A Compelling Reason

The US Embassy in Iraq is an absolute behemoth that sends a terrible message about American dominion over the country. The problem is that the State Department has no personnel who actually want to work in what is still an incredibly dangerous territory. So the top officials came up with a brilliant plan: forced labor!

The State Department will order as many as 50 U.S. diplomats to take posts in Iraq next year because of expected shortfalls in filling openings there, the first such large-scale forced assignment since the Vietnam War.

On Monday, 200 to 300 employees will be notified of their selection as "prime candidates" for 50 open positions in Iraq, said Harry K. Thomas, director general of the Foreign Service. Some are expected to respond by volunteering, he said. However, if an insufficient number volunteers by Nov. 12, a department panel will determine which ones will be ordered to report to the Baghdad embassy next summer.

"If people say they want to go to Iraq, we will take them," Thomas said in an interview. But "we have to move now, because we can't hold up the process." Those on the list were selected by factors including grade, specialty and language skill, as well as "people who have not had a recent hardship tour," he said.

I understand the need to fill various positions, but I wonder what those positions will actually be. Perhaps they could do something about the paralegal running the anti-corruption office?

Rep. John Tierney (D-MA) laid it all out. Not only are there duplicative U.S. offices in Baghdad to oversee anti-corruption efforts -- the Anti-corruption Working Group and the Office of Accountability and Transparency, to name two -- but coordination is so bad that the OAT for months boycotted the meetings of the AWG. Rice said she was "not aware" of that.

Another point she wasn't aware of: OAT has had, according to Rep. Tierney, four acting or permanent directors in the past ten months alone. The most recent one isn't a diplomat or a trained anti-corruption official at all, but rather a "paralegal" who works at the U.S. embassy. "I should get back to you with a sense of how we manage these programs," she replied.

I should note that this information came out in the great House Oversight Committee hearing where Condi Rice was forced to say over and over again, "Corruption is a major problem in Iraq" (in fact, it may be funding the insurgency). The sole reason that there has been these kinds of revelations is the tenacious work of my Congressman, Henry Waxman. He's the Kurt Rambis of the House, a role player who is just supposed to come in and throw some elbows through investigation. And this little guy has the White House completely spooked.

Waxman has become the Bush administration's worst nightmare: a Democrat in the majority with subpoena power and the inclination to overturn rocks. But in Waxman the White House also faces an indefatigable capital veteran -- with a staff renowned for its depth and experience -- who has been waiting for this for 14 years.

These days, the 16-term congressman is always ready with a hearing, a fresh crop of internal administration e-mails or a new explosive report. And he has more than two dozen investigations underway, on such issues as the politicization of the entire federal government, formaldehyde in Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers, global warming, and safety concerns about the diabetes drug Avandia.

"We have to let people know they have someone watching them after six years with no oversight at all," said Waxman, 68. "And we've got a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick."

Someone is watching, and I think in the final analysis, there is an opportunity to roll back a lot of the abuses of the first six years.