Rather than being received as invaluable intelligence, the messages from Foreign Service officers are discarded or, worse, considered signs of disloyalty. Rejecting the facts on the ground apparently requires blaming the messengers. So far two top attachés at the embassy have been reassigned elsewhere for producing factual reports that were too upsetting, according to the State Department officials.Gosh, golly, the DOD is offering State Department the right to hire mercs from any place that they want to, as the Greatest Military Leader EVER! has far more important Domestic Political Issues to attend to than the health and safety of American Foreign Service Personnel on the forefront of the War On Whatever!
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By reducing the numbers of soldiers the administration can claim its policy is working going into the midterm elections. But the jobs that the military will no longer perform are being sloughed off onto State Department "provincial reconstruction teams" led by Foreign Service officers. The stated rationale is that the teams will win Iraqi hearts and minds by organizing civil functions.
The Pentagon has informed the State Department that it will not provide security for these officials and that State should hire mercenaries for protection instead. Apparently, the U.S. military and the U.S. Foreign Service do not represent the same country in this exercise in nation-building. Internal State Department documents listing the PRT jobs, dated March 30, reveal that the vast majority of them remain unfilled. So Foreign Service employees are being forced to take the assignments, in which "they can't do what they are being asked to do," as a senior State Department official told me.
[ cf Salon: Cannon fodder at State reffed from digby ]
Clearly now all of those Victims of Chicken Hawk Angst Syndrome who were not sure how they were going to be famous War Heroes, AND rake in the Big Bucks! Well now more than ever maybe you want to be a part of the Great New ParaMilitarry Forces Protect the AFS types who are being abandoned in the field by the troops whom the Great Leader Abandoned...