The last post: The State Department sucks

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

1. 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.
2. 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.”
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. 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”.)
12. 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
13. 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.”
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. 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.
17. 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.