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.”

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