WASHINGTON, 8 June 2007 — The rumbling at the State Department is amplifying. With 19 months left in her term as secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice has no major diplomatic deal to her credit. Now a panel of diplomats is blaming her for the department’s “worsening morale,” while insiders say Vice President Cheney has her hamstrung.
Word is that State Department’s morale and staffing resources are being drained. This — not from naysayers, but from an independent study that places the blame directly on the slim shoulders of Secretary Rice.
The influential Foreign Affairs Council, an organization of retired American diplomats and ambassadors that monitors United States diplomacy and State Department management, published a report saying the department faces a staff shortage crisis amid “worsening morale.”
Also in the report is news that about 200 existing jobs, mostly overseas, are unfilled at State Department, which also needs an additional 900 training slots to provide essential languages skills and other expertise.
The council, an umbrella organization of 11 foreign-affairs groups, issues biannual reports on the department’s management. Its president Thomas Boyatt, is a former ambassador to Colombia and a supporter of President Bush.
The group of diplomats urged Rice to “devote more time and energy to acquiring resources of management purposes” if she wants to accomplish what she has termed “transformational diplomacy.”
It criticized the secretary for failing to request more funds for non-Iraq operations despite her well-known influence with President Bush. [It also pointed out that Congress granted none of the administration’s funding requests “for training and transformational diplomacy” in the past two years.]
Its reviews of Rice’s predecessor, Colin Powell, were overwhelmingly positive, especially in praising his so-called Diplomatic Readiness Initiative, which brought more personnel in the Foreign Service and made it more diverse.
“Widespread anecdotal evidence suggests worsening morale” under Rice, noted the report, which was released this week. “The decline is exacerbated by the fact that, unlike colleagues at some sister agencies, all of State’s junior and mid-level officers take an immediate cut in base pay of 18.6 percent upon departing Washington for an overseas assignment.”
“My own view is that the Foreign Service is at the front edge of a personnel crisis, and if something isn’t done about what we have identified here as job No. 1, we are going to be in a very, very serious situation a year or so from now,” said Boyatt.
“Every secretary of government has the responsibility to at least leave that institution as healthy as they found it, if not to improve it,” said Boyatt, reinforcing the report’s perspective that Rice had to bear responsibility for the crisis.
But political observers say Rice’s biggest battles may not be at State Department. Her struggles with Vice President Cheney over international relations are well-known. She is said to have clashed with Cheney’s office on issues like Mideast peace, where she is said to be stymied in efforts to push for more engagement with Syria and the Palestinian radical group Hamas.
A senior White House admitted, off the record, that Cheney’s office is blocking Rice’s efforts to bring Bush around on what should be the simplest-to-achieve deal for Rice to accomplish — a new relationship with Syria that would help stabilize Iraq. She has also been rebuffed by Cheney’s office in an effort to soften detention policies at Guantanamo.
In a recent interview, John Bolton, one of Rice’s fiercest current critics, and former UN ambassador — told journalists he left the administration because he believed his hard-line views toward Iran and North Korea were being eclipsed by Rice’s State Department.
Bolton then complained that the administration’s hard-liners are not what they were in the first term, when Cheney’s office was accused of cherry-picking intelligence to make the case for war against Iraq.
This may eventually allow an opening for the kind of diplomatic “breakthrough” that traditionally defines a successful secretary of state. In a recent interview, Rice said she “wouldn’t rule it out,” then added: “We’re laying the foundations for someone else to succeed in the future, and I think that’s fine.”
