Posted by: McQ on Wednesday, April 16, 2008 I've been talking the last few weeks about the need for a political/diplomatic surge in Iraq to help that side of the house more speedily do what is necessary to accomplish reconciliation and ensure a stable and functioning Iraqi government. Seems the people charged with that don't really want to do their jobs: The State Department is warning U.S. diplomats they may be forced to serve in Iraq next year and says it will soon start identifying prime candidates for jobs at the Baghdad embassy and outlying provinces, according to a cable obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.I know it is easy to sit here and yell "fire the bastards" - that's most satisfying but doesn't solve the identified problem - we need State Dept. types in Iraq, lots of them. And as far as I'm concerned, until last year, that department was basically shirking its job there. They managed to find enough volunteers last year to staff the positions they thought were necessary to help in the diplomatic/political sphere. I won't get into the numbers because on the face of it I don't think what they sent was enough. But that's another discussion. All of my life I've watched the men and women of the Armed Forces go to places they didn't want to go and serve with distinction. There was never a 'crisis' about manpower. You got orders and you went. You accepted that when you signed on. Well, the State Department's foreign service employees have the same understanding as the military. They serve where they're needed, when they're needed and I'm not really interested in their whining about why they don't want to go. "We face a growing challenge of supply and demand in the 2009 staffing cycle," the cable said, noting that more than 20 percent of the nearly 12,000 foreign service officers have already worked in the two major hardship posts - Iraq and Afghanistan - and a growing number have done tours in both countries.I have no idea why having 80% remaining who have done neither constitutes a "staffing crisis" for those posts, do you? If approximately 2,400 of the 12,000 have already done their part in Iraq, it seems high time a portion of the remaining 9,600 "man-up", shut up and do theirs. Either that or get those resumes out there post haste. _________ Linked by The Thunder Run - Thanks! |
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