Today’s hearings

Secretary of State Clinton answered questions for umpteen hours today in the House and Senate on the September 11 attack on the U.S. facility in Benghazi.  It was not only a waste of time.  It will have a negative impact on American diplomacy for months, if not years, to come.

This was not for lack of skill on the Secretary of State’s part.  She was sharp, intelligent and trenchant.  Blood clots haven’t fogged her thinking at all.  Yes, she said, she knew armed militants conducted the attack and said so the next day in public.  No, she had not seen the ambassador’s request for better security.  Yes, State is resource-constrained in meeting security requirements.  No, the Libyan government had not provided the kind of security the facility required, due to incapacity rather than bad intentions.

The questioning was almost entirely hostile from the Republican side of the aisle and almost entirely benign from the Democratic side.  I imagine no Republican wants to have it remembered three years from now that he was soft on Hillary Clinton, as she is widely regarded as a strong candidate for the presidency.  No Democrat wants to be seen as piling on.

This wouldn’t matter much except that it will spook the Foreign Service.  Ambassadors are already far too risk-averse, because that’s what gets you ahead in the State Department.  Of the 1.4 million cables the Secretary said she receives each year, hundreds (maybe thousands) will ask for more security.  Virtually none will ask for less.  This hearing–and of course the incident itself–will reinforce risk aversion.

The problem is that you can’t do diplomacy in dangerous places and also reduce risks to zero.  Weak states–Libya is certainly that after the revolution–are risky places.  Ambassador Chris Stevens was doing precisely what I would want our ambassadors doing:  getting out of the capital, talking with Libyans who knew more than he did, and trying to understand a complicated and difficult situation.  He knew the risks and thought them worth taking.  That’s what ambassadors get paid the big bucks for.

But hearings like today’s make our diplomats hunker down, sit behind 20-foot high walls with barbed wire on top in Baghdad and travel in armored convoys that frighten the locals and create enormous resentment.  You just can’t do the real work of diplomacy that way.  To its credit, the Accountability and Review Board report on the Benghazi incident said this up front, but all its recommendations went in the other direction.

We are going to end up with diplomats who spend their careers cooped up in fortresses.  That’s not going to help us maintain a leadership role in the world.  Risk means something will happen now and again.  Someone has to say it out loud:  Chris Stevens was unlucky, but he was doing what diplomats should do.