Waxman has been a pus-filled pain in the ass long enough for me to enjoy watching this backfire on him.

There will be no serious investigation of this. I would imagine the Carlyle Group is involved here too. The Arabists are ingrained in our State Department, you can't get them out with dynamite.

The real solution would be to simply close State entirely, firing everyone down to the janitorial service. What does it do anyway other than foul things up?

I guess you could call me a former "State Dept. Arabist" in that the bulk of my 25-year career there was spent in the Middle East. But I'm also a conservative Republican who, while trying to understand how Arabs approached the world, never forgot which country he worked for.

The 1992 article linked is a bit dated. I know all of the people cited, both "old" and "new" Arabists, most of whom are now retired or soon to retire. They are not--for the most part--people who forgot their values, but were in situations where they were asked to support and implement policies that were often unclear at best, wishful thinking at worst.

Starting in the late '80s, as part of the "Peace Dividend" at the end of the Cold War, State (as other agencies) underwent massive downsizing. By 2002, there were over 800 positions overseas that were unstaffed simply because there was no one available to staff them.

A particular case in point: In 1990, prior to the Gulf War, there were eight, language-qualified officers in the US Information Agency (the one I worked for), spread between Jeddah, Riyadh, and Dhahran. When I returned to Saudi Arabia in 2001, there were four officers in Public Diplomacy (what USIA became after consolidation into State), only one of whom (me) was language qualified. The post in Dhahran had been closed.

I was able to get the staffing levels back up, as well as to re-open the Dhahran post, but I couldn't instantly create Arabic-speakers. When I left in 2003, there were a total of two in the section. The Embassy--a congomeration of some 14 federal agencies--had only about a dozen people who could speak Arabic. Worse, two-year tours of duty were the norm, which have since been reduced to one-year tours.

I had no prior desire to go to NEA. That's what I was selected for, based on my language abilities. But once into Arabic studies, one faces a hard choice. Arabic language study itself is a two-year proposition. You don't really want to waste that if you can help it (the same applies to Chinese, Japanese, Korean). But you also realize that you're going to be spending (and bringing your family into) some of the most inhospitable parts of the world. For a long time.

With manpower shortages, the officers have much greater say in where they're assigned. Given a choice between, say, being the Press Officer in Canberra, or the Press Officer in Riyadh, guess which people pick?

As part of their commissions, State officers acknowledge that they can be sent anywhere in the world "at the needs of the service". But they can also walk out the door. Being grossly understaffed, State as an institution doesn't push very hard. They also have to deal with issues that weren't issues in the past: families, two-employee couples, children's education.

Instead of harping on mistakes and failures, you might want to actually help change things around.

John:

The salient fact is that in '91 State counseled stability rather than liberty in Iraq--a disaster for all concerned and of a piece with its historic preferences.

John,

There are six million American Jews, most of whom speak Hebrew with some degree of fluency. There are also millions of Christians with more than a passing familiarity with Biblical Hebrew.

Since Hebrew and Arabic are more closely related than English and German, it would be a relatively simple matter for these people to be trained in Arabic. There are also hundreds of thousands of Arabic-speaking Jews in the NY Metro Area, whose parents and grandparents fled the Arab world.

However, the State Department as an institution is completely hostile to both Jews and committed Christians. Their language problems would be over were they to hire from both these groups for a change. When State does this, give me a call. Otherwise, save the whining for someone who actually cares.

John,

Thank you for your contribution. I appreciate that working at the State Dept. implies unique difficulties.

When you invite us to "help change things around", what exactly do you mean?

When I read this article about the way recruitment works at State, I have to wonder if anything less than a massive overhaul/purge can bring any improvement.

In order, please:

OJ: State may have "counselled stability", but that was not an outlier of opinion within the government as a whole. I do not think that the US as ready to go it alone in getting rid of Saddam in 91, and go it alone they surely would have been forced to do. The coalition would have shattered, which is what State pointed out. I was assigned to the Gulf (Bahrain) right up to the eve of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. I did read traffic from neighboring countries as well as have decent contacts within Bahrain. No one would have gone along with a unilaterally changed mandate. This was not the era of pre-emption. An entirely different ethos was at work, across the USG. I happen to agree (and agreed then) that Schwartzkoff was right, But outside of CENTCOM, no one was buying that.

Bart: Six million Jews may very well be able to do a transition from Hebrew to Arabic. So where are they? They're not lined up to join State.

I'll question your assertion about their language ability in Hebrew, as well. While some Jews (non-Israeli) I know do have very good Hebrew, most don't, actually. They have enough to get them through rituals and prayers, but not enough to engage in conversation. I'll let pass the difference between Torah Hebrew and contemporary Arabic. I've not seen a flood of Arabic-speaking Jews lining up for State, DOD, CIA, or NSC yet.

I'll dispute, too, your assertion that Jews are not welcomed at State. Fully a quarter of my entry class were Jews. In every assignment I've had--including two tours in Saudi Arabia--there were Jews on staff, including in senior positions. "Anti-Christian" bears a little more scrutiny, but only to the extent that public profession of any religious affiliation is seen as both "unseemly" and pretty much restricted by federal workplace regulation. But particularly among GS staff, religious affiliation was not disguised.

Sorry you think I'm whining when I note that people don't get hired when they don't bother to apply.

Eugene S: Reading that article, I could certainly hear some echos. Realize that my comments are not directly comparable as the entry process has changed over 25 years.

I took the FS exam three times. I passed the written part easily in all three attempts. My first try was as a junior in university. I was told that were I a senior our out of university, I'd have passed. Okay... they were saving the job offers for those ready to take them up.

The second one, I was out of school (dropped out, no Ivy League grad). I didn't pass the oral exam. My take was that I was too much of a potential competitor for the group of examiners I had. None of them was more than a couple of years older than I was. Maybe that's ego, but I haven't really felt the need to change that judgment to date.

Which brings up another point. Assignment to the BEX (Board of Examiners) is not considered a prestige assignment. One gets that assignment for one of two reasons: 1) you can't get anything else, or 2) you really care about who's coming on your coat tails. Most are there for reason 1). And that is an institutional failure, I think.

My third try was a few years later, after I'd worked in private sector for about seven years. I breezed through the written and oral. The medical was okay (but not, though that's another story), and the security review was the most intrusive exam I've ever had, including colonoscopy.

State hires specialists, but they are not whom one usually considers "Foreign Service Officers". They are specialized in things like medicine, security, IT, Commo., etc. FSO are hired as "generalists", though they gravitate into certain "cones". The cones are Consular, Economic, Political, Public Diplomacy, and Administration. All are needed to run a foreign mission. All play a part in the advice given to Washington, as well as policy suggestions forwarded to the White House.

FSOs are expected to use what they bring to the job. For the past 20 years, new FSO are more often then not coming right out of university. Those guys have limited packages of what they're bringing. The average age of new officers is now around 35. I, at 31, was among the youngest in my class. My most recent Junior Officer came in at 50+, after 20 years of law practice. The one before that came in with 10 years in the Army. The one before that, seven years as a deputy district attorney, five as a university professor, and five as a public defender. Their states of origin were, respectively, Texas, South Carolina, Wisconsin. None of them when to Ivy League schools.

A major change has taken place in the Foreign Service over the past 25 years, most of it mediated by new information technologies. Ambassadors (and their staffs) no longer make policy. In major countries, they're barely in the decision-making loop. Kissinger, though his "shuttle diplomacy", short circuited the previous system entirely. Now, the ambassador to a major country is lucky to hear that the Sec. State had a phone conversation with his counterpart before it's reported in the media.

Ambassadors--the maximum achievement for career State officers--have little power to make or influence opinion when the President picks up the phone and speaks to the head of state of another country at any time. The job has lost much of its sex appeal.

That's one of the reasons why high-achievers don't go into State anymore. There's more power to be had in other places.

There's also the matter of pay and working conditions. I've noted some of the working conditions earlier: Bung-hole assignments, very unhealthy climates, danger that doesn't exist in the US, problems with providing for families.

But pay is a major disincentive. The GAO has consistently reported that foreign service salaries are 25%-35% below what the comparable work would earn in the private sector. I took a 20% paycut to join the foreign service. I quickly made it up through promotions, but I do consider myself a hardish-charger. I took the cut both out of self-confidence and my desire to use my skills and abilities in the service of my country. I also took my commission seriously.

There are certainly slackers at State. Once in, it's hard to get bounced out, though State does have both an up-or-out system of promotion and a mandatory "bottom 2%" classification. Anyone getting a "bottom 2%" two years in a row is asked to leave. Other than those two mechanisms, though, it's as hard to clear dead wood as in any other federal department.

There are also some who behave in a manner that I would consider "disloyal", forgetting to whom their allegiance lies. They are, thankfully, a miniscule percentage of the population.

There's also a definite leftward bias at State, but I don't think that's a matter of "Ivy League" mindsets. Ivy League schools, in fact, represent less that 5% of all entrants. What it is more, is those who join State do so because they want to make a difference in the world. Sometimes that brings in "we are the world" types. I'm not as sanguine, as the author of the '92 piece on Arabists, about former Peace Corps officers. They certainly do bring a particular mindset with them. Particularly if it's not balanced by "real world", i.e., private sector, experience, that can lead to grave imbalances.

But as a conservative, I never felt lonely at State. There are plenty of them, though they may keep their political mouths shut most of the time. (Again, this is a matter of regulation, particularly the Hatch Act that limits political expression.) Things could certainly be better for conservatives, but State is not the den of iniquity that it's sometimes painted to be.

John:

We fomented the uprisings--we were morally obligated to aid them. That State believes in Realism rather than moralism is an indictment.

John,

After 9/11 and the claim was made by the FBI that they needed Arabic-speakers. Assemblyman Dov Hikind of Brooklyn lined up literally thousands of Arabic-speaking volunteers, from the Sephardic and Israeli communities in Brooklyn. The FBI director wanted to avoid offending the Muslim community in the US and turned down the help. This has been reported in Debka, in the Jewish Press and elsewhere.

Even a basic knowledge of Hebrew is a huge head-start over being someone with no familiarity with languages that don't have vowels and are read from right to left. The fact that I grew up speaking French to my grandparents gave me a huge advantage studying languages from Italian to Romanian and even a smattering of Catalan.

The discrimination against Jews occurs in the feeder universities like American, George Washington and Georgetown. Friends of mine were encouraged, by faculty advisers, to go to law school rather than State because they would not be able to advance due to their faith.

As an aside, I do know what a security check for the Air Force is like for a Jew. When I was in grad school I was asked by one of my profs to help out on something and I needed a low-level clearance. When I was interviewed, I told them that I had been a member of JDL in college, but quit because I didn't like their anti-secular bias. Had I not spoken to a couple of my dad's non-Jewish classmates at West Point, who at the time were generals in the Army working at the Pentagon, I would not have gotten even a low-level clearance.

I hope you saw the 60 Minutes story about the Orthodox Jew who is currently suing the CIA on employment discrimination grounds and internal memos say things like 'We can't have any kikes at State.'

If we aren't applying it's because we know we're not wanted unless we grow a foreskin.

Thank you John,

There's also a definite leftward bias at State

That was very...

Things could certainly be better for conservatives, but State is not the den of iniquity that it's sometimes painted to be

...diplomatic.

:/

Bart: As to problems with recruitment or attitude toward Jews at FBI, I can't say a single knowledgeable word. I've never worked at FBI, so I don't know their institutional biases.

I can speak somewhat informedly about State. In the 40s and 50s, there was certainly a sense that Jews were not welcomed. From the late 70s onward (my period of employment), I never saw or heard any anti-Jewish sentiment except in one regard. That was that it seemed one had to be Jewish to get assigned to Tel Aviv. I have no stats to pack up that allegation and I'm sure no such stats exist (religion is not a component of any personnel records).

In none of my eight overseas assignments was I working in an embassy that had no Jewish officers on staff. They were male and female, Othodox to Reform. I did not see any Chasidic Jews, however. Nor was one's religion or lack of religion a matter for determining assignments. As I think I mentioned, I worked with Jews--as both bosses and subordinates--in Saudi Arabia, both in '81 and '01. I am aware of Jews having worked in that mission in the period inbetween. I've simply seen no discrimination toward Jews in State.

In my assignments to Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, and Syria, the well-being of local Jewish populations were policy issues for the embassies. This is not indicative of a general anti-Semitic attitude.

I'm certain that there are anti-Semites in State, as there are just about everywhere else. They do not dominate, they do not control hiring, they do not set policies. I think your anecdotal information is dated--by 50 years--at best. I am open to new information, however.

OJ: I understand (I think) your point about "moralist" v. "realist", but have never seen that proffered as a political philosophy. Could I ask you to point me to more information about it, or perhaps, write about it yourself?

I confess that the terms in themselves are a little murky. What comes to mind is something like the Spanish-American war ginned up through newspaper articles about the supposed rape of an American woman in Cuba. I truly don't mean that in a diminishing sense, but just don't understand exactly what you mean.

Thanks

John:

http://www.brothersjudd.com/blog/archives/012415.html

Orrin, thanks. I'll read it first thing in the morning.