1115.org

Last time we wrote about Condi Rice’s management skills, public recognition thereof, she had just won the title of Miss Mis-Management 2007. (Due to an unfortunate lapse of concentration — or lack of foresight, perhaps — we may have neglected to mention that this was the U.S. title.) Well, the Miss Mis-Management (Universe) 2007 contest has now been held, and guess who comfortably walked away with the title? In a rare double, she also captured the Miss Mis-Congeniality crown, for which she seems to have been training since at least January 2001, if not her whole adult life.

What does this report say about the Secretary of State, and her grasp of her job:

The State Department expects to announce, perhaps as early as today, that volunteers have filled all 48 open jobs at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad for next year and that it will not order any foreign service officers to work there against their will, officials said yesterday.
[…]
Last summer, Rice ordered that upcoming vacancies in Iraq be filled before any other new assignments were approved. Although State’s annual bidding cycle for postings in the coming year normally begins in November, a shortfall of 48 new Iraq volunteers by mid-October led to fears that there would not be enough. Personnel officials notified 250 “qualified” individuals that they could be ordered to Baghdad next summer if the jobs were not filled by this week.

Some diplomats protested that Rice moved too quickly and left a public implication that they were trying to avoid Iraq service, when many were simply waiting to see whether they would receive their preferred next assignment. “That’s the way our system works,” one said. “You bid for Paris along with 30 other people, and when you don’t get it, you volunteer for Iraq.”

John Naland, president of the American Foreign Service Association, the diplomats’ union, said yesterday that “if State had gone through the normal assignment cycle, this is how it would have turned out.”

“After all the bad publicity indicating that the foreign service would not step forward, it in fact turned out — as most of us thought — that they did step forward as volunteers to staff Iraq,” Naland said.

Just in passing, isn’t it funny that State Dept. diplomats have a union? Do ambassadors join too?

If we credit the scurrilous lies contained in this WaPo story, we are forced to conclude that Rice cooked up a totally unnecessary flap. It can’t have been due to lack of intelligence, because we all know how brilliant the lady is. So maybe this demonstrates yet again her incomprehensibly total lack of common sense?

Having been Secretary of State for a while now, she should certainly be aware of the diplomatic assignment bidding process, and how it works. She should jolly well know that November is the peak season for diplomats to volunteer for Baghdad, and a mid-October shortfall in volunteers is exactly what to expect. Precisely this must have happened last year. And the year before. And if Condi herself has been too busy saving the world (and concealing all evidence of it through an entirely becoming modesty) to remember, any number of career diplomats in the State Department could and should have told her. So what is more striking—that she didn’t know, or that nobody told her?

Does she simply not have lines of communication open to even her senior staff? Or did even her senior staff refrain from telling her just so that they could clap their hands in glee right about now, as the facts emerged and made Madame Secretary, Ph.D., look once again like the epitome of incompetence? Or was she perfectly aware of the truth, and just pretended not to be, for deep and devious reasons that only a Ph.D. of her caliber could begin to even guess at?

And now, let’s let’s go back for a minute to the beginning:

Last summer, Rice ordered that upcoming vacancies in Iraq be filled before any other new assignments were approved.

Sounds very much like Rice had to eat her imperious words, and revoke that order in order to have the upcoming vacancies in Iraq filled, doesn’t it? First, other assignments were approved, and then some of the losers in that bidding game volunteered for Iraq, just as the people in the State Dept. who have the normal quantity of common sense knew all along they would.

If we review for a second what Condi has achieved as a result of this entirely unnecessary episode, here’s the scorecard:
• She has managed to offend her entire corps of diplomats, who feel they have been made to look scared, selfish and unpatriotic.
• She has managed to make herself look even sillier than she was looking before.
• She has managed to aggravate further the already raging tensions between the State Department and the U.S. military (as the latter’s perception of the former’s cowardice led to a war of words).

It is not known at this point — not even to my fly-on-the-wall army — whether Condi is wringing her hands in despair, or rubbing them in out-of-touch-with-reality satisfaction. (That’s the beauty of this administration. All kinds of things are possible. Including exactly opposite outcomes.)

This next revelation may not be all that surprising. Why should it be a surprise that the administration which sent troops into battle in Iraq without adequate body armor and under-armored Humvees, would also send diplomats into Baghdad battle-zone assignments without essential, self-protection training? Why should Condi Rice’s State Department be any different in its attitude to the volunteers who serve the U.S. in Iraq than Rumsfeld’s Defense Department?

At a contentious town hall meeting at State two weeks ago (several diplomats said that) the department has failed to provide adequate preparation and training for the assignment, noting that those sent to do similar jobs during the Vietnam War were given as much as six months of lessons in Vietnamese language and culture, were sent to combat training and were provided with a gun for personal protection.

Those sent to Iraq receive a short course — dubbed “crash and bang” — that includes four days of weapons familiarization and a week of defensive driving basics. The weapons training, one diplomat said, does not include firing practice, and diplomats in Iraq are prohibited from carrying weapons. The driving course, he said, is of little use since they are also barred from driving there and are transported in convoys by armed guards.

Mandating a week of defensive driving training when you’re forbidden to drive—that seems to out-SNAFU even the army. I wonder if this training was laid on at the specific instructions of Madame herself. (Same three scenarios as before, right? Can’t nobody tell her nothing? Or they won’t, out of spite? Or deep and devious unguessables?)

I don’t want to end this post on a note of I-don’t-know, so let me shift to something I do know.

Crash and Bang also includes a course called “Dealing with Blackwater”, but it’s classified, of course. (And if anyone talks about it, Blackwater sends someone to deal with you.) But my fly-on-the-wall (strictly volunteer) army has certainly penetrated this veil of secrecy. This is the course in which they teach you — by means of deep hypnosis and other permanent-learning therapies (but not waterboarding, apparently) — to always support what Blackwater says, to always believe what Blackwater says, to never criticize what Blackwater does, and to never properly investigate any allegations against Blackwater. And to not even bother to pretend to subject security contractors’ bills to scrutiny.