Lifting off Rice's competent mask

Style Over Substance
By Dennis Jett
Copyright by the The Chicago Tribune

Sunday 05 February 2006

Lifting off Rice's competent mask.
The clothes have no empress.

No hint of that is found in the reporting on Condoleezza Rice, however. Most of the early stories on her tenure as secretary of state focused on what she was wearing rather than what she was saying. Now they dwell a bit less on fashion but still comment on style instead of substance. One recent Associated Press story used confident, compassionate, sure-footed and self-assured all in the first five sentences.

Just parsing fashion statements offers no explanation of why America's image abroad has sunk to new depths. In her trip to Europe in December she firmly asserted that the U.S. does not torture. Shortly after her return the White House put out the president's signing statement on the bill Congress passed prohibiting the use of torture.

The statement, and the president in his last news conference, made clear that he believes the use of torture is a presidential prerogative.

To point out such inconsistencies is apparently not newsworthy.

Another bit of breathless and uncritical reporting was on Rice's speech Jan. 18 at Georgetown University. In it she announced a major overhaul of the way the State Department does business.

Dubbing her plan "transformational diplomacy" she lamented that there are as many American diplomats in Germany, a country with 82million inhabitants, as there are in India, which has 1 billion people. She also noted that there are more than 200 cities of 1 million or more in the world with no American diplomatic presence.

Her answer is a massive shift of personnel from old Europe to the front lines of diplomacy in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, where they are supposedly needed the most.

Foreign Service officers will be required to serve in hardship posts and be fluent in at least two languages, preferably Arabic, Urdu or Chinese. One-person posts will be established, and diplomats everywhere will be expected to get out from behind their desks and change the world instead of just reporting on it.

While all that may sound as necessary as it is revolutionary, most of it does not stand up to any serious analysis. One question: Where will the resources to implement the plan come from?

Who will fill in?

Under Rice's predecessor, the State Department added more than 2,000 positions. Since it takes two years to become fluent in Chinese or Arabic, is Congress going to appropriate the money to add the hundreds of personnel to fill in for all those off studying languages?

Another expense will be the cost of opening new facilities.

If the idea that diplomats should be allocated on a per capita basis is taken seriously, it would mean more than 40 new offices in India and even more in China. But population isn't the only criterion that determines the size of an embassy. India may have 1 billion people, but the U.S. does five times as much trade with Germany.

There may be 200 cities with 1million or more people without an American diplomatic presence, but so what?

Imagine a foreign ambassador in Washington sending a request to his foreign office for the funds and personnel to open nine new offices throughout the United States. When the foreign office asks why, the ambassador responds: "Because they are cities with over 1 million people, and putting one of our diplomats in each will convince Americans of the wisdom of our policies."

There are two reasons our diplomats are clustered in heavily fortified embassies in capital cities-because that is where the decisions are made and because they can be defended when concentrated.

A one-person post is an invitation for terrorists to attack.

My first diplomatic post was Argentina in the mid-1970s. There were several one-person posts in provincial cities staffed by U.S. Information Service officers. In April 1974 leftist terrorists shot and kidnapped one of them.

He was released and recovered, but all the one-person posts were closed-all, that is, except for one retired businessman who acted as the embassy's consular agent in one distant city. He was murdered by terrorists the following year.

It May Not Do Any Good

Leaving expense and security aside, will all those diplomats in all those new places convince the people that America is, as Rice said in her speech, truly interested in a partnership and not paternalism?

Unlike many Americans, people abroad take note of what the U.S. government does and not just what it says. Getting diplomats on the street will convince no one if Washington does not live up to its rhetoric.

To paraphrase an overused line: "It's the policies, not the PR, stupid."

The intelligence community supposedly was reformed because of the failure to anticipate the Sept. 11 attacks or find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security was supposed to make the government better able to respond in a crisis.

Tell that to the residents of New Orleans. These bureaucratic changes are nothing more than a means for politicians to avoid accepting responsibility for their policy failures.

Rice said in her speech that we are living in an extraordinary time, and "the very terrain of history is shifting beneath our feet."

She refers to Dean Acheson, the secretary of state who was present at the creation of the Cold War world. Clearly Rice and her boss are already legends in their own minds.

They will go down in history, but not for leading the world to peace and freedom.

They will be remembered for converting the world's greatest democracy into the world's largest hypocrisy.


Dennis Jett is the Deaan of the University of Florida International Center and a veteran diplomat who was ambassador to Peru and Mozambique.


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