January 29, 2006
REALISTS, MEET REALITY:
Goodbye Paris, hello Chad (Walter Russell Mead, January 29, 2006, LA Times)
ABOUT 100 SEASONED State Department officials recently got perhaps the nastiest shock of their professional lives. Headed for long-awaited cushy assignments in the fleshpots of Europe, they were suddenly reassigned to such developing countries as Kenya and Pakistan. The word is that another 500 officials scheduled for moves later this year will get the same news.However frustrating these orders are for Foreign Service veterans looking forward to restful years in Paris and Rome, the transfers signify an important and long-needed transformation of U.S. foreign policy.
As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made clear in a speech this month at Georgetown University, the world has changed, and the State Department needs to change with it. [...]
Rice wants the State Department to practice a new type of diplomacy.
In the old days, striped-pants cookie pushers — as U.S. diplomats were sometimes derisively known — focused on governments and elites. There was no need to learn such languages as Urdu, Farsi and Arabic because English was the language of high places. Why bother speaking to common people?
Yet the old style of diplomacy no longer works.
You can't rule out that she's just trying to get folks to quit. Posted by Orrin Judd at January 29, 2006 5:06 PM
This is another bureaucracy that quit working for us about 40 years ago. Keep a few clerks around to process visa applications and cashier the rest.
Posted by: curt at January 29, 2006 5:30 PMYou want to scew with an elected president's foreign policy? You want to mount an all-out leak blitz to get destroy his re-election chances? Then welcome to Dhaka sir. Don't drink the water.
Posted by: Jim in Chicago at January 29, 2006 5:35 PM"You can't rule out that she's just trying to get folks to quit."
Yeah, no kidding! I've had that trick pulled on me before. Worked pretty good too!
"Milt, we're gonna need to go ahead and move you downstairs into storage B. We have some new people coming in, and we need all the space we can get. So if you could go ahead and pack up your stuff and move it down there, that would be terrific, OK?"
Bryan:
Did I teach you nothing? The farther from the prying eyes of supervisors the better.
Posted by: oj at January 29, 2006 5:53 PMWe can't leave Chad hanging.
Posted by: Noel at January 29, 2006 5:53 PMDoes anyone know if Rice is responsible for the people down in Cuba right now? I got a kick out of that electronic sign they put in their windows, that Fidel is trying to block from view.
Posted by: RC at January 29, 2006 5:55 PMAnd I said, I don't care if they lay me off either, because I told, I told Bill that if they move my desk one more time, then, then I'm, I'm quitting, I'm going to quit. And, and I told Don too, because they've moved my desk four times already this year, and I used to be over by the window, and I could see the squirrels, and they were merry, but then, they switched from the Swingline to the Boston stapler, but I kept my Swingline stapler because it didn't bind up as much, and I kept the staples for the Swingline stapler and it's not okay because if they take my stapler then I'll set the building on fire...
Posted by: H.D. Miller at January 29, 2006 6:47 PM> This is another bureaucracy that quit working for us about 40 years ago.
They were working for us 40 years ago?
I've read a lot of WWII history. I've read one (1) paragraph about the State Department's contribution to winning WWII. (They provided information on local customs to OSS agents headed for Occupied Europe.)
works either way.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at January 30, 2006 3:10 AM