state department

Just over the wires:
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is holding out the possibility that Iraq’s national election could be delayed beyond January because of a dispute over the allocation of seats in parliament.

If there were a healthy or coherent relationship between civilian and military efforts in war zones or weak states or post-conflict environments, there wouldn’t be any need for, say, Stuart Bowen to propose a new U.S. Office of Contingency Operations. Instead there’s ad-hoc and personality-driven relationships and operational incoherence. This, for instance, is what Secretary [...]

It turns out that expanding your contracts with the government after killing people and paying hush money can attract congressional scrutiny. The New York Times:
Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, wrote in a letter on Wednesday that his committee was told by a top State Department official [...]

President Obama tapped Rajiv Shah, a 36-year old undersecretary of the Department of Agriculture and medical doctor with extensive experience in food security and public heath, to head the agency.

Just released from the Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton:
Dr. Raj Shah is a leader in the development community, an innovative and results-oriented manager, and someone who understands the importance of providing people around the world with the tools they need to lift themselves out of poverty and chart their own destinies. By nominating Raj [...]

Last week I broke the story of a proposal from Stuart Bowen, the inspector general for the Iraq war, to create a new agency for coordinating and directing civilian governance and development activities in war zones. Bowen wants the envisioned agency, known as the U.S. Office for Contingency Operations or USOCO, to stand up in [...]

This doesn’t have much actual bearing on the case of Matthew Hoh, the top U.S. civilian official in Zabul Province, resigning from the State Department in protest of the Afghanistan war, but this post from a foreign service officer reminds people that Hoh wasn’t actually an FSO, but rather a temporary contract employee. He She [...]

This seems almost too weird to be true, but Wired reports that on Oct. 1, federal agents seized the computers, manuscripts and pickaxes of an anarchist social worker in Queens, N.Y., claiming he violating anti-rioting laws on Twitter.

The planning process is expected to result in significant policy changes.

President Obama convenes the national security team for another debate on Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy, and I notice an addition to the guest list is Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew. Lew is the deputy in charge of management and personnel for Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, so perhaps part of today’s session will include an assessment of [...]