I’ve got a stack of employment paperwork as thick as my skull sitting next to my desk waiting to be filled out, yet I have decided to take a break and link you to this editorial from the Washington Times, which is also handily ripped to shreds by an ex-soldier/current FSO over yonder on Consul-at-Arms.
The issue at hand is State Department (DoS) employees objecting to “directed” tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, which you may remember being plastered all over the news previously. You may also recall a sound bite of one FSO referring to such tours as a “potential death sentence.”
I will admit that I thought these objectors a little on the yellow side. Not cowardly, mind you; but they were putting their lives before US foreign policy, something every FSO is sworn to uphold. At that point I was still riding the register and hoping for the call, so I was a little disgusted. I mean, the whole point of being a part of the Foreign Service is going where the government needs you, regardless of whether you ultimately want to be there or not. Sure, you bid on postings based on preference, but ultimately, it’s up to State to decide where you end up.
As I have come to learn, such a thought process is a little naive at best and at worst — in the case of that editorial — grossly misinformed. Despite the fact that this whole post is based on a print article, I blame the news.
One of the objectives of television news is to blast out headlines as quickly as possible, getting the basic facts out before the viewer loses interest. There’s little room for depth and it’s easy to shape a story based simply on what there is and isn’t time to report. Chalk it up to passive editorializing if you want, but when a 30-minute news program is timed down to the second, a lot of this perceived “imbalance” on the part of the networks may be completely involuntary. Watch a show from behind the scenes; pages and pages of content get dropped all the time because of a few seconds of dead air or an anchor who doesn’t read the prompter quickly enough.
Anyway, I think the objecting FSOs got the short end of the stick this time around. When all one hears is the sound bite and the initial facts, one is led to believe that these folks are making a scene because the going got a little tough. However, one may fail to notice — as I did myself — that the statements were made at an open “town hall” type of meeting, where such open dialogue is not only appropriate, but encouraged. I imagine it’s something like the Airing of Grievances during Festivus.
Now, as for the op-ed piece…well, I think Consul-at-Arms put it best:
The really funny thing here is that throwaway phrase “300 vacancies remain” that the writer puts out there without explaining that there are 300 vacancies every year, because they are one-year assignments, and also that they just now beginning to identify candidates to fill them. The jobs aren’t even available to be bid upon, so it’s hardly as if no one’s stepped forward.
Every single position the Foreign Service has fielded in Iraq since 2003 has been filled by a volunteer. Given the small size of the Foreign Service, re-filling those 300 plus jobs each and every year with qualified officers is itself a non-trivial problem, but so far we’ve been able to pull it off.
I strongly recommend reading the rest of his dissection, as he also draws an important distinction between a diplomat and a soldier, which the editorial likes to parallel.
The moral behind the story? Before publishing a reactionary hunk of hearsay in the second biggest newspaper in the city, get all of your facts straight.
