{"id":183052,"date":"2015-03-27T19:32:00","date_gmt":"2015-03-28T00:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/03\/27\/why-we-need-to-clean-house-at-the-state-department\/"},"modified":"2015-03-27T19:32:00","modified_gmt":"2015-03-28T00:32:00","slug":"why-we-need-to-clean-house-at-the-state-department","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/03\/27\/why-we-need-to-clean-house-at-the-state-department\/","title":{"rendered":"Why We Need to Clean House at the State Department"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you have to conceal substantive negotiations from your foreign policy bureaucracy, it means that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/2015\/03\/23\/us-cuba-usa-insight-idUSKBN0MJ0AP20150323\">it&#8217;s time to fire a bunch of people in that bureaucracy<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">The December breakthrough that upended a half-century of U.S.-Cuba enmity has been portrayed as the fruit of 18 months of secret diplomacy.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">But Reuters interviews with more than a dozen people with direct knowledge of the process reveal a longer, painstakingly cautious quest by U.S. President Barack Obama and veteran Cuba specialists to forge the historic rapprochement.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">As now-overt U.S.-Cuban negotiations continue this month, Reuters also has uncovered new details of how talks began and how they stalled in late 2013 during secret sessions in Canada. Senior administration officials and others also revealed how both countries <b><span style=\"font-size: 100%; font-variant: small-caps;\">sidelined their foreign policy bureaucracies<\/span><\/b> and how Obama sought the Vatican\u2019s blessing to pacify opponents.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\"><b><span style=\"font-size: 100%; font-variant: small-caps;\">Obama at first froze out the State Department in part due to concern that &#8220;vested interests&#8221; there were bent on perpetuating a confrontational approach, said a former senior U.S. official. Secretary of State John Kerry was informed of the talks only after it appeared they might be fruitful, officials said.<\/span><\/b><\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Cuban President Raul Castro operated secretly too. Josefina Vidal, head of U.S. affairs at Cuba&#8217;s foreign ministry, was cut out, two Americans close to the process said. Vidal could not be reached for comment.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Sorry, but if your senior members of a bureaucracy, of <b>any<\/b> bureaucracy,&nbsp; have to be kept out of the loop by elected leaders in order to avoid possible sabotage of policy, then it&#8217;s time for them <b>not<\/b> to be senior members of that bureaucracy.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately the legacy of a competent non-partisan civil service has been undermined by decades of <a href=\"javascript:void(0)\">burrowing<\/a> by Republicans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you have to conceal substantive negotiations from your foreign policy bureaucracy, it means that it&#8217;s time to fire a bunch of people in that bureaucracy: The December breakthrough that upended a half-century of U.S.-Cuba enmity has been portrayed as the fruit of 18 months of secret diplomacy.But Reuters interviews with more than a dozen &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,964,1068,978],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-183052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-foreign-relations","category-latin-america","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183052"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183052"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183052\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}