Dear friend, perhaps our paths may cross again:
Perchance, we’ll meet together at the top,
Or down below, beneath the crowds, inside
The underground. Perhaps we’ll be united
By a cause, a hope, a dream, a fantasy . . .
Perhaps we’ll join together out of fear
Or love for something we perceive to be.
It matters not, my love, the force, the source
That consecrates the ground on which we’ll meet;
It matters not the place, my sweet, that destiny
Prescribes . . . . we’ll meet! The Muses tell us so!
Though circumstance as yet precludes the fate
The gods have planned, I wait, I wait, I wait . . .
Oral History - Ruminations on my 365 days in Iraq
From Diplopedia
(Editor's note: Raymond Maxwell, a foreign
service management officer, served as Embassy Baghdad chief of staff and Exec Sec,
Jan 08 - Jan 09)
My service in
Iraq, from January 2008 to January 2009, was a
complex sentence that had, for me, several significant punctuation marks. A
semicolon marked my transfer from the Office of Provincial Affairs to the Front
Office; a series of exclamation marks accompanied the March and April bombings
in the IZ and on the Palace grounds; tentative commas marked our move from the
“
hootches” to the
NEC apartments
starting in May and the intense heat of the June through August summer months;
repetitious question marks from September through November caused us all to
wonder whether the Iraqis would actually accept the terms of the Strategic
Agreement and the Strategic Framework Agreement; the period, full stop, of
December ended our occupation of the Republican Palace; and the exclamation mark
of our January move to the new chancery coincided, altogether, with some measure
of restoration of Iraqi sovereignty and the establishment a new US-Iraq
bilateral relationship. Through it all, the exceptional courage and the tireless
sacrifices of my fellow foreign service officers, foreign service nationals,
third country nationals, and contractors left me in a state of awe and with a
deep sense of humility of the privilege that was mine, to be there in service
with them.
Similarly, service in
Afghanistan and
Pakistan demands great courage and
sacrifice, as does service in less heralded but equally demanding hardship
postings, such as
Luanda,
Monrovia, and
Khartoum, to name a few (I
betray here my AF background and professional lineage). The point, however, is
that success in tough places requires personal courage and sacrifices, both of
FSO’s and of
their families. And the sacrifices are not equal – our families and loved ones
pay far more, far more. Much of the human cost of our political success in Iraq,
or in any of these places, such as it is, goes unpaid.
Shifting gears
quickly, a great American diplomat once confided to me that perhaps we pay too
much attention to direct compensation, such as hardship pay, danger pay, special
differentials, etc., and not enough attention to the appeal to a sense of duty
and the possible achievement of patriotic success so rarely experienced in a
long career. It may be that we have lost faith in such intangibles, such
outmoded values, and that we place more faith in the details of the Service
Recognition Package. That loss of faith in our core values, quite frankly,
identifies us less as diplomats and more as mercenaries, soldiers for hire, and
we sell ourselves short, and cheaply, at that.
And what is to become of our
Foreign Service? That’s a question that came up often in Baghdad conversations
where it was evident and obvious that traditionally diplomatic functions, once
the province and the domain of the Department of State, were and are slowly
being taken over by a far better resourced, better trained, and better equipped
Department of Defense. Many studies have been and are being conducted on the
militarization of diplomacy (just google the words and see what comes up) and
the more euphemistic term, “civilian-military cooperation.” Baghdad is a huge
laboratory for such studies, the former term being far more descriptive that the
latter. Military units named Strategic Effects and Strategic Communications have
leveraged the massive resource imbalance between Defense and State to spring
themselves into former State-dominated areas of political and economic reporting
and public diplomacy efforts. Regional and combatant commanders have become the
equivalent of ambassadors and chiefs of mission, outside the traditional
inter-agency setting, but with far more resources and more robust means of
budget execution. The Country Team is just another joint interagency task force,
among many. Fortunately for us, Defense shows no taste for administrative or
consular work, State’s traditional and historic stepchildren, so State’s
monopoly is safe there, for the time being.
Where did the Foreign Service
lose its soul, its purpose, its identity? We allowed the lines separating
foreign service professional service from military professional service to be
blurred. But there are important differences between us, more that the false
dichotomy espoused in the phrase “State is from Venus and Defense is from Mars.”
We are both from Earth, but there are differences in the way we think, the way
we approach problem solving, differences in our respective strategic cultures.
Diplomacy, true diplomacy can prevent war and all the attendant physical and
human losses and has done so. The tools of diplomacy, falsely, inappropriately
or unprofessionally applied, however, have a high probability of failure.
Diplomacy has come to be seen in recent times as simply the prerequisite and
prelude to war. The noted military historian, Geoffrey Blainey writes, “many
historians, in explaining the outbreak of war, argue that ‘the breakdown in
diplomacy led to war.’ This explanation is rather like the argument that the end
of winter led to spring: it is a description masquerading as an explanation.”
Where war, historian Barbara Tuchman writes, "is the unfolding of
miscalculations," diplomacy is the precise calculation itself, and the accurate
reporting of solutions to correct calculations that eliminates the need for war
and all its corresponding horrors. State’s core competency is diplomacy to
prevent war. Defense’s core competency is fighting to win the war itself.
Where do we go from here? We start by unequivocally defining ourselves and
our core competencies. It is not about funding. It has never been. It is about
our professional capacity to bring about the peaceful resolution of conflicts.
It is about peace making. War has brought us a limited economic development,
followed by financial disaster. Peace brings a much broader and more widespread
prosperity. History is the judge. Blessed are the peace makers...
For other FSO perspectives dealing with the PRT experience in Iraq,
please see Oral Histories, the Iraq Experience on the U.S. Institute for
Peace website [
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