Several hundred U.S. diplomats vented anger and frustration Wednesday about the State Department’s decision to force foreign service officers to take jobs in Iraq, with some likening it to a “potential death sentence.”
I couldn’t believe this when I read it. It really, really made me angry. The only real reaction to it (that I’m willing to publish on a family blog) is “Quit yer whining!” I thought of my friends who have been in Iraq, and who are there today. I thought of my own deployments doing a mission that I didn’t think was doing much good, but doing it twice, doing it as best as I could with the hope that it would work, and all without ever once demanding a meeting with the Secretary of Defense to complain about it.
The Foreign Service Office isn’t a sight seeing travel office paid for by the government because the taxpayers felt like Congress wasn’t wasting enough money. It’s a corps of officers who serve at the pleasure of our government in order to accomplish certain missions, and who are expected to, more than any other government employee, toe the Official Line in their utterances. They are the ones who are supposedly trained in the non-military parts of the solutions to the world’s stickier problems. They are supposed to be the experts and the saviors in places liberals insist (sometimes even correctly) “can be bombed into pieces but can’t be bombed into peace.”
But it seems that the FSOs (at least the ones whining at that meeting) think that they are entitled to wine-‘n’-dine junkets in Rome or London, or maybe even a dangerous place like Tokyo, where Americans are unthreatened, where our alliances are not in serious doubt, and where nothing they do matters one tiny little bit to the cause of peace or stability in the world, except that maybe their superiors get a strongly worded letter when they rack up too many parking tickets.
But give them a chance to bring their training to bear to help pitch in and stabilize Iraq, potentially saving millions of lives and ensuring freedom and liberty for millions more?
“It’s one thing if someone believes in what’s going on over there and volunteers, but it’s another thing to send someone over there on a forced assignment,” [Jack] Croddy [a senior foreign service officer who once worked as a political adviser with NATO forces] said. “I’m sorry, but basically that’s a potential death sentence and you know it. Who will raise our children if we are dead or seriously wounded?”
Boo. Frickin’. Hoo. In other words, it’s good enough for those knuckle dragging morons who were stupid enough to sign up for the military, but beneath the dignity of these heroes. Very nice.
It’s not that worrying about your family when you have a dangerous job isn’t valid. It’s not even that you can’t complain to your buddies when you’re given an assignment from the boss you don’t like. But when you choose a career that’s dangerous in part because you want an exciting or meaningful job, and when you’ve sworn to serve and have promised to be deployable world-wide, don’t come crying to the public when you’re asked to make good.
That’s what the military does, and they don’t even get paid as much. (In fact, the military is on the front lines diplomatically right now as well as militarily, and they don’t even have all the fancy training. In the cause of world peace and justice, I’ll take a single Marine for every 100 diplomats every single time.) And soldiers don’t have the same ability to resign if they decide they aren’t so crazy about the mission.
We hear a lot about “needing more diplomacy” from politicians and pundits, but no one is willing to say what it actually is. In Iraq, it’s more than processing passports and sipping tea with government officials. It’s not just “talking” or “learning to understand each other.” (Our enemies understand us just fine.)
It’s being on the ground and working to bring fractious tribal leaders together (or at least convincing them to stay on the sidelines). It’s executing PR campaigns that counter the propoganda of our enemies. It’s following through on the new military success the surge is producing. It takes hard work, sacrifice, self-discipline, and courage – and it entails some not insubstantial risk.
If Mr. Croddy and his fellow whiners aren’t willing to accept that, then maybe they should get new jobs as salesmen or restaurant managers or state administrative bureaucrats. If (as I suspect) these cry-babies are in the minority of an otherwise professional corps, then not only will their exit improve their own lives, but the State Department (and Iraq) will be better of for their absence.
