MountainRunner has Manuel Miranda's (Office of Legislative Statecraft, U.S. Embassy Iraq) 'departure assessment' on Ambassador Ryan Crocker's and State's effort in Iraq.
From the General Assessment:
After a year at the Embassy, it is my general assessment that the State Department and the Foreign Service is not competent to do the job that they have undertaken in Iraq. It is not that the men and women of the Foreign Service and other State Department bureaus are not intelligent and hard-working, it is simply that they are not equipped to handle the job that the State Department has undertaken. Apart from the remarkable achievements of Coalition forces in the pacification of Iraq, the few civilian accomplishments that we are presently lauding, including the debathification law and the staffing of PRT's are a thin reed. It was regrettable to see the President recently grab on to it.
The purpose of the Surge, now one year old, was to pacify Iraq to allow the GOI to stand up. The State Department has not done its part coincident with the Commanding General's effort. This is not the fault of intelligent and hard working individuals skilled at the functions of the "normal embassy." The problem is institutional. The State Department bureaucracy is not equipped to handle the urgency of America's Iraq investment in blood and taxpayer funds. You lack the "fierce urgency of now."
Foreign Service officers, with ludicrously little management experience by any standard other than your own, are not equipped to manage programs, hundreds of millions in funds, and expert human capital assets needed to assist the Government of Iraq to stand up. It is apparent that, other than diplomacy, your only expertise is your own bureaucracy, which inherently makes State Department personnel unable to think outside the box or beyond the paths they have previously taken.
Bill Gertz in Washington Times' Inside the Ring has more.
A State Department official this week issued a blistering critique of Foreign Service bureaucrats at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad for undermining civilian stability efforts in Iraq.
The Feb. 5 memorandum to U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan C. Crocker stated that the military surge is working, but State Department support for civilian efforts to pacify the country is a disaster due to bureaucrats' "built-in attention deficit disorder."
The Associated Press reports that Miranda was a Republican Party activist and former top GOP congressional aide who worked at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and the State Department said Miranda was "entitled to his opinions" but that they were not shared by President Bush or Secretary of State Rice..
A full copy of Miranda's assessment is here.