Diplomats are paid to have cool minds and even cooler temperaments, but inside the beleaguered State Department, plenty of America's elite diplomats are privately seething. They are up in arms about what they see as the hijacking of foreign policy-making by the Pentagon and efforts to undercut their boss, Secretary of State Colin Powell.
"I just wake up in the morning and tell myself, `There's been a military coup,' and then it all makes sense," said one veteran foreign service officer.
The first two years of the Bush administration has seen what the diplomat called a "tectonic shift" of decision-making power on foreign policy from State to the Defense Department, one that has seen the Pentagon become the dominant player on such key issues as Iraq, North Korea and Afghanistan.
"Why aren't eyebrows raised all over the United States that the secretary of defense is pontificating about Syria?" said the official, who declined to be identified.
"Can you imagine the defense secretary after World War II telling the world how he was going to run Europe?" he added, noting that it was Secretary of State George Marshall who delivered that seminal speech in 1947...
For decades, the State Department has been fighting a mostly losing battle with critics from incoming administrations, who have accused it of everything from harboring communists to coddling China.
"This building is chock-full of people who are deep, deep believers in this country and its principles and its defense," said a young diplomat who opposed the Iraq war. The current ideological spat "has nothing to do with whether U.S. interests are being defended and everything to do with trying to check a Pentagon run amok. It's the Dr. Strangelove syndrome: There's very much the dominance by this institution whose sole role ultimately is to kill people and blow things up, and they do that very well.
"I, like many others, am carrying a great deal of anger and at times even shame over the way we as a nation are conducting ourselves," he said.
