State Department to order diplomats to Iraq

This is off The Washington Post:

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.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice previewed a possible shortfall in June, when she ordered that positions in Iraq be filled before any other openings at the State Department headquarters in Washington or abroad are available. At the time, Rice said it was her "fervent hope" that sufficient numbers would continue to volunteer. Her order followed a request by Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker in Baghdad for an increase in the number and quality of economic and political officers.

Carpetbagger nails this story in that no one wants to go to Iraq. and that they really don’t want to be forced to go to Iraq. Iraq is a complete disaster. There is still continued ethnic violence taking place between the Shiites and Sunnis, Turkey is threatening to move into northern Iraq to take out Kurdish guerrillas, and the Bush administration seems intent on starting a third war with Iran. Is it no wonder that career foreign service officials are balking at going to Iraq, considering the utter failure of this PNAC neocon Bush administration and its failed Iraq foreign policy?

The real political damage here will be a mass of State Department resignations, if the Bush administration attempts to force these diplomats to go to Iraq. We could see a complete gutting of the State Department as both career officials decide it is not worth continuing to work there, and young graduates decide not to join the diplomatic corps, due to the incompetence of this administration. And if we do have a mass of State Department resignations over the last year of this second Bush term, I seriously wonder if the gutting will continue into 2009 if the Republicans keep control of the White House.