A Crocker Who’s No Betty

Ryan Clark Crocker is a consummate professional, one of those rare most-senior U.S. ambassadors who have achieved his appointments by working their way up through the ranks as a career Foreign Service Officer (FSO) with the Department of State… as opposed to being a political appointee offered a juicy ambassadorship for campaign support or service to a political party. In countries ranging from the U.K. (known as the “Court of St. James” for royal palace that is the seat of the monarchy) to Japan and China to the Bahamas, political appointees represent our government as ambassadors. But in the tough nations and those of significantly less glitz and glitter, the ambassadors are the hard-working “best and brightest” FSOs (civil servants) who have dedicated years to studying the local languages and cultures, trained in the political countries where they are sent. I grew up in just such a family, and lived as a teenager in Lebanon. I know the drill.

Ambassador Crocker has served under Republican and Democratic administrations alike. His focus has been the Middle East and Central Asia: “Ryan Clark Crocker (born June 19, 1949) is a Career Ambassador within the United States Foreign Service and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He currently is the United States Ambassador to Afghanistan. He was the United States Ambassador to Iraq until 2009; he previously served as the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan from 2004 to 2007, to Syria from 1998 to 2001, to Kuwait from 1994 to 1997, and to Lebanon from 1990 to 1993. In January 2010 he became Dean of Texas A&M University's George Bush School of Government and Public Service. He was nominated by President Barack Obama in April 2011 to serve as the next U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan and was confirmed to the post by the United States Senate by unanimous consent on June 30, 2011. In May 2012 he announced he will step down in mid-summer due to unspecified health reasons.” Wikipedia.

Trained in Persian languages, fluent in Arabic and able to claim a lifetime of dedicated service with a focus on one of the most volatile areas on earth, as he departs after almost four decades of government service, Ambassador Crocker has some wise words for Americans in their future foreign policy directives, particularly addressing the current issues in Syria and Iran:

¶ Remember the law of unintended consequences.

¶ Recognize the limits of the United States’ actual capabilities.

¶ Understand that getting out of a conflict once you are in can often be dangerous and as destructive for the country as the original conflict. New York Times, July 28^th

“You better do some cold calculating, you know, about how do you really think you are going to influence things for the better,” he told the Times. In the three sustained post-Korean War (and note Korea is still divided) conflicts where we dedicated massive troops, I am reminded that we have not really implemented our goals: South Vietnam fell to the enemy, Iraq’s Shiite-leaning government has marched that nation’s affinities directly into our enemy Iran’s sphere of influence and Afghanistan is mostly controlled by the Taliban (and maybe a few regional warlords), but the corrupt Karzai regime we effectively put in power controls little more than the region immediately around Kabul.

“In the years ahead, Mr. Crocker sees, if anything, an increasingly fraught foreign landscape in a world set afire by war and revolution, a chapter bound to frustrate the best intentions and most sophisticated strategies of the United States. Although he speaks Arabic and has spent a lifetime immersed in the Arab world and Afghanistan, Mr. Crocker is deeply skeptical that Americans on foreign soil can be anything other than strangers in a strange land… ‘We’re a superpower, we don’t fight on our territory, but that means you are in somebody else’s stadium, playing by somebody else’s ground rules, and you have to understand the environment, the history, the politics of the country you wish to intervene in,’ he said.

“Although publicly Mr. Crocker has sometimes presented the glass as half-full when assessing the situation in foreign countries, fellow diplomats say that his private analyses tend to be stark and unromantic — a vision shaped by his 38 years of experience in which he confronted over and over the limits of American power and the hostility of many in the world to what the United States stands for.” The Times. He has been a good and loyal soldier even though he was aware of how misdirected so much of what the higher-ups have commanded.

Foreign policy is complex, and although we are a lettuce bowl of ethic mixes, we really only share a border with two rather friendly neighbors and are otherwise isolated by two vast oceans from most of the rest of the world. Except for a language that may be learned at home, Americans don’t learn foreign languages well (you can see how poorly any film that isn’t in English does in this country), really don’t know much of cultures beyond our borders and tend to react to cowboy-driven sloganeering from politicians with not much in the way of international expertise.

We have positive knee-jerk reactions to Israel and the U.K. and negative to Russia and China, regardless the logic or the situation. We see a world that is mired in thousands of shades of gray in stark black and white terms, good vs evil, you’re for us or against us. We cannot afford to be the world’s policeman – we are resented whenever we try – and what we need to do, but have failed miserably to date at generating, is global support for what we really need overseas. It cannot always be about dictating, speaking without listening, predicting how we will achieve this or that goal with our armed forces or our diplomatic pressures. Unless you really understand a particular situation and culture in a distant land, it’s time to temper raw opinion with hard facts. Thank you Mr. Ambassador for your insights.

I’m Peter Dekom, and cowboys really do make terrible foreign policy decisions.