State Department readies its larger role in Iraq
The State Department plans major increases in its Iraq mission, with hundreds more employees there and a stepped-up diplomatic presence outside Baghdad as the U.S. military prepares to leave later this year. A new fiscal 2010 supplemental request asks for $2.1 billion for use in Iraq, the bulk going to set up two permanent consulates ...
The State Department plans major increases in its Iraq mission, with hundreds more employees there and a stepped-up diplomatic presence outside Baghdad as the U.S. military prepares to leave later this year.
A new fiscal 2010 supplemental request asks for $2.1 billion for use in Iraq, the bulk going to set up two permanent consulates and three temporary "Provincial Development Teams." The funding will enable another 129 State Department positions in Iraq, bringing the total to 664 by the end of this fiscal year. One consulate will be in Basra, one in northern Iraq. The PDTs will be along the Arab-Kurb fault line near Kirkuk, Ninewa, and Diyala, and $735 million in the supplemental request is designated for the security needed to protect civilians in the new outposts. The new presence around Iraq is described in the budget request as crucial "to mitigate ethno-sectarian conflict, to minimize the risk of instability, and to seize strategic policy opportunities."
Some have wondered why the money for Iraq came in the supplemental request rather than through the State Department’s regular budget request for fiscal 2011.
"The most important point in terms of the supplemental is timing," Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew said in an interview with The Cable, "The plan to transfer a set of responsibilities from the military to civilian control is on a pretty fixed timetable. In order for us to make this transition process to work smoothly, there’s a fair amount of work that has to be done in advance."
The fiscal 2011 budget request asks for another $2.6 billion for Iraq, but that will focus more on longer term needs, said Lew.
"Enduring diplomatic presence comes a little later than police training, so there’s more of that in the 2011 proposal than the supplemental," he said, adding, "Planning for this Iraq mission has been intensive."
Experts said that the U.S. attention to lingering ethnic tensions in Iraq is crucial over the next few months as the fragile reconciliation process there continues.
"There’s a view that sectarian conflict is done and gone; on the other hand that would be very unusual as a historical matter," said Stephen Biddle, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, "It’s one of these half full, half empty kind of glasses."
In the new budget request, more than $500 million is to go to the International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Bureau (INL), known as the "drugs and thugs" bureau, for the police training mission. That mission will be transformed from focusing on individual soldier training to more administration, investigative, and organizational assistance, said Lew.
The Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction criticized INL in a recent report for lax oversight of the police training mission to Iraq, which is contracted out largely to DynCorp, but Lew said that more contract oversight personnel were on the way to Baghdad and the poor past accounting of DynCorp funds was being corrected.
Josh Rogin covers national security and foreign policy and writes the daily Web column The Cable. His column appears bi-weekly in the print edition of The Washington Post. He can be reached for comments or tips at josh.rogin@foreignpolicy.com.
Previously, Josh covered defense and foreign policy as a staff writer for Congressional Quarterly, writing extensively on Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, U.S.-Asia relations, defense budgeting and appropriations, and the defense lobbying and contracting industries. Prior to that, he covered military modernization, cyber warfare, space, and missile defense for Federal Computer Week Magazine. He has also served as Pentagon Staff Reporter for the Asahi Shimbun, Japan's leading daily newspaper, in its Washington, D.C., bureau, where he reported on U.S.-Japan relations, Chinese military modernization, the North Korean nuclear crisis, and more.
A graduate of George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, Josh lived in Yokohama, Japan, and studied at Tokyo's Sophia University. He speaks conversational Japanese and has reported from the region. He has also worked at the House International Relations Committee, the Embassy of Japan, and the Brookings Institution.
Josh's reporting has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, C-Span, CBS, ABC, NPR, WTOP, and several other outlets. He was a 2008-2009 National Press Foundation's Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellow, 2009 military reporting fellow with the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism and the 2011 recipient of the InterAction Award for Excellence in International Reporting. He hails from Philadelphia and lives in Washington, D.C. Twitter: @joshrogin
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