Given the current circumstances, this probably isn’t a good time for career weapons experts to get pushed out of the State Department and replaced with Bush’s political appointees. And yet, that’s exactly what’s happening.
State Department officials appointed by President Bush have sidelined key career weapons experts and replaced them with less experienced political operatives who share the White House and Pentagon’s distrust of international negotiations and treaties.
The reorganization of the department’s arms control and international security bureaus was intended to help it better deal with 21st-century threats. Instead, it’s thrown the agency into turmoil and produced an exodus of experts with decades of experience in nuclear arms, chemical weapons and related matters, according to 11 current and former officials and documents obtained by Knight Ridder.
The reorganization was conducted largely in secret by a panel of four political appointees. A career expert was allowed to join the group only after most decisions had been made. Its work was overseen by Frederick Fleitz, a CIA officer who was detailed to the State Department as senior adviser to former Undersecretary of State John Bolton, a critic of arms agreements and international organizations.
The Knight Ridder article paints quite an unpleasant picture. In October, a dozen State Department employees delivered a rare written dissent to the reorganization plan, which has caused several top officials to leave government service. The same employees approached the Justice Department about stopping the plan, but they were unsuccessful.
In December, a group of employees told Undersecretary of State for Management, “The process has been gravely flawed from the outset, and smacks plainly of a political vendetta against career Foreign Service and Civil Service (personnel) by political appointees.”
Of course, the timing couldn’t be much worse.
Among those who have left as part of the “reorganization” is the State Department’s top authority on the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, “the cornerstone of the international regime to curb the spread of nuclear arms.”
Jonathan Granoff, the director of the Global Security Institute, an arms control advocacy group, said the loss of State Department arms-control expertise was especially worrisome because the only mechanism for verifying U.S. and Russian nuclear arms cuts – the 1991 START I treaty – is due to expire in less than three years.
That also will eliminate the most effective way of verifying that the former rivals are abiding by their Non-Proliferation Treaty commitments to eliminate their nuclear arsenals eventually, he said. “Rather than nurture our experts, the administration seems to have brought in neophytes without a passion for progress in this field and, worse, undermined the international institutions that are most effective in stopping proliferation,” he said.
And who is replacing the experts? Well, Thomas Lehrman, a political appointee who heads the new office of Weapons of Mass Destruction Terrorism, listed loyalty to Bush and Rice’s priorities as one of his qualifications.
Who feels safer?