State Department official Manuel Miranda has harshly criticized the bureaucrats at the US Embassy in Baghdad for undermining the coalition’s efforts in Iraq, through sheer incompetence and inertia; Bill Gertz has more: Bureaucrats in Iraq.

“After a year at the embassy, it is my general assessment that the State Department and the Foreign Service [are] not competent to do the job that they have undertaken in Iraq,” said Manuel Miranda, a conservative former Senate staff member who is part of the office of legislative statecraft in Baghdad.

The Feb. 5 memorandum to U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan C. Crocker stated that the military surge is working, but State Department support for civilian efforts to pacify the country is a disaster due to bureaucrats’ “built-in attention deficit disorder.”

Read the memo (download pdf)

“The State Department bureaucracy is not equipped to handle the urgency of America’s Iraq investment in blood and taxpayer funds,” Mr. Miranda said. “You lack the ‘fierce urgency of now.’”

Mr. Miranda’s most stinging accusation is that the State Department is an “albatross around the neck of the coalition command.”

The department “failed to assist coalition initiatives by delaying or failing to supply the civilian expertise needed in a thoughtful and timely manner and also delaying decisions on funding and staffing vital to GOI (and our) success,” he said, using the acronym for the government of Iraq.

Also, the embassy has blocked the flow of information to the White House and other policy-makers, the State Department in Washington, and the commanding general in Baghdad, fearing leaks to the press.