Stardate 20030901.1317

(On Screen): Over the course of the last two years, the ongoing failure of the State Department has been a constant theme, even a constant menace.

In our system of government, it's necessary to have a large bureaucracy. But overall policy is supposed to flow downwards. The President is elected, and he selects his cabinet secretaries (subject to Senate approval). Those secretaries are partisan; they're his team, and their job is to carry out policies that he approves of. And in turn, the departments they lead are supposed to take their cues from whichever secretary is currently in charge of them. And at an even higher level, for really big policy decisions the President has to get buy-in from the House and Senate.

Ultimately, what this means is that the policy comes from the voters, since they're the ones who picked the President and Senators and Representatives. The permanent bureaucracy is supposed to work for elected officials, who in turn work for the people of the nation. In our system, the government leads us and serves us, but does not rule us. It is supposed to be reactive to our will.

But there's a natural tendency in this kind of organization for the permanent bureaucrats to adopt an attitude that secretaries come and go, and they don't really know what they're doing. There can be a feeling, especially among those at the top levels of the bureaucracy who worked their way up over the course of long careers, that the secretaries don't really deserve to be in charge. They didn't pay their dues, they're outsiders who don't really understand what's going on.

Whether that's true or not is beside the point. The larger principle is that the bureaucracy must remain under control of our elected representatives. The bureaucracy is a resource which can provide advice and knowledge about what kinds of things are possible and how they can be carried out, and provide the means to do so, but which accepts and implements basic policy chosen by the President or his team.

That kind of thing happens to some extent in all cabinet departments, and not just here in the US. For instance, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld is engaged in trying to seriously reform the structure of the US military, and he's been running into a lot of resistance from generals in the DOD. At a certain point the only solution is to fire the recalcitrant, and Rumsfeld has canned a few generals. But DOD has been far more reactive to Presidential policy than State.

Again and again, State seemed to go well beyond simple resistance. It seems that there's a culture now inside of State which thinks that it actually makes the policy, and that policy should flow up to the President instead of down. Instead of offering alternatives so that the President could make choices, the top bureaucrats at State seemed to want to make those choices themselves. As time went on, Bush more and more bypassed State entirely and implemented essential foreign policy decisions via resources associated with the Department of Defense or the National Security Council or through the White House staff, often over the objections of State, which were even publicly voiced a few times.

And though Rumsfeld has been deliberately knocking heads in DOD, Secretary of State Powell hasn't seemed willing to work to bring about a similar degree of reform in the State Department. Which has made his behavior very confusion; sometimes he's seemed to be completely onboard with the President, but other times it seems as if he's advocating policies given to him from below even though they were counter to Presidential attitudes. That has made him something of an enigma. (One begins to wonder if he just agrees with whoever spoke to him last.)

Unfortunately, part of the culture which seems to infuse State is post-nationalism, part of what Fonte calls "transnational progressivism". (One person described this as the idea that "it's more important who you stand with than what you stand for.") This includes the idea that negotiations and internationalist efforts are always the right answer to every problem, and that the US should submit itself to the will of the world as expressed in nascent world government organizations like the UN and ICC.

State also seemed far more sympathetic to the Arabs relating to Israel and in other ways than the Bush administration, and some of us came to view State not so much as our diplomacy arm to the world as the world's diplomacy arm in the US.

During the period between the attacks in September of 2001 and the end of major combat in Iraq, it would have been a mistake to traumatically revamp State. If Powell had been able to handle it, and had brought State on board, that would have been fine. It was his job to do, but either he didn't try or he tried and failed. However, going beyond that to the level of Congressional hearings and consideration of a new law which would formally change State entirely would have been a bad thing during the period of diplomatic crisis. Even at its worst State wasn't useless. And if State itself was under serious formal investigation within the US, its ability to do anything internationally would have been seriously limited.

During this interval, there were major questions being debated here and everywhere else, and all of them pivoted on the invasion of Iraq. Would the US submit itself to be bound