PoliticalWarfare.org

Memo rips Foreign Service's 'gripping culture of excused inaction'

A senior State Department contractor who completed a year's tour of duty in Baghdad has written a scathing memo describing how the Foreign Service bureaucracy is undermining the war effort in Iraq.

Manuel Miranda, Director of the Office of Legislative Statecraft in the embassy’s Political Section, addressed the February 5 memo to Ambassador Ryan Crocker as a “departure assessment.”

The memo is the most withering internal critique of the State Department bureaucracy that I have ever seen - and it is consistent with what I have been hearing for years. I quote at length from the memo below, and attach a copy of the original here: Download mirandamemo1.pdf

From his State Department in Baghdad, Miranda was a senior adviser to the Iraqi Prime Minister's office. A graduate of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, Miranda has extensive international legal and business experience and also served as a staffer on the Senate Judiciary Committee and as counsel to the US Senate Majority Leader. He also has written for the Wall Street Journal. 

Miranda won't be a media favorite because he supports the war effort in general, and backs what General David Petraeus and the other warfighters are trying to do in particular. His criticism to Ambassador Crocker was directed squarely at the “Foreign Service and the State Department’s bureaucracy” as being “at the helm of America’s number one policy consideration.”

“We have brought to Iraq the worst of America – our bureaucrats – and failed to apply, as President Roosevelt once did, the high-caliber leadership class and intellectual talent, whose rallying has defined all of America’s finest hours," he said.

“After a year at the Embassy, it is my general assessment that the State Department and the Foreign Service [are] 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. . . .

“The purpose of the Surge, now one year old, was to pacify Iraq to allow the GOI [Government of Iraq] to stand up. The State Department has not done its part coincident with the Commanding General’s effort. This is not the fault of the intelligent and hard working individuals skilled at the functions of the ‘normal embassy.’ 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.’

“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.”

Miranda assailed what he called "the Foreign Service’s gripping culture of excused inaction.” Among his points:

·         “. . . neither the State Department nor its Foreign Service is competent to manage or lead personnel who have been hired and brought to Iraq as experts, or to synchronize expertise, funds, and programs to support the GOI.”

·         “The American people would be scandalized to know that, throughout the Winter, Spring and Summer of 2007, even while our Congress debated the Iraq question and whether to commit more troops and more funds, 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.”

·         “. . . 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.”

·         “. . . if the management of the Embassy and the State Department’s Iraq operation were judged by rules that govern business judgment and asset waste in the private sector, the delays, indecision, and reorganizations over the past year, would be considered willfully negligent if not criminal. In light of the nation’s sacrifice, what we have seen this past year in the Embassy is incomprehensible.”

·         “The Embassy is also severely encumbered by the Foreign Service’s built-in attention deficit disorder, with personnel and new leaders rotating out within a year or less. . . .

·         “. . . there is a near complete lack of strategic forethought or synchronization between Embassy staffing and program initiatives and funding . . . Only the military takes seriously the Joint Campaign and its metrics of achievement, while State Department leaders use it only when advantageous.”

·         “The waste of taxpayer funds resulting from such mismanagement is something that only a deeply entrenched bureaucracy with a unionized attitude, like the Foreign Service and Main State [Department], could find acceptable.”

·         “This past year, the State Department and the Embassy has been led by two misguided premises: first, the obsessive aim that the Embassy be turned into a ‘normal embassy’ and, second, that the State Department cannot be faulted for things that the GOI is not doing, i.e. ‘the Iraqis need to do this themselves.’”

·         “The impulse to transform the 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.”

·         “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.”

·         “Simply put, Foreign Service officers are not equipped to manage process-oriented assistance programs and yet we have put into their hands hundreds of millions of dollars. Any American graduate school study group could do better.”

·         “In this excuse-making culture, the State Department has been an albatross around the neck of the Coalition command, whose leaders and personnel have a leadership profile radically opposite to the State Department’s. Among other things, the State Department has failed to assist Coalition initiatives by delaying or failing to supply the civilian expertise needed in a thoughtful and timely manner and also delaying decisions on funding and staffing vital to GOI (and our) success.”

·         “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’).”

·         “I have also witnessed a relentless culture of information-hoarding 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.”

·         “Needless to say, I have also witnessed the failure to coordinate and communicate with allies and international organizations.”

·         “. . . 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.”

·         “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.”

·         “Only American bureaucrats, without practical legal or business experience, who spend their careers abroad, could fail to understand the role of legislative practice in our own country, or the need for a concerted, professional support effort in our Embassy in Baghdad.”

·         “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.”

·         “In addition . . . there are no lack of 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.”

·         “The State Department would do the nation a service if it admits that it is not equipped to do 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.”

Anti-American operatives at VOA's Iranian service

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A music video mocking democracy and heaping scorn on the United States is the product of staffers for the Voice of America's Farsi language service to Iran. The VOA employees used several terrorist propaganda video clips showing IED attacks on American humvees and armored vehicles in Iraq.

The title of the video is "DemoKracy." (Click here to view the video if the YouTube image is not visible above.)

Produced by an obscure Swedish-Iranian band called Abjeez, the music video is themed in and around a TV newsroom, with the anchor and a reporter, played respectively by Safoura and Melody Safavi, mocking the United States and democracy.

The "reporter," shown at right holding the microphone in the first part of the video, is the VOA employee, Melody Safavi, whose married name is Arbabi. This blogger has learned that VOA fired her after an Iranian former political prisoner filed a complaint to Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes, but her husband Saman Arbabi, who directed the video, reportedly is still on VOA staff.

The video includes pictures of civilian casualties, grieving women and wounded children, Iraqi and American coffins and funerals, and a weather map of the Middle East showing bombs dropping on every country in the greater Middle East, from Sudan and Egypt to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Three nuclear bomb-style mushroom clouds are superimposed over the part of the map depicting Iran. The video closes with an archival aerial photo of a nuclear weapon test in the desert.

Abjeez has produced the video in several languages, though viewer statistics on YouTube show few people worldwide have accessed the video. Nevertheless, the production raises questions about the editorial judgment of VOA personnel, and whether US taxpayers should have such individuals on the payroll to wage the war of ideas against Islamist extremism.

The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which governs VOA, has long denied problems with its controversial Iran services. Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has been raising concerns for a year about the broadcasts to the Islamic republic, but the BBG and State Department were dismissive. Last spring, this blogger also submitted a set of written questions to outgoing Under Secretary of State Hughes at the request of a senior aide, and received a written response that ignored or evaded the answers. It's time for BBG and State to catch up with the new leadership at RFE/RL and tackle the larger problems of US broadcasting into Iran. 

War of ideas? What, me worry?

Top Bush Administration national security officials practically admit that they are doing nothing to wage the war of ideas against Islamist extremists.

In a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing, Chairman Joseph I. Lieberman (I-CT) asked the nation's top security and intelligence chiefs about what they are doing to counter enemy propaganda at home and abroad.

The answer, as Bill Gertz reports in the Washington Times: "Not much."

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller told the Senate that the FBI is doing nothing to combat enemy propaganda (even though the Bureau routinely did such things since before World War II). All it's doing, he said, is "outreach" to Muslims here at home so they "understand the FBI" and address the "radicalization issue," he said, according to Gertz.

National Counterterrorism Center chief Scott Redd acknowledged in the hearing that the "war of ideas" is one of the "four pillars" in American war strategy, but said there is no "home office" for that pillar in this country.

Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Mike McConnell "said the intelligence community does not conduct any battle of ideas against terrorists in the United States unless there is a foreign connection," Gertz writes. Fair enough. But is it acting on a comprehensive strategic level, or are the efforts still piecemeal?

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, reports Gertz, "also said nothing is being done domestically to battle Islamist extremist ideas. The department's incident management team, he said, is focused on civil rights or civil liberties — not fighting terrorists' ideology." Not even when the ideology threatens citizens civil rights and civil liberties.

Military public affairs sites are bigger security risk than bloggers

When the Army issued a censorship policy against bloggers last May, it cited "operational security" reasons. Fair enough - as long as the reasons were legit. But we knew at the time they weren't, and now an Army investigative report confirms it.

Wired magazine is reporting that internal Army investigations appear to show that "official Defense Department websites post material far more potentially harmful than anything found on a individual's blog."

The Army Web Risk Assessment Cell (AWRAC) monitored 878 official military websites and 594 individual blogs between January 2006 and January 2007. According to an AWRAC report obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the cell found 1,813 operational security violations on the official military websites, and only 28 breaches on the individual blogs.

Official military websites are generally run by public affairs officers (PAOs).

Statistics are unclear because of an apparently contradictory way in which AWRAC presents its methodology. But even the Army agrees that the milbloggers are more security conscious than the public affairs people.

Army spokesman Gordon Van Vleet (of the public affairs shop) says in the Wired story that one "factor that contributes to fewer violations being found on blogs is that in general the blogger is conscientious about their duty not to provide information that could be considered an OPSEC violation."

"Often these bloggers are stationed in the combat areas and they more than anyone understand the importance of security and the potential impact any OPSEC violations could have on themselves and their fellow soldiers, airmen and Marines," Van Vleet said.

He didn't explain why the military's highly trained PAOs don't share that same OPSEC concern.

How politicians will help the terrorists to win

Let's not even bother speculating about the reasons why, but the House of Representatives just handed the terrorists a big win.

During a House-Senate conference meeting last week, some lawmakers tried to get a provision in a Homeland Security bill that would protect citizens who report suspicious terrorist-related activity from being sued.

That's a big win for Islamist extremists. The majority party bowed to pressure from supporters of the "flying imams" - the six Muslim clerics who last November made the big show of making bizarre requests for seat-belt extenders with big heavy buckles, sitting in the exit rows and center of a plane in a 9/11 hijacker pattern, violating airline safety rules by milling around the cabin and leaving their assigned seats just after takeoff, then chanting anti-American slogans and yelling "Allah, Allah."

The "flying imams" are shown in the photo at Reagan National Airport, holding hands.

House Democrats blocked the good-citizen protection language because, they say, they're afraid keeping vigilant citizens safe from lawsuits would lead to racial profiling.

"I don't see how you can have a homeland security bill without protecting people who come forward to report suspicious activity," says Rep. Peter King (R-NY) of the House Homeland Security Committee said about his colleagues' action.

A federal air marshal adds, "The crew and passengers act as our additional eyes and ears on every flight. If they are afraid of reporting suspicious individuals out of fear of being labeled a racist or bigot, the terrorists will certainly use these fears to their advantage in future aviation attacks."

The Council for an American Islamic Republic (CAIR) led a protest to demand an investigation of US Air, which removed the suspiciously-acting men, as well as a probe of airport security.

No word yet about the names of the individual congressmen and staffers responsible, but we'll print them as soon as we find who they were.

UK Guardian: Iran has plan to manipulate US Congress

The Iranian government has deployed a political warfare strategy to force a humiliating defeat on the United States in Iraq by manipulating the US Congress.

And while some of us have suspected that for a long time, the real surprise is the source: Britain's left-leaning Guardian newspaper.

"Iran is secretly forging ties with al-Qaida elements and Sunni Arab militias in Iraq in preparation for a summer showdown with coalition forces intended to tip a wavering US Congress into voting for full military withdrawal," Guardian deputy editor Simon Tisdall reported May 22. 

"'Iran is fighting a proxy war in Iraq and it's a very dangerous course for them to be following. They are already committing daily acts of war against US and British forces," a senior US official in Baghdad warned. 'They [Iran] are behind a lot of high-profile attacks meant to undermine US will and British will, such as the rocket attacks on Basra palace and the Green Zone [in Baghdad]. The attacks are directed by the Revolutionary Guard who are connected right to the top [of the Iranian government].'"

US commanders in Iraq are reading for a widespread summer offensive orchestrated by Iran, and consisting of an alliance among al Qaeda and Sunni insurgents, and Shi'ite militias. Iran's goal, according to the Guardian, is for the uprising to "trigger a political mutiny in Washington and a US retreat."

"We expect that al-Qaida and Iran will both attempt to increase the propaganda and increase the violence prior to Petraeus's report in September [when the US commander General David Petraeus will report to Congress on President George Bush's controversial, six-month security "surge" of 30,000 troop reinforcements]," a US official tells the paper.

Simultaneously in Afghanistan, Iran is backing Taliban military attacks on American, British and other NATO forces, according to the report.

"Tehran's strategy to discredit the US surge and foment a decisive congressional revolt against Mr Bush is national in scope and not confined to the Shia south, its traditional sphere of influence, the senior official in Baghdad said. It included stepped-up coordination with Shia militias such as Moqtada al-Sadr's Jaish al-Mahdi as well as Syrian-backed Sunni Arab groups and al-Qaida in Mesopotamia, he added. Iran was also expanding contacts across the board with paramilitary forces and political groups, including Kurdish parties such as the PUK, a US ally."

Bloggers and other commentators seeking an American withdrawal or defeat in Iraq have been attacking the Guardian as a "US mouthpiece" and alleging that the deputy editor is a spy.

11 former VOA chiefs oppose planned budget cuts

Eleven former chiefs of the Voice of America, reflecting the broadest political spectrum, have signed a joint statement opposing the Bush Administration's plans to slash or abolish VOA broadcasting in key languages, including Russian and English. PublicDiplomacy.org carries the text of the March 5 letter:

"We former directors of the Voice of America urgently appeal for a reversal by Congress of planned reductions in VOA that could silence the nation's largest publicly-funded overseas broadcast network in much of the world. Taken together, the cuts would seriously jeopardize our national security and public diplomacy. Further, they would deprive millions of people of access to a fully free and open media, a core value of what our nation is all about.

"The Bush administration has proposed to eliminate VOA English in every continent except Africa, abolish services in Cantonese, Croatian, Georgian, Greek, Thai and Uzbek, cease radio broadcasts in Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Albanian, Bosnian, Macedonian, and Hindi (to India), and significantly scale back programming in Tibetan and Portuguese to Africa.

"In view of:

• decisions by China, Russia, Iran, France and Al Jazeera TV to broadcast around the clock or increase airtime in our own language, English, spoken or understood by at least 1.6 billion people worldwide
• a 23 percent increase in Russia's military budget as Vladimir Putin muzzles his own as well as foreign news and information outlets
• new media restrictions and arrests or jailing of journalists in China, Tibet and Uzbekistan along with just declared martial law and an upsurge of extremist Muslim activity in Thailand
• the volatile situation in the Balkans as Kosovo moves toward independence, and
• VOA's proven cost effectiveness (more than 115 million listeners and viewers a week)

"We urgently appeal for an increase of the proposed $178 million VOA budget to $204 million for fiscal year 2008 beginning October 1. This would be mandated to cover programming and transmission of services listed above, 3.9 percent of the entire U.S overseas broadcasting budget. This is a tiny but essential investment. Surveys show anti-American opinion abroad to be at an all-time high. At this critical moment in the post 9/11 era, the United States simply cannot, for its own long term strategic safety and security, unilaterally disarm in the global contest of ideas."

Mary G. F. Bitterman
Robert E. Button
Richard W. Carlson
Geoffrey Cowan
John Hughes
David Jackson
Henry Loomis
E. Eugene Pell
Robert Reilly
R. Peter Straus
Sanford J. Ungar

March 5, 2007

Operational absurdity

The Army is making it rough on those of us who advocate a stronger military role in the war of ideas. As if it wasn't hard enough already to get the truth out about the war effort and generate public support for a truly noble effort, the Army is making it even harder.

"Operational security" is the supposed reason behind the latest brilliant stroke in the war on terror: A total ban on emails, blogging and other electronic communication from the troops in the field. Unless, of course, those messages are censored first.

There's a lot to be said for cracking down on the sending of messages, images and other electronic data that harm the war effort. And certainly there's a huge security concern about undisciplined disclosure of information. But World War II ended before many of our generals were even born, and it's time for the military to understand the age of the wired grunt and adapt accordingly.

And implement far more rigorous counterintelligence procedures and practices, which is a crux of the real problem.

With few exceptions, the military's IO and public affairs policies are primitive enough as they are, even though we have all the technology and human talent we need. Mindless, blanket censorship of all electronic communications isn't going to help things.

WSJ: 'Al Hurra more like Al Jazeera'

With the arrival of a CNN producer to run Al Hurra, the US-funded Arabic-language satellite TV channel has become "more like Al Jazeera," Joel Mowbray writes in the Wall Street Journal. Founded in 2004 to counter enemy propaganda and provide a good face for the US and its causes, Al Hurra has worked hard to build credibility as an objective and reliable news source.

Word is that, rather than investigate the serious allegations, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes attacked them. If true, that would be consistent with her office's response to warnings from friends of the administration.

After coming aboard late in 2006, Al Hurra chief Larry Register, long of CNN, "lifted the ban on terrorists" appearing on Al Hurra and quickly allowed the broadcast, nearly in full, of a speech by Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah, according to Mowbray.

"The cultural shift inside the newsroom is evident in the on-air product. In the past several months, Al-Hurra has aired live speeches from Mr. Nasrallah and Hamas leader Ismail Haniya, and it broadcast an interview with an alleged al Qaeda operative who expressed joy that 9/11 rubbed 'America's nose in the dust,'" Mowbray writes.

"While a handful of unfortunate decisions could be isolated, these actions appear to be part of Mr. Register's news vision," according to Mowbray, who adds that Register doesn't speak Arabic, so he has no idea of what is guests are saying. Many on the Al Hurra staff reportedly delighted to allow terrorists to spew their propaganda on US-funded TV into the Arabic-speaking world.

The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which runs Al Hurra and the rest of US government international boradcasting, is out of control. It has destroyed programming that would mount an ideological attack on Islamist extremism; it terminated broadcasting to much of the rest of the world, including VOA's Russia service; and recycles Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) propaganda back into Iran on Radio Farda.

Even Norman Pattiz, the former BBG member who dumbed down international broadcasting and replaced it with popular culture, is discontented with Al Hurra's new direction. He says in the Mowbray piece, "Simply handing a microphone over to a terrorist and letting them spew is not what I would call good journalism."

Update, March 21: We hear that the Mowbray report sent Under Secretary of State Karen Hughes, who is responsible for public diplomacy and international broadcasting, into a bit of a dither. Rather than investigate the problem, our sources say she went on a kill-the-messenger mission, convening aides to refute the report. Another reason why she has been unable to drag public diplomacy out of its hole.

US ranks with Israel, Iran & N Korea in global survey

While the State Department happily congratulates itself about its public diplomacy, the American image abroad is as bad as ever, according to a new poll.

In a BBC survey of 28,000 people in 27 countries, the United States ranked at the bottom with Israel, Iran and North Korea among 12 nations and the European Union. (Full polling data: here.)

56 percent view Israel as a "mainly negative" force in the world. Israel has the worst image of all the countries surveyed.
54 percent say that Iran is a "mainly negative" force.
51 percent say the same about the United States.
48 percent see North Korea as mainly negative.

Canada, Japan, the EU, France (independent of the EU) and the UK ranked on top, followed by Communist China. The US edged out Vladimir Putin's Russia and the Hugo Chavez regime in Venezuela by a few points as a positive influence in the world.

Not that broadcasting is the only answer, but it's worth repeating that the State Department has asked Congress for a 3.8 percent increase in international broadcasting funds for FY2008, despite an inflation rate of 3.2 percent that makes the increase not an increase at all. At the same time, State has gone along with shutting down international broadcasting in key languages like Russian.