Here's an oldie but goodie -- State Dept. contracts to rebuild Iraq are vulnerable to billions in waste, fraud and abuse. The Wall Street Journal's August Cole relays an Iraq special inspector general report that police training by Virginia-based company DynCorp is not being adequately monitored by State Dept. ...

The Washington Post's Mary Beth Sheridan and Greg Jaffe reports that Defense Sec. Robert Gates wants to merge together the Pentagon and State Departments responsibilities for nation-building in failing states like Somalia and Yemen: The proposal would concentrate existing and new money in three long-term funds totaling as much as $2 billion. They would be dedicated to training security forces, preventing conflicts and stabilizing violence-torn societies around the world. The funds would exist separately from the war budgets, and allow for quicker and better-coordinated response to looming or actual conflicts, officials said. In a memo to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Gates noted that the huge increase in Pentagon funding for stabilization efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan has prompted complaints about the militarization of U.S. foreign policy. // ') ; } // ]]> The proposal "sets forth a new approach that could transcend these debates. It argues for a new model of shared responsibility and pooled resources for cross-cutting security challenges," Gates wrote in the unclassified Dec. 15 memo, which was obtained by The Washington Post. It is hard to see, though, how a $2 billion program can transcend any national security debate.

Secretary of State Clinton's recent speech on America’s human rights agenda at Georgetown University may deserve a place in history, if the Obama Administration sticks to its own program. The language was definitely Clintonian (Hillarian?) – straightforward, mostly unambiguous, and inspiring in a grounded sort of way.  It included the following insights: "Democracy has proven the best political system for making human rights a human reality over the long term." "In democracies, respecting rights isn’t a choice leaders make day by day; it is the reason they govern." "We may call rights inalienable, but making them so has always been hard work." "Believing in human rights means committing ourselves to action, and when we sign up for the promise of rights that apply everywhere, to everyone, that rights will be able to protect and enable human dignity, we also sign up for the hard work of making that promise a reality." This was “the” Obama administration human rights speech for the next few years at least, since it laid out four key ingredients for human rights  in U.S. foreign policy.

The New York Times' James Risen and Mark Mazetti broke the news last night that the company formerly known as Blackwater actively participated in CIA raids against insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Blackwater also transported detainees for the CIA. This is despite the fact that that Blackwater's CIA contract stipulated that the private security contractor should only participate in defensive operations. And also that government contracting law and common sense dictate that private companies shouldn't be fighting wars. After the Jack Abramoff scandal in 2006, there was a lot of talk about the "revolving door" in Washington between lobbyists and lawmakers. It became a familiar narrative that members of Congress or former Congressional staffers would leave Capitol Hill and take a lucrative job in the private sector where they proceeded to influence their former Hill colleagues. What the history of Blackwater has demonstrated is the "revolving door" between the Pentagon, intelligence agencies and the coterie of private security contracting companies.

By Mitchell Polman During his tenure as director of the now defunct United States Information Agency, renowned journalist Edward R. Murrow said, "The really crucial link in the international communication chain is the last three feet, which is bridged by personal contact, one person talking to another.” Public diplomacy practitioners often refer to Murrow's statement in describing the nature of their work. It was with this vital aspect of human communication in mind that the Fulbright Scholars program and the Department of State's Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs (ECA) in 2004 created the "Direct Access to the Muslim World" program. The program makes it possible for U.S. universities to bring specialists from the Islamic world to the U.S. for six weeks of teaching, scholarship, and engagement with local communities. Fulbright scholars in this program, visiting academics from countries as diverse as Indonesia and Bosnia, have academic duties at their host institutions, and team-teach with host college professors. They are also expected to meet and talk with high school students, community service groups, religious groups, and other local organizations. Many of the sponsoring institutions are small colleges, state universities, and community colleges. In short, the emphasis is on giving Americans, especially in rural and small-towns, the opportunity to learn directly about the Muslim faith and life in predominantly Muslim societies directly from scholars who live in a predominantly Muslim society. The scholars also assist their host universities in developing curricula and materials related to Islam, including at colleges with no or very few programs related to Islam. The program is in real demand. "It's been a popular program", says Andy Riess, from the Outreach and Public Relations office of the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars (a division of the International Institute of Education), which administers the program under contract from the State Department. One of this year's scholars was Professor Fikret Karcic, an Islamic theologian and professor

In the new New Republic, Michael Crowley has a short, front-of-the-magazine piece on Sec. of State Hillary Clinton. The piece mainly tries to impute significance to Clinton's verbal "gaffes" so far, i.e. comparing North Korea to an unruly teenager. Crowley less than compellingly concludes that such gaffes are a continuation of Clinton's mistake-filled presidential campaign. What was interesting, though, was that Clinton was being profiled at all.

Via the Washington Post, the Miami Herald's Juan Tamayo reports that Voice of America, the U.S. government's radio feed, will increase its reach into Latin America. This includes audiences in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua, who have governments generally critical of the Obama administration. Mitchell Polman has written a ...

As James Fallows' blog makes clear, President Obama's human rights effort in China was more nuanced, and probably more successful, than people unfamiliar with China and Asia more generally can easily gauge.  The question is whether human rights have a permanent foothold in U.S. foreign policy.

Part of our Public Service Announcement series, profiling federal employees and their work By Norman Kelley The United States knew it had more than a diplomatic problem when two of its embassies were targeted by terrorist bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. The attacks in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam made it clear to the State Department that its security apparatus was woefully inadequate. Enemies of the United States, especially Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda, were making use of State's lack of security preparation. Embassy security had been an on-going but neglected concern since 1983, when the US embassy in Beirut was bombed. Beginning with the Clinton Administration, State began a process of revamping America’s diplomatic installations to meet its security challenges. [caption id="attachment_5364" align="alignleft" width="120" caption="Jay Hicks"][/caption] One of the people now at the heart of that program is Jay Hicks, a native of Flint, Michigan who came to government service after many years as a private sector real estate developer. Hicks, Managing Director at the State Department’s Office of Planning and Real Estate (OP&RE) and a member of the Senior Executive Service, sat down recently with Understanding Government at a Dupont Circle coffee shop to talk about his time in public service. On a dreary, rainy fall morning, before he took off for Madrid, Hicks talked about his work one of the missions of the division of the Department of State’s Overseas Building Operations (OBO), the division of State that oversees OP&RE (located in Rosslyn, Va.). “With the bombings of Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, it was apparent that we were very vulnerable with our embassies overseas,” he said. “We weren’t building many new embassies at the time of those tragic terrorist attacks. In the wake of those bombings, it was apparent to everybody that we needed to do something different, and what they did was set up a program where there was a dramatic infusion of capital and cash into the State Dept. to build new embassies.”

Here is a potentially big foreign policy change from the Bush administration to the Obama administration: the U.S. will have an ambassador at the upcoming International Criminal Court conference, reports the Washington Post's Colum Lynch.  With three weeks left in office, Bill Clinton signed a treaty that created the ...