I certainly share Max Boot’s praise of Ryan Crocker and Robert Ford for the professionalism with which they distinguish themselves in a crisis. However, what really distinguishes how honorable is Crocker’s character—as opposed to so many of his Foreign Service colleagues—is how he distinguished himself outside the halls of the Foreign Service.
It’s no secret that many ambassadors retire from the Foreign Service and immediately join firms shilling for autocratic regimes. Robert Kaplan dealt with this phenomenon briefly in The Arabist. There are few former U.S. ambassadors to Turkey (Eric Edelman is a notable exception) who do not consult for Turkish business interests or fundraise from Turks.
In recent days, for example, Mark Parris, ambassador to Turkey between 1997 and 2000 and long a cheerleader for the ruling AKP government, has just become the non-executive director of a Turkish-British company with tens of millions of dollars in Iraqi Kurdish oil interests, a position he could not attain had he not remained in the Turkish government’s good graces. Marc Grossman, pressed into service post-retirement to fill Richard Holbrooke’s shoes, had also profited from contacts with Turkey’s ruling party during his retirement when he began to work with Ilhas Holding. Likewise, when Libyan rebels overran the intelligence ministry in Tripoli, they found recent minutes of a meeting between former Assistant Secretary of State David Welch and Qadhafi regime officials. Welch retired from the State Department to win Libya contracts for Bechtel. Welch’s behavior might be legal, but it is shameful.
When Ryan Crocker retired, however, he became the dean of Texas A&M’s Bush School. He did not seek to cash in on his foreign contacts, nor did he shill for the Middle Eastern governments in which he served. The true test of one’s honor is after they leave service, and it is here that Crocker stood in such sharp juxtaposition to his peers.
I still wish, however, that Crocker was not so much a proponent of engaging Hezbollah, as he recommended to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee while still a retiree.
As regards Ford, he is doing an honorable job in a dangerous area, but that should not mean he should remain as ambassador to Syria. The opposition to Ford’s re-nomination has nothing to do with Ford, but rather with the wisdom of honoring a murderous dictator at the level of ambassador. It is possible to maintain a diplomatic presence without an ambassador. But, since Ford is such a high-value asset in a Department which has so few, why not send Ford to a post where the United States could truly use his skill, like Turkey or Lebanon, both of which have ambassadors now who are particularly weak and who have not shown themselves to be effective?
