WASHINGTON — Four days before a deadline for Foreign Service officers to volunteer to go to Iraq or face the prospect of being ordered there, the State Department notified employees Saturday that “about half” of 48 open assignments there for next year have been filled.
“This reduces but does not eliminate the possibility that directed assignments may be necessary,” Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte wrote in an e-mailed update. Filling the remaining jobs remains “the Department’s priority,” he said, adding that he remains optimistic that more will volunteer.
With 26 positions still open, however, it appeared increasingly unlikely that they would all be filled by Tuesday’s deadline. Both Negroponte and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have made clear in recent days that they intend to proceed with a mandatory call-up if spots remain unstaffed.
“If I need somebody to serve in Iraq, they have to serve there,” Rice said Friday in Dallas.
Rice praised the Foreign Service and noted that “large numbers” have volunteered for Iraq duty in the past four years. She said that widespread news reports indicating diplomatic dissension over possible directed assignments were “overblown.”
The Foreign Service, Rice said, resented “the idea that they don’t want to serve in the highest priority security and national security issue for the United States.”
But the plan to order diplomats to take posts in Iraq if enough volunteers cannot be found — the first time forced assignments have been contemplated since the Vietnam War — has been controversial within and outside the service.
The controversy has exacerbated antagonism between the U.S. military and the diplomatic corps. Some comments on State’s public blog, Dipnote, praised soldiers who accept dangerous assignments without question and criticized the Foreign Service for raising questions. Such criticism, which has also been expressed to the news media by the military in Iraq, raises hackles inside State, where the Foreign Service has far smaller resources.
“Out of 6,500 Foreign Service generalists, 68 percent of them are serving overseas,” many in hardship posts, said one Baghdad-based diplomat, and more than 1,200 have already served voluntarily in Iraq. “Of 1.4 million in military service, only 20 percent” are overseas at any given time, he said.
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