The Bush administration took a hard line last week on United States diplomats resisting postings to Iraq, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the US ambassador in Baghdad issued blunt reminders of their duty to serve anywhere in the world.
In an escalating dispute over the first forced deployment of diplomat since the Vietnam war, the ambassador, Ryan Crocker, made the thinly veiled threat that officials who put their own personal safety before the interests of their country were “in the wrong line of business”.
Any qualms individuals might have about the war in Iraq were irrelevant, he said, adding: “It is good for all our colleagues to remember that we took an oath to serve our nation worldwide when we joined the foreign service, just as the military swore an oath.”
Rice added her weight to the top-down pressure on rank-and-file US diplomats, saying: “We are one foreign service and people need to serve where they are needed.”
The row flared up on October 31 at a meeting between state department officials and their managers at which individual employees likened a tour in Iraq to a “potential death sentence”. The department’s hierarchy countered that only three foreign service personnel had been killed since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The confrontation is the culmination of a tense period in the state department since Rice took over at the start of the second Bush administration in January 2005. She vowed to shake up the antiquated bureaucracy and introduce “transformational diplomacy”.
Preparations for the opening of the new US embassy in Baghdad next year have also begun to add great strain, with more than 1Â 200 of the 11Â 500 officials already having served in the country and more being earmarked. Last week up to 300 were told they were “prime candidates” to fill 48 posts in the new embassy, and that they would be forced to go should any of the positions remain unfilled voluntarily. So far only 15 officials have volunteered.
This would be the first mass mobilisation of diplomats imposed upon employees against their will since 1969, when recruits entering the service were told they would not be given jobs unless they agreed to go to Vietnam as their first posting.
James Collins, a former US ambassador to Moscow who runs the Russian-Eurasian programme of the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, said the return to directed assignments, as they are known, was an unfortunate step. “The management of the state department has a big problem if they have to resort to 1960s rules in order to do 21st-century work.” In Collins’s view, any official refusing to serve in Iraq in breach of his or her oath should resign, but he added that the foreign service “was squandering its main strength if it just sends out people with skills and experience to fill slots”.
Officials sent to Iraq are given almost double pay as compensation and to allow for long hours. They are also given five breaks from the job in the course of the year, as well as being given preference when choosing their next posting.
Against that, they have to leave their families and face the risk of shelling in the fortified Green Zone. Their union, the American Foreign Service Association, argues that civilians who are untrained for combat or for survival in war situations should not be obliged to serve. — Â