Israel Matzav

US reshuffling diplomats in light of Wikileaks

I suppose this was inevitable. The United States is going to have to re-shuffle some of its diplomatic personnel in light of the Wikileaks document dump.

The shakeups are most likely at embassies where U.S. diplomats and other officials wrote classified cables—made public by WikiLeaks over the last week, or soon to be made public, with the Americans identified by name and title—in which they were harshly critical of corrupt or incompetent local government leaders.

Officials were reluctant to identify specific diplomats who might have to be removed from their posts. But they did not deny there were obvious candidates, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Gene Cretz, a highly respected career diplomat who wrote in a 2009 cable—revealed in the initial WikiLeaks dump—that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi never travels without his "voluptuous blond" Ukrainian nurse.

"That's another part of the tragedy of this," said a senior U.S. national-security official. "We're going to have to pull out some of our best people—the diplomats who best represented the United States and were the most thoughtful in their analysis—because they dared to report back the truth about the nations in which they serve."

The State Department acknowledges that the WikiLeaks dump has done damage to American foreign policy, a problem that is likely to be compounded by the withdrawal of U.S. diplomats and other embassy officials who cannot be easily replaced because they are—not surprisingly—among the government's best-trained specialists on the foreign nations and regions where they are now posted.

Administration officials say that while some foreign governments have expressed outrage over the comments made in diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks—among them, NATO allies France, Italy, and Turkey, as well as Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia—there has been no formal move by those governments so far to force the ouster of U.S. diplomats identified in the cables.

"We think it's only a matter of time, though," predicted a senior official. "You're bound to see some PNG-ing of our diplomats." (He was referring to the diplomatic term "persona non grata," applied when a government demands the removal of an unwelcome foreign diplomat.)

I assume that the State Department has enough Arabists left to replace the ones who are being withdrawn. What could go wrong?

Labels: persona non grata, Wikileaks

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:06 AM