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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Friday, October 26, 2007

Join The Foreign Service and See Iraq......Or Else! 

...while George W. Bush, "Big" Dick Cheney, and a decidedly small percentage of Americans may think that things are coming up all crumpets and tea in Iraq, the same can't be said for career State Department diplomats whose services are needed inside the Baghdad Green Zone:
Beginning Monday, 200 to 300 diplomats will be notified that they have been identified as "prime candidates" to fill 40 to 50 vacancies that will open next year at the embassy, said Harry Thomas, director general of the Foreign Service.

The telling line in the story, at least for a veteran of over thirty years of federal staffing issues like myself, is this part:
Those notified that they have been selected for a one-year posting will have 10 days to respond. Only those with compelling reasons, such as a medical condition, will be excused from duty...

...that, friends, is what folks in federal service call a directed reassignment. The notification will include a reporting date and outline the punishment that will be administered for failure to show up at the appointed place at the appointed day and time, with termination being the most prominently mentioned 'administrative action' response to failure. I have received such letters myself a time or two (usually during force reduction actions, known in Bureau-speak as "Right-Sizing") and have seen others who have lost their jobs through resignation or being fired because they didn't want to relocate to the directed location...

...for all the brave talk and fabricated celebration of the supposed success of The Surge, there isn't any better barometer to measure just exactly how we are doing in Iraq than the refusal of career diplomats to volunteer to be on the front lines of Gee Dub's efforts to construct a brave new shining City on The Hill radiating the promise of Democracy to the surrounding huddled masses of the Middle East. We are talking here about difficult work conditions in a brutal work setting on an unaccompanied assignment (spouses and dependents not allowed) with a statistically relevant possibility of coming home in another anonymous unheralded flag-draped aluminum coffin...

The Foreign Service isn't a terribly large bureaucracy; people know people owning to years of service and all the points of contact that accrue from that service. They talk to each other, and the outcome of that talk is that those who have been there have said enough to convince those who haven't that there isn't any particular benefit in having a tour of duty in Baghdad in the 'past work experience' section of your C.V. Thomas Friedman (herein we see an example of my Christian Charity) hasn't been right in some of his analysis of the Iraq invasion and occupation, but in this piece he is expressing the underlying problem (again with that Christian Charity thing!) that makes State Department employees who went into the Foreign Service to Make A Difference run as fast as their legs can carry them away from an assignment in this hopeless situation in which we find ourselves as a result of a poorly planned, incompetently managed and unnecessary invasion of a country whose only coherency was defined by arbitrary lines on a map and the power of dictatorship...

So this is what we are down to: Foreign Service diplomats, even if they understand that we are trapped in a fool's errand in Iraq, will be offerred the choice of 1) accepting reassignment to Baghdad for the pleasure of being subjected to the ugly devolving endgame of Gee Dub's perverse effort to sew a silk purse out of a pile of much-chewed-upon sows' ears, or 2) resign their appointments to federal service in refusal of that reassignment, or 3) be fired for failing to respond to this reassignment to a hopeless unwinnable Hell. The very existence of this situation is all you need to know about how well the Surge Is Working...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:18 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Wrestling With Self Actualization 

...it isn't necessarily surprising that the Sept. 16 shoot-em-up incident involving private security personnel working for the State Dept. in Baghdad would have resulted in a bit of navel-gazing by the Foggy Bottom folks about just exactly how, why, when, and where they were really making gains in that whole "hearts and minds" gig that they need to be playing in Iraq...

It also isn't all that surprising that the ensuing report recommended that a greater degree of oversight and adherence to a well-established set of Rules Of Engagement would be the be one of the outcomes of such a navel-gazing exercise. Far too many rumors have circulated for far too long a time about the "cowboy" antics of private security contractors and the impact that such reported behavior would have on the aforementioned "hearts and minds" campaign...

It is, however, just a tad bit surprising to find that the leaders of Blackwater are 100% big-time behind these recommendations. The obvious question is thus: why weren't the private security firms capable of developing a plan of their own that would prevent a poor reflection on their customer....
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:49 PM 0 comments

Sunday, October 21, 2007

Sox vs Rockies--The Conundrum... 

...I have to confess being conflicted about the upcoming Series. On the one hand, I am a sucker for the underdog, and the Colorado Rockies will undoubtedly be the underdog in the upcoming series. And then there's that East Coast Bias of my very own; I usually root for the western team over the eastern team in these sorts of contests...unless they involve the Raiders or the (not very western) Cowboys in NFL football, in which case it doesn't matter where the opponent came from...

This time, however, there is a kink in the fabric, because the Boston Red Sox had the good taste to bring a young man up to The Bigs in the latter part of the season. Jacoby Ellsbury is a promising new star in the Red Sox sky, but - more to the point - he is from the small town of Madras, Oregon, just a little more than an hour's drive north of my hidden little redoubt. A number of former sports stars have chosen to settle or have second homes here in Central Oregon, but there aren't very many actual native sons or daughters with big league credentials who have local connections. There is, however, an interesting past corporate connection between the recent history of local minor league baseball and the Colorado Rockies...

So how do ya pick who to root for in a case like this...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:24 PM 0 comments

First Impressions Of A Damning Indictment 

...out here on the Left Coast, where we are the last people to see all those shows that the rest of the country has already chewed over and retired to their bedchambers to digest, I just watched the “60 Minutes” Katie Couric interview with Valerie Plame (complete with emotion-filled cameo appearances by her husband Joe Wilson). Aside from the fact that they swatted down the lame effort that Katie probably thought of as her best shot - “but Karl Rove’s wife doesn’t work for the CIA” - the entire piece was perhaps the most open, perfect damning indictment and revelation of the thuggish brutal hardball politics in which Bushco has engaged to beat down opposition to and criticism of the misguided and unfounded war of choice that they dragged us off into in Iraq...

Almost in spite of Couric’s efforts (WHY is she on this show? Who thought she was worthy of sitting - figuratively, of course - in a chair that has supported the butts of Murrow, Cronkite, and Rather?), the interview with Plame helps to bring the whole dirty little episode into exceptionally clear focus. Valerie Plame worked for US. She was more important to any sense of “Homeland Security” than Cheney, Libby, Rove, or any of the other halfwits and congenital losers - we’re looking at you here, Ari - and yet a tight dirty little cabal of Bush Administration insiders burned her and rolled up an important spy network more effectively than anything that John LeCarre could dream up for no better reason than to punish her husband for rightfully criticizing the Bush administration for use of false intelligence that was otherwise proved to be forged....

If a reasonable percentage of the American public saw tonight’s Plame interview on 60 Minutes, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the next ‘how’s the (P)resident doing’ numbers in the low Twenty's or high Teen’s by most reputable pollsters. In an earlier age, such a report would have resulting in impeachment hearings, but Sam Ervin isn’t in Congress anymore and the Clinton impeachment as a retaliation for Nixon has so poisoned this particular well that we won’t be seeing any discussions about such a prospect in any case. It is a most remarkably damning indictment by a person who has, both by her own statement and the admission of others in the agency, every right to be angry about her situation. It is likely that only our children will only have the rigorous efforts of future historians to actually accurately document the damage that a dirty little political pushback against an administration critic did to our security. We may well never know how many people simply disappeared from the earth’s surface because of this little political temper tantrum over Joe Wilson’s editorial piece. In time, though, the truth will come out, and the scribes of history will undoubtedly have their full chance to pick over the rotting carcass of what will be eventually be clearly understood to be the failed Bush presidency....
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:21 PM 0 comments

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