U.S. Embassy Baghdad's "Last Three (Virtual) Feet"

DipNote has announced U.S. Embassy Baghdad's latest initiative in public diplomacy, a new program on its YouTube channel called "Window Into the U.S. Embassy."

OK, given the realities of the security situation in and around Baghdad, maybe our public diplomacy options there are limited to social media and YouTube. I can understand that. But, the Dipnote post has this strange concluding paragraph that makes a mockery of the whole idea of impersonal person-to-person communication:

I'm a firm believer in Edward R. Murrow's tried and true words about effective communication with foreign audiences: "The real crucial link in the international communication chain is the last three feet... one person talking to another." While there's no substitute for meeting Iraqis face-to-face, and building relationships over a cup of steaming tea or a plate of kebabs, here at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad social media is helping us open windows into new audiences and build bridges across those last three (virtual) feet.

DipNote's post seems to be having an argument with itself. In the first place, we will speak to Iraqis at arms length, and in the second place, face-to-face communication is crucial. Which is it?

If there really "is no substitute" for meeting Iraqis face-to-face, then why are we substituting a YouTube program for just that? And, if we have no better option but to do just that, why are we invoking the sainted Edward R. Murrow and his all-important "last three feet" in a post about how we will keep the internet between us and the Iraqi public?

What is the "virtual" last three feet, anyway? Virtual as in "simulated," I suppose. We will pretend to talk to you in person, and we invite you to pretend along with us.

The idea of virtual human contact simply doesn't fit into the Murrow paradigm, and by using it Dipnote invites snickering.

Wiki-Whizzzzz

The State Department dodged a bullet last May, according to the WaPo.

In a WaPo story with a somewhat misleading headline, WikiLeaks cable dump reveals flaws of State Department's information-sharing tool, we learn that:

A few State Department officials expressed early concerns about unauthorized access to the [Net-Centric Diplomacy] database, but these worries mostly involved threats to individual privacy, department officials said. In practice, agency officials relied on the end-users of the data - mostly military and intelligence personnel - to guard against abuse.

The department was not equipped to assign individual passwords or perform independent scrutiny over the hundreds of thousands of users authorized by the Pentagon to use the database, said Kennedy, the undersecretary of state.

"It is the responsibility of the receiving agency to ensure that the information is handled, stored and processed in accordance with U.S. government procedures," he said.

Indeed. That's what is somewhat misleading about the headline, since the "flaws" in that info-sharing tool were introduced when the Army allowed PFC Manning to pretty much run amok with its classified computer databases.

But here's the bullet-dodging moment:

Although it is perhaps small comfort, the disclosures could have been worse. In May, the Obama administration's top intelligence officer asked the State Department to expand the amount of material available to other agencies through Net-Centric Diplomacy.

In a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, then-Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair urged that the database include not only cables but also e-mails between State Department officials. Such a move would "ensure that critical information will reach the necessary readers across the government," Blair wrote.

Clinton refused.

Having cable traffic in the public view is bad enough, but imagine how much worse it would be if WikiLeaks had your e-mails as well.

That was close.

Synchronicity?

A correspondent who keeps track of these things notified me of a confluence of seemingly unrelated events that occurred in St. Petersburg, Russia, on December 28/29.

First, Bobby Farrell, front man of the musical group Boney M, died there while on tour. The UK Telegraph reports:

Farrell, 61, had performed in St Petersburg on Wednesday but had complained of breathing problems before and after his show, according to his agent John Seine. Staff at his hotel discovered him after he failed to answer a wake-up call.

Coincidentally, the date of his death, December 29, was the same as Grigori Rasputin, the infamous Russian mystic who was an adviser of the Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra, who died in 1916. Rasputin however met a more brutal demise, as he was poisoned, shot four teams and thrown in the river before he eventually drowned.

Rasputin was also the name of a 1978 Boney M hit [here's the video], reaching number two in the British charts.

-- snip --

Boney M was the first Western music group invited by a Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, to perform in the Soviet Union. A Soviet military plane flew the performers from London to Moscow, where they sang for an audience of 2,700 Russians in Red Square.

Okay, one coincidence is easy to accept. But now the coincidences multiply.

The evening before Farrell and Rasputin died, Anna Chapman, the protege of Vladimir Putin, Russia's current mad monk and St. Petersburg's favorite son [Putin and Rasputin, is there a little similarity there?] gave her first interview to Russian state-run television. She talked about her hopes to have a TV or movie career, and was presented with a pet lion.

See for yourself:

Now here's the second Rasputin tie-in. Rasputin had a daughter, Maria, who grew up in St. Petersburg and aspired to be an entertainer. After the Revolution she became a lion tamer, toured the United States, and settled down in Los Angeles. She died in a bungalow near the Hollywood Freeway.

I'll admit the destiny behind all of this is still a bit murky. Maybe it will take a vodka or two before the course of the future becomes clear.

H/T to The Snake's Mommy, and a happy new year!

Mexico's Drug Wars "Surpassing Usual, Proper, Or Specified Limits"

If you follow the news from Mexico you are probably numb from the unrelenting tragedy of the drug wars, in which more than 30,000 people have been killed since Mexican President Felipe Calderon began a crackdown on the narco cartels four years ago this month.

H/T to Blog del Narco for reporting on a commonplace administrative matter in one Mexican city that cut through the fog of statistics and made me wince.

Due to the excess of deaths ("debido al exceso de muertes") that occurred in recent months in Sinaloa, the city many drug kingpins call home, the health department has run out of death certificates and is giving families of the dead copies of the certificates rather than originals.

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Webster's definition of EXCESS:

(1) the state or an instance of surpassing usual, proper, or specified limits; superfluity; the amount or degree by which one thing or quantity exceeds another

(2) undue or immoderate indulgence; intemperance; also, an act or instance of intemperance

I Didn't Want To Be The First ...

... to notice the news story about that guy who robbed a bank while wearing a Hillary Clinton mask. But, since John Brown's Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review has broken the ice, here it is:

A gun-toting man in a Halloween-style mask robbed a Sterling [Virginia] bank on Dec. 27, authorities said. It appeared that the man wore a Hillary Clinton mask, according to Kraig Troxell, spokesman for the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office.

Read the rest of the WaPo story here.

Now, here's my question - was the robber wearing a pantsuit?

WikiLeaks? More Like Late'nWeak

WikiLeaks is a latecomer to the business of publishing U.S. diplomatic documents, and an amateurish one.

As the Office of the Historian reminds us in a DipNote post today, the State Department has been publishing its own official diplomatic documents for all the world to see for 150 years now. And, unlike WikiLeaks, it adds scholarly value to the raw documents via a documentary editorial process, and also gets them declassified. There's really no comparison.

The WikiLeaks controversy highlights a whole set of important questions about how the United States, or any government, conducts its affairs in the international arena. Similarly, the ongoing challenges of the day attest to the sweep of issues that must be negotiated among states. What, exactly, do diplomats do? How, precisely, is diplomacy conducted? How are particularly thorny diplomatic issues negotiated? How much information should be kept secret, and how much should be shared? What is the goal of foreign policy? What does “national security” mean, and who defines it?

-- snip --

The Civil War marked a key turning point in this tradition of public disclosure [which began in the 1790s], because the Department of State began disseminating foreign policy records on a regular basis. Documents have been published continuously since 1861, selected for their importance, annotated for accuracy, and bound into book-length volumes. Now called the Foreign Relations of the United States (or FRUS), this series celebrates its 150th year of publication in 2011. They are not stories written by historians who have digested the material and presented it in narrative form. Rather, after a thoroughgoing process that combines scholarly principles of documentary editing and responsible procedures for declassification review, the documents are allowed to speak for themselves, giving the reader the opportunity to experience the “you were there” feeling that comes from encountering the original material yourself.

-- snip --

By reading FRUS, anyone can gain insight into how diplomacy actually happens. Sometimes the negotiations become intense, with messages flying about the world on an hourly basis, multiple meetings, hushed corridor conversations, and deals struck after much bargaining. Some problems are resolved, while others are not. In some cases, long-held secrets are revealed. At other times the documents confirm what has long been believed but not previously proven ...... Mostly, however, one encounters the dilemmas facing ordinary people who must make immediate decisions with incomplete information, fearful of worst-case scenarios, and hopeful that they can craft a better world than they inherited. It is the stuff of mundane routine and high drama; taken altogether, it is a story of great consequence for the peoples of the world.

Read the whole thing here: “Foreign Relations of the United States” Series Tells the Story of U.S. Diplomacy.

Woman In a Burka Reviews "Burka Woman"

Some people - and by "some people" I mean my wife - misunderstand it when I laugh at a satirical treatment of women in strict Islamic societies, such as "Burka Woman", because they think I'm laughing at the women in the Burkas rather than at their societies.

So I am very pleased to report that an actual woman in a Burka also finds that video hilarious.

Check out the blogger Saudiwoman, who describes herself as "Saudi, genetically wahabi and a woman," and read the 20-plus comments to her post about "Burka Woman."

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p.s. - Regarding the photo above, I consider it definitive proof that men in the Islamic world do indeed find women in Burkas sexually attractive. I took the photo in Riyadh, inside a barracks occupied by Saudi Ministry of Interior security forces. Some of the troops had taken photos of women from glossy magazines, cut out the (lavishly made-up) eyes, and taped them to the walls in their rooms. Not the rest of the women, just their eyes. Saudi pin-up girls.