Memorial Day: Remember Our Diplomats, Too

from the Dallas Morning News [behind a paywall, unfortunately]:

This Memorial Day, remember the diplomats, too

by Clayton McCleskey*

WASHINGTON — They are the proud, the few and the unarmed. They dodge bullets in the mountains of Afghanistan and brave the deserts of Iraq. They serve as America’s face to the world, from violence-ridden Mexico to the financial hubs of Asia to the capitals of Europe. They promote American business and protect American citizens abroad. They are the men and women of the U.S. Foreign Service.

On Memorial Day, we rightly pause to remember those who serve our nation in military uniform. But we should also recognize the more than 12,000 members of the American diplomatic corps who serve in Washington and in 271 missions across the globe.

“They are the ones out there on the front lines trying to advocate and explain [American] policies, regardless of which administration they are serving,” said Karen Hughes, former Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy under President George W. Bush. She praised the Foreign Service as “a very dedicated group of public servants” who “work and make sacrifices around the world in some very difficult assignments.”

You may think of diplomats as tuxedo-wearing statesmen sipping cocktails at summits in Switzerland, but American diplomats are deployed in places like war-torn Africa and Afghanistan, where they often face the same dangers as members of the military. One diplomat I spoke to said he has been shot at five times in the line of duty.

Yet, even as America’s engagement with the world is growing more crucial, budget hawks are circling over the State Department. Speaking to the National Conference of Editorial Writers this month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned, “There’s a huge gap between perception and reality … and people think that we can balance our budget on the back of our foreign operations.”

The continuing resolution passed to fund the government cut $8 billion for the State Department and USAID — while increasing the Defense Department’s budget by $5 billion. The demands on the State Department are growing, but the budget isn’t.

“It is so out of whack with what we have to be doing,” Clinton lamented.

Part of the problem is that many Americans misunderstand diplomats’ role. Diplomacy isn’t about throwing money at the world. Yes, foreign aid — which accounts for only about 1 percent of the total federal budget — is a useful diplomatic tool. But too often diplomacy is dismissed as wasteful global charity or useless hemmin’ and hawin’ at the United Nations. Whether working to secure access to natural resources (like oil), leading reconstruction in Afghanistan or screening hundreds of thousands of visa applicants, diplomats are producing concrete results. They are the facilitators of globalization.

In an interconnected world, diplomacy is becoming ever more relevant to the daily lives of Americans, especially when it comes to the economy. Diplomats pave the way for American businesses to make profits at home by expanding overseas.

“If companies want to grow, if we want to grow our GDP, if we want to be competitive on a global basis in the 21st century, people really have to step up to export and export more, because that’s where the growth opportunities are,” said Lorraine Hariton, U.S. Special Representative for
Commercial and Business Affairs.

Texas definitely enjoys the dividends of diplomacy. According to the latest figures from the International Trade Administration and Bureau of the Census, in 2009 the Dallas-Fort Worth area exported $19.9 billion worth of merchandise. And because of the Open Skies agreements liberalizing international air travel,Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport will see “billions of dollars in new business,” Clinton said this month.

Members of the Foreign Service play a crucial role in making that kind of lucrative international agreement possible, part of a government-wide campaign to help American businesses increase exports.

“We need to set up partnerships and relationships all around the world so we can understand the market needs in Kenya as well as the market needs in Fort Worth,” Hariton said.

Indeed, to maintain America’s global competitiveness and to capitalize on the opportunities globalization creates, we need a well-funded diplomatic
corps.

“Diplomacy used to be thought of as the quiet, behind-the-scenes, government-to-government communications,” Hughes told me.

It’s now so much more than that. “In order for America to enact the kinds of policies we want to enact around the world,” Hughes explained, “we have got to build a public case for those policies, for our values and for our interests.”

Our diplomats are out in the trenches doing just that, often at great personal danger — remember the Iranian hostage crisis? Foreign Service officers have also been the targets of drug violence, insurgent attacks and kidnappings. Yet they man their posts, safeguarding American interests and
protecting U.S. citizens overseas.

This weekend, as we salute our military, we also owe a tribute to America’s diplomats, many of whom are in conflict zones riding in the same Humvees as the troops. The only difference is that they can’t shoot back.

*Clayton M. McCleskey is a contributing writer for The Dallas Morning News, based in Washington. His email address is letters@claytonmccleskey.com.*

Hat tip to the American Foreign Service Association.

For some war dead, Arlington's gates are closed

from The Washington Post:

For some war dead, Arlington's gates are closed

by Marc Chretien

On Memorial Day weekend two years ago, I was in Iraq and busy throwing myself a goodbye party. On hand were my closest friends in Baghdad. Most, like me, were serving with the State Department, though some were with USAID or other federal agencies. A number of us had worked many years in Iraq, and we always got together to send a friend home.

We were all civilians and had volunteered for this service. It wasn’t glamorous. In the early years in Iraq, we were awarded a “Certificate of Appreciation” from the State Department at the end of our tours. It was a photocopied piece of paper, thanking us for our service. It was presented in a nice frame. Immediately after the ceremony we had to peel the paper certificate out of the frame, because there was only one frame to use. By 2009 we finally had enough frames, but by then most of us did not request one.

One of my favorite colleagues, Terry Barnich, a fellow senior staffer at the embassy in Baghdad, was at the party that day. He had left a promising career in law and public service in Chicago to volunteer to work in Iraq. He was not what we called a “palace rat” — someone who refused to leave the embassy for work outside the wire. Terry was different. He was the best-dressed man I have ever seen in a combat zone. But he didn’t wear a “full Bremer,” complete with khakis, combat boots and a blue blazer. He was more subtle than that. Even in 120 degrees of blast-furnace heat, he had on a pressed cotton shirt, pants with a crease in them and polished shoes. All this while wearing a helmet and armor and traveling to places such as Fallujah, where roads can have a coating of dust five inches deep.

He epitomized that old Hemingway ideal of grace under pressure. While I, a middle-aged lawyer, was sweltering in cargo pants and a rumpled polo shirt with white salt marks from my sweat, Terry would hop aboard convoys as if he were going to the Head of the Charles Regatta in Boston. He didn’t shirk work that required him to be in some very ugly places. Most of us liked to complain a bit. Terry didn’t.

I flew to Dulles the day after my party. I came home to Arlington and an e-mail account full of messages from my friends back in Iraq. Terry had been killed in Fallujah later that weekend. He was riding in the ninth vehicle in a convoy, checking on the status of the city’s wastewater-treatment plant. His vehicle had struck an improvised explosive device, killing several aboard, including a Navy officer, a contractor and Terry.

At 56, I have built coping mechanisms over the years when someone close to me dies, especially in combat. I send out a “Family Gram” to relatives and friends, and I usually include my Marine and Army friends as well. Those who have lost buddies in combat know that friendships formed in war zones are like no others. I was particularly touched after Terry’s death by the words of many Marine friends, as all of them had experienced this kind of loss.

Last fall I attended a funeral at Arlington National Cemetery for a fallen Marine. I did not know him, but I knew his father. I came to honor his service and to show my respect. The young Marine had died in Sangin, in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, where I had just finished a tour as a senior adviser for the State Department. Marines are an insular lot — a tribal, warrior clan, and one of their own had fallen. Gathered at the funeral were several hundred Marines: young ones, senior ranking officers and retired Marines. The young widow, starkly beautiful, was lost in her grief.

I took it all in: the singing of “Danny Boy,” the horse-drawn caisson, the folded flag handed to the new widow. I bit my lip to keep my tears away. I went home exhausted, but I could see, and appreciate, what a grateful nation did to honor someone who had died in its service.

I have a simple request to make: We should allow federal civilian employees who die in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan to be buried at Arlington Cemetery. Terry Barnich isn’t even listed in newspapers as a fatality of the Iraq war — he wasn’t in the military. And he couldn’t be buried at Arlington.

I know there’s a distinction between military service and civilian service. But consider this: World War II and the Korean War had extremely few civilians involved in combat. Vietnam started the trend, with certain federal agencies sending civilians into the war. Iraq and Afghanistan have seen, for the first time, fairly large numbers of civilians serving side by side with Marines and soldiers. In Afghanistan, we serve in forward-deployed “district support teams.” In Helmand, where I led the civilian team into Marja immediately after the Marines cleared the town last year, four of us composed the civilian presence there, all in tight quarters with the Marines, in an exposed and dangerous area.

I know, as Terry knew, what it feels like to have a mortar round land so close to you that the blast wave blows your helmet off your head (sorry, some of us civilians don’t snap the chin straps). Or to have rockets hit the sleeping quarters next to yours, splitting it open like it was made of aluminum foil, killing its occupants. Or even the painful indignity of having rocks hit your face, thrown by children when you run out of candy to give them.

Military service is still qualitatively different. The most dangerous jobs in Iraq and Afghanistan are always held by troops: manning a checkpoint, being a turret gunner or, worse, acting as human bait, as Marines do when they’re out on foot patrols in Helmand, seeking to identify the location of Taliban fighters. We civilians don’t have it that bad, and unlike the troops, we can quit (even if most of us don’t).

I’m not asking for special treatment or anything that doesn’t acknowledge those differences. What I am asking for is respect. When I go, as an unarmed civilian, with a Marine patrol to some outlying area such as Marja, I try my best to step in the exact footprints of the Marine in front of me. With each step, I wonder if this is my unlucky day. And should I get killed, I’d like to be buried at Arlington Cemetery. (I did serve in the Army, and so would be eligible for inurnment at the Arlington columbarium, but that wouldn’t have anything to do with my current wartime service.)

There are very few of us who do this for a living, year in, year out. Civilians help form local governments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Civilian knowledge is used in specialty areas such as agriculture, where some USDA experts serve in the field with the military, helping Afghan subsistence farmers increase their yields so that they and their families can make it through the winter. Only a few of us die each year.

We know the risks. We have no sense of entitlement. We want no special benefits and don’t feel we deserve medals. But should we give our final measure to our country as a result of direct enemy action, I think we should be eligible for burial at Arlington National Cemetery.

Marc Chretien, a lawyer and a former paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division, served for more than five years as a senior adviser with the State Department in Iraq and Afghanistan. He expects to deploy to Afghanistan again late this summer.

Comment: As we understand the situation, Mr. Barnich is also ineligible to be buried at any National Ceretery.