The rumors have been swirling around Condi Rice running for VP for years now. Previously the rumor had little basis since she had always seemed to be uninterested, it looks like that has changed. Condi is someone I have always admired. I am in awe of her intellect and talents, determination and sheer will. There’s always a however though. I’m not a Condi fan politically. This has been further solidified by her meddling and seeming demise of Israel by her pandering to the Palestinians. There’s also the failure of the State Department in Iraq which Colin Powell was also a party. Granted the State Department’s failures and systematic faults started long before either Powell or Rice but it doesn’t appear either of these two promoted or have achieved any improvement.

The detailed memo from Manual Miranda who spent a year working for State at the Baghdad Embassy tells of an incompetent and negligent group of officials who are hurting more than helping the success of Iraqi’s.

Here’s the link to Miranda’s 10 page memo - http://www.washingtontimes.com/pdfs/mirandamemo.pdf

Kenneth Timmerman wrote about the Miranda Memo:

In a blistering memo, a former State Department official accused the U.S. embassy in Baghdad of bringing “criminally negligent and incompetent” officials to do jobs for which they were not equipped.

Manuel Miranda, a former senior aide to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and a lawyer by training, spent a year as the embassy’s “senior adviser” in charge of supervising the U.S. effort to help the Iraqi government draft new laws and comply with congressionally-mandated “benchmarks.”

Instead of helping the Iraqis, however, Miranda says that the U.S. embassy was “simply not up to the task . . . we have brought to Iraq the worst of America — our bureaucrats.”

Part of the “surge” strategy was to pacify Iraq to allow the government of Iraq to craft new laws and win the confidence of the Iraqi people, but the State Department “has not done its part,” Miranda stated in his memo.

Foreign Service officers, “with ludicrously little management experience by any standard other than your own, are not equipped to manage programs, hundreds of millions in funds,” Miranda wrote. “It is apparent that, other than diplomacy, your only expertise is your own bureaucracy.”

In his top secret memorandum to Ambassador Ryan Crocker, which was provided to Newsmax by a U.S. source in Baghdad, Miranda revealed that “even while our Congress debated the Iraq question and whether to commit more troops and more funds [in 2007], the Embassy was largely consumed in successive internal reorganizations with contradictory management and policy goals.”

snip…..Miranda alleged that:

The U.S. embassy in Baghdad is wasting taxpayer funds due to “a deeply entrenched bureaucracy with a unionized attitude” that fails to “think outside of the box.” The U.S. Embassy has little institutional memory, and no system for data retrieval, so that the embassy is “in a constant state of
revisiting the same ground.”

Instead of responding to Petraeus’ call for a “civilian surge,” the U.S. embassy has been “doing a bureaucratic imitation of the Keystone Cops, counting chairs and desks and reviewing decisions over and over again.”

It’s an intensely damning memo!

Debbie at Right Truth has collected a number of links to pundit blogs on the topic of Condi for VP with the pros and cons to having Condi on the ticket.

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