Plan for embassies may not be workable

WASHINGTON -- Last May when I was in Uganda, deep in central Africa, I was approaching the American Embassy on the outskirts of Kampala when my driver, who had struck me over several days of work together as a sensible man, stopped the car on the side of the road. He refused to go any closer.
The embassy was about 300 feet away from us and bore a disturbing likeness to the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. It was big, gray and forbidding, with dark, solid walls, high fences, and a security gate that did indeed give pause.
"It scares me," he finally said -- and I got out and walked the distance to my own embassy for an interview with our ambassador. Frankly, it scared me, too. Rather too many American embassies do these days.
In Jordan, an American embassy that used to be on the main drag (and, while rundown, always seemed open and friendly) is now another armed camp on the outskirts of the city; in London, the old embassy remains, but it is blocked off at almost every turn; in Saudi Arabia, the two consulates-general in Jeddah and the eastern provinces have been closed, as they have been in most countries, leaving the countryside empty of American interlocutors.
The diplomatic Graham Greene days of yore -- where ambassadors languished in tropical open-air mansions, drinking vodka gimlets as the sun went down and discreetly exchanging nuanced tips with every sort of saint and scoundrel -- are clearly gone. And one wonders how they could ever return.
Skeptical
So I find myself more than a little skeptical about Secretary of State Rice's new "transformational diplomacy," even while, in my heart of hearts, I hope she can pull it off.
What the secretary envisions is no less than a return to the JFK-ish 1960s and early '70s, when correspondents like me could find some of the most talented diplomats and thinkers America ever produced representing America in the Third World (Latin America, Africa, Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East). It was a jubilant and effervescently hopeful time, when talented individuals did wonders in telling and showing the world what America was really like.
Rice announced this winter that she will shift, ultimately, as many as one-third of the 6,400 Foreign Service positions to those parts of the world. Noting that the U.S. has nearly as many diplomats in Germany, with 82 million people, as in India, with more than 1 billion, she immediately set out to take 100 positions from Europe and send them to the nearly 200 "provincial" cities across the globe that have populations of more than 1 million people and in which there is now no formal American presence. "This," she said, "is where the action is today."
There is no question that the smart and composed (and White House-connected) secretary is changing American foreign policy dramatically. The 30 or so "neocons" who got us into Iraq are subdued, and today she and her "neorealist" advisers (largely professional diplomats) have been gradually changing things. They believe in democratization, too, but through working with allies -- they have even gone so far as to talk to Iran behind the scenes -- and one can see the effect in President Bush's more cordial temperament recently.
But there is one problem (at least), and it is a big one. She is sending those Foreign Service officers into exactly the mouth of the tiger named Islamic terrorism, failed societies and human anarchy.
As Ambassador William Milam, a veteran of more than 35 years in the Foreign Service, commented to me this week: "The whole question as you move people out of the capitals and into the Third World countries is security! Why, when I was ambassador to Pakistan in the late '90s, I was surrogate ambassador to Afghanistan, but security would never let me go there."
Violence
If one needed any proof of the difficulties ahead, The Washington Post just reported that an American hip-hop band concert in North Sumatra, Indonesia, on Jan. 31 was going great -- before motorcyclists barged violently in, destroying the entire performance.
What's more, since those halcyon days of the 1960s, the State Department's own "culture" has tightened. There is less national expertise, less willingness to experiment or go "out there," and who can blame them? And at the same time, the Pentagon talks of and plans for a "long war" in the world, a la Iraq.
Universal Press Syndicate