Rice’s contribution to the discussion in 2006, when she coined the term transformational diplomacy. All three ideas aimed to redefine America’s position in the world in light of challenges such as globalization and violent extremism. Each notion in turn assumed that a new world order would require diplomats to take on unconventional roles and think in different ways about the intersections of diplomacy, development assistance, and military power. This would be a lengthy conversation—Rice thought it would be “the work of a generation.”
As secretary of state, Rice gave two speeches on transformational diplomacy, both at Georgetown University, two years apart. Her first speech in 2006 focused on new threats to the United States that were emerging within states rather than between them. “It is impossible to draw neat clear lines between our security interests, our development interests and our democratic ideas. American diplomacy must integrate and advance all of these goals together.”
But the headline grabber was the case she made for a global repositioning.
To advance transformational diplomacy, we must change our diplomatic posture. In the 21st century, emerging nations like India and China and Brazil and Egypt and Indonesia and South Africa are increasingly shaping the course of history . . . Our current global posture does not really reflect that fact. For instance, we have nearly the same number of State Department personnel in Germany, a country of 82 million people that we have in India, a country of one billion people. It is clear today that America must begin to reposition our diplomatic forces around the world, so over the next few years the United States will begin to shift several hundred of our diplomatic positions to new critical posts for the 21st century.33
Yet the most controversial aspect of her speech, at least in retrospect, was her willingness to join diplomacy to the work of the military. Rice outlined her vision of future diplomats working alongside military officers, citing a need to work at the “intersections of diplomacy, democracy promotion, economic reconstruction and military security.” She foresaw what she called a “jointness” between soldiers and civilians.
Rice’s second speech about transformational diplomacy, in 2008, offered a darker worldview in which the United States was buffeted by the chaos of failed states.
Globalization is revealing the weaknesses of many states, their inability to govern effectively and to create opportunities for their people. Many of these states are falling behind. Others are simply failing. And when they do they create holes in the fabric of the international system where terrorists can arm and train to kill the innocent, where criminal networks can traffic in drugs and people and weapons of mass destruction, and where civil conflict can fester and spread and spill over to affect entire regions.34
Here too is a foreshadowing of the precarious state of Iraq and its vulnerability to the ensuing chaos that was brought by ISIS and other rival factions.
Rice made a reference to the town hall meeting in Foggy Bottom and spoke approvingly of how the Foreign Service had responded. “To staff our positions in Iraq, we have had to transform our personnel system and that is working. We now have some of the most senior and outstanding members of our Foreign Service leading out efforts in Baghdad, including four ambassador-rank officers. And most importantly, our diplomats in Iraq have answered the call to serve voluntarily and I thank them for that.” Her use of the word voluntary hinted that the threat of directed assignments probably was a heavy-handed and unnecessary approach.
All good officers read the boss’s speeches, and not surprisingly, many embassy cables began connecting the phrase “transformational diplomacy,” to their reporting efforts. Lacking any context beyond the hot spots mentioned by Rice, posts began using the term transformational diplomacy to cover a multitude of concerns, ranging from outreach to the Lebanese diaspora in Brazil, to a post visit of the USS Cowpens Navy cruiser in Vladivostok, to a funding gap for a U.S. pavilion at the Shanghai Expo. At its worst, “transformational diplomacy” became a catchall term to justify costs or staff for new programs.
A test of any policy is whether it outlives the incumbent who first articulated it. By this standard, Rice’s initiative indeed made an impact, although whether she would agree with all that is being done in the name of transformational diplomacy remains an open question. In retrospect, all the speeches, articles, and debates in Washington and the foreign policy think tanks about whether U.S. foreign policy should be soft, smart, or transformational seem almost irrelevant when set against the incredible challenges diplomats faced in many of the countries mentioned.
Rice’s second speech made a revealing point about the tentativeness and uncertainty in charting a new course. “There are no precedents or playbooks for this work. We are trying to do things, quite literally, that have never been done before.” She referred to earlier periods of international upheaval, quoting Dean Acheson, who wrote, “The significance of events was shrouded in ambiguity. We groped after interpretations of them, sometimes reversed lines of action based on earlier views, and hesitated long before grasping what now seems obvious.” 35
Given the intellectual honesty of that admission, Rice seemed curiously eager to buy into a new scenario in which diplomats would work alongside the military, as she tried in the Georgetown speeches to provide the intellectual underpinnings for why that might be a good idea. What’s missing from her speeches is any sense that she had taken the pulse of the field. Diplomats had been serving alongside the military in Iraq since 2003. There should have been ample institutional memory available to her of what worked and what didn’t. In general, the conversations among foreign policy luminaries failed to connect to the concerns of real-life diplomats, many of whom were still asking a legitimate question: How will America’s diplomats work in war zones?
Iraq was only one of the critical threat posts—officers wrote equally compelling cables about Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Iraq cables from 2006 to 2010—some 6,651 in total—are not the output of officers triumphantly crowing that they had it figured out. They would be the first to insist they did not. The multiplicity of ethnicities within these countries would take a lifetime to decipher, not to mention fluency in more than one of the many languages spoken in the region.
What makes the Iraq cables noteworthy, and newly relevant given the subsequent unraveling of Iraq in 2014, are the stories they tell of officers, often ill prepared, gamely trying and making the most of the skills they had and experiencing the small victories that come from connecting with people, however fleetingly. They wrote cables because they wanted to let it be known to Washington that they had shown up and done their best in tough circumstances, reason enough to write home.