February 3,jordan shoes, 2012 // I’d like to share a few quotes, and you try and guess whether they came from my book, We Meant Well,louboutin, or from somewhere else. Five points for each correct answer; anyone who scores 20 or more wins a free trip (one way) to Iraq. Bonus points if you can guess to whom these were directed. Here we go: As a graduate of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, I was proud when I swore in at the State Department. By the middle of 2007 that changed. I was ashamed for my country. Pax Americana will not be achieved with the Foreign Service and the State Department’s bureaucracy at the helm of America’s number one policy consideration. You are simply not up to the task, and many of you will readily and honestly admit it. At stake, as a whole,louboutin pas cher, is not only the success of the mission, the lives of Americans and the future of a country for which we must now bear some responsibility,louboutin pas cher, but also hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars being wasted and poorly managed. After a year at the Embassy, it is my general assessment that the State Department and the Foreign Service is not competent to do the job that they have undertaken in Iraq. The problem is institutional. The State Department bureaucracy is not equipped to handle the urgency of America’s Iraq investment in blood and taxpayer funds. You lack the “fierce urgency of now.” Foreign Service officers, with ludicrously little management experience by any standard other than your own, are not equipped to manage programs, hundreds of millions in funds, and expert human capital assets. It is apparent that, other than diplomacy,air jordan, your only expertise is your own bureaucracy. The American people would be scandalized to know that,outlet hogan, throughout the Winter, Spring and Summer of 2007, even while our Congress debated the Iraq question and whether to commit more troops and more funds, the Embassy was largely consumed in successive internal reorganizations with contradictory management and policy goals. In some cases, administrative and management goals that occupied our time reflected the urgencies and priorities that could only originate in Foggy Bottom and far-removed from the reality or urgencies on the ground. The fact that over 80 people sit in Washington, second-guessing and delaying the work of the Embassy, many who have never been to Baghdad, is an embarrassment alone. I would venture to say that if the management of the Embassy and the State Department’s Iraq operation were judged by rules that govern business judgment and asset waste in the private sector,louboutin, the delays, indecision,hogan, and reorganizations over the past year, would be considered willfully negligent if not criminal. The Embassy is also severely encumbered by the Foreign Service’s built-in attention deficit disorder, with personnel and new leaders rotating out within a year or less. Incumbent in this constant personnel change is a startling failure to manage and retrieve information. The Embassy is consequently in a constant state of revisiting the same ground without the ability to retrieve information of past work and decisions. This misleads new personnel at senior levels into the illusion of accomplishment and progress. This illusionary process of “changing goal posts,” as one senior official put it, helps to explain why so few goals are scored. Overall,supra, the lack of coordination and leadership in key areas (including Rule of Law activity, PRT’s, and others), upon which the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction has repeatedly commented, is real and pervasive. The waste of taxpayer funds resulting from such mismanagement is something that only a deeply entrenched bureaucracy with a unionized attitude, like the Foreign Service and Main State, could find acceptable. The impulse to transform the Embassy into a “normal embassy” displays most starkly the State Department bureaucracy’s endemic problems,christian louboutin, including inflexibility and the inability to understand alternative management principles, use expertise and funds in any manner outside the State Department’s normal experience, the inability to respond to the urgency of America’s presence in Iraq, and the inclination to make excuses and blame the Embassy’s failures on others. Simply put, Foreign Service officers are not equipped to manage process-oriented assistance programs and yet we have put into their hands hundreds of millions of dollars. Any American graduate school study group could do better. The Foreign Service culture has created a situation where important information is kept from vital decision-makers. In my year in Baghdad, I have seen the Embassy intentionally keep information from the State Department in Washington (because “we cannot trust that they will not leak to the press”), and the Commanding General (because “we do not wash our dirty laundry in public”.) I have also witnessed a relentless culture of information-hording within the Embassy. The dysfunctional failure to communicate and share information is beyond anything that can be imagined under any circumstances. It is endemic of a bureaucracy that is far beyond its pale of competence and experience. The significance of our work in Iraq would suggest that the State Department might need to think outside its box on an information management system that any medium-sized law firm would have. Trick questions– none of these quotes come from my book. They were all written in 2008, in a blistering memo from Manuel Miranda, a contractor heading the Office of Legislative Statecraft in Baghdad, to then-Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Hell, I did not even quote the entire memo, so go . I’m just glad Miranda didn’t decide to write a book about his thoughts on Embassy Baghdad, otherwise I’d be out of a job. Copyright ? 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State,franklin marshall, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the US Government. The Department of State does not approve, endorse or authorize this blog or book. Follow us on Posted in ,supra shoes, , , Related articles: BEIJING More than 115 to customers