Division Of Labor

The military fights wars and the diplomats make peace – until the Hedgemony. So now the diplomats are not happy about being ordered into a war zone, rather than handling the assignments on a volunteer basis.

CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports on the controversy: Diplomatic Call Up Riles State Department

…the union which represent Foreign Service Officers contends Iraq should be for volunteers only.

“We have concerns, many of our members do, about assigning diplomats who are unarmed civilians, who are not trained for combat, to combat situations,” said Steve Kashkett of the American Foreign Service Association.

If a diplomat refuses to go to Iraq, he can be reprimanded, suspended without pay or even fired.

Twelve hundred Foreign Service officers have served in Iraq. Three have been killed. Ambassador Ryan Crocker has been asking for more and better qualified officers, saying in one cable, “The issue is whether we are a department and a service at war.”

It’s an issue which, in the fifth year of war, you might think had long since been settled.

Except of course that the rationale for this disaster keeps changing and there is no security. The fact that many people firmly believe that the company hired for diplomatic security, after the Pentagon under Rumsfeld refused to fulfill its traditional role in this area, is made up of psychopathic murderers and the new embassy is worthy of its own show on HGTV called Contractor Horror Stories.

What the State Department has been assigned to do is normally handled by military civil affairs teams, except Rumsfeld didn’t think civil affairs was a military mission, so it was eliminated.