Matt Yglesias

Generals Perturbed By Senators’ Obstruction of Chris Hill

I don’t think I’ve posted yet on John McCain and Lindsey Graham acting to hold up veteran diplomat Christopher Hill’s appointment to serve as Ambassador to Iraq. Hill’s a career foreign service officer whose views are sufficiently compatible with conservative politics that George W. Bush made him Ambassador to Poland, Ambassador to Korea, and Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia. But neocons are mad that in that last role he helped avert a war with North Korea, so they’re holding up his appointment. There’s no real prospect of blocking him, but McCain and Graham are managing to annoy some of their erstwhile friends. Laura Rozen reports:

There’s one as yet unremarked constituency increasingly disturbed by some Republican senators’ efforts to block the confirmation of former North Korea envoy Christopher Hill to be the next U.S. ambassador to Iraq: the U.S. military.

Sources tell The Cable that Centcom commander Gen. David Petraeus, top Iraq commander Gen. Raymond Odierno, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates are frustrated by the delay in getting a U.S. ambassador confirmed and into place in Iraq, and support Hill’s confirmation proceeding swiftly.

That said, the nominal source of opposition to Hill is not his work in North Korea but his lack of experience in the Arab world. I think this is a concern that deserves to be taken seriously, but anyone who’s serious about it would recognize that it’s a systemic issue. One might think that the Foreign Service ought to be organized around regional or cultural areas of specialty. But that’s not generally how our system, which prefers to emphasize a form of generalized diplomatic expertise, works. It may be worth reconsidering this choice as a general matter. But there’s no reason to single out one senior FSO for problems here, and everyone knows that their real issue is Cheneyite opposition to the North Korea policy that Hill, Condoleezza Rice, and Bush followed at the end of the Bush administration.

Needed: More Bureaucrats

Alyssa Rosenberg makes an excellent point about the missing Treasury Department subcabinet officials:

It’s hard to argue that it’s in any way a good thing that Obama hasn’t filled a lot of key posts at Treasury. But that kind of misses the point. Obama shouldn’t have to appoint that many people in the first place. There are far too many positions that the president has to fill personally that could be easily and competently done by career employees. Of course the president needs people who can implement his agenda and set policy. That’s what department heads and a layer of political appointees immediately below him or her are for. But agencies and departments would be vastly better served by having high-ranking career employees bringing their institutional memory and experience to high-level positions in departments and ensuring that they can continue to function no matter how far along the president is in his vetting and appointments process.

Americans tend to assume that however we happen to do things is just the way things need to be done. But in reality, compared to other democracies we’re an extreme outlier in terms of how “deep” into the org charts of our agencies political appointees go. If you don’t like to think about foreigners, one way of thinking about how to build effective public sector institutions is always to look at the United States military where, unlike on the civilian side, political consensus has generally existed that effective institutions are important. You’ll see that while the president has discretion about which senior officers go where and do what, he doesn’t get to just pull new three- and four-star flag officers out of the ether (back in the day, things didn’t work that way, and during the Civil War there were plenty of “political generals” who did worse than the professionals). And what’s more, though a new president could shake things up right away, the expectation is that he won’t and that commanders will generally stay in place and provide continuity. They’ll report to a new commander-in-chief, and eventually they rotate to new assignments or into retirement, but the general assumption is that you don’t start everything from scratch. In addition to the various direct, practical benefits of greater professionalism this also greatly enhances the prestige of the low- and mid-level officers. The way you get to be an extremely important military commander is to start out as the most junior possible kind of commissioned officer and work your way up.

One potential model for civilian agencies might be the State Department where there are a ton of offices that are technically political appointments but where strong norms and traditions suggests that you fill them with career civil servants. Christopher Hill, for example, is a career foreign service officer. As such, he served on the team that negotiated the Dayton Accords. Based on that, he was given a “political” appointment as Ambassador to Macedonia. In 2000, he became Ambassador to Poland and he stayed in office until 2004 across a Presidential transition. Then he became Ambassador to South Korea, and in 2005 he became Assistant Secretary for East Asia. Soon, he’ll be Ambassador to Iraq. In general in the State Department it’s considered normal for the Undersecretary for Political Affairs and almost of all the Assistant Secretaries who report to him, and the policy-relevant ambassadorships to be occupied by career people.

Of course it’s worth saying that Timothy Geithner is essentially a person along this model—a guy who was working in a civil service job who, starting in 1995, got tapped for a series of increasingly-important political appointments in the Treasury Department who then left at the end of the Clinton administration. If the Bush administration had been inclined to make more Geithner-esque appointments at Treasury—elevating senior civil servants to subcabinet posts—it might have been more feasible to have a smooth transition.