Scandal Breeds Pessimism Among U.S. Diplomats

Struggling with diplomatic fallout from the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal and a growing perception that U.S. foreign policy is out of control, some State Department officials this week sounded a note of despair.

“I expect doom and gloom,” one official said.

“By next week, every national assembly [of every nation] that has forces in Iraq is going to demand an accounting of what their forces were doing, and specifically, of what they were doing with the prisons. And some governments are going to say: ‘This is more trouble than it is worth.’ Soon the coalition of the willing will become the coalition of the desperate and nowhere to go.”

That such pessimism has spread even to the ranks of American diplomats underscored the grim position the Bush administration finds itself in: Securing greater international support is crucial to its plans in Iraq, but the prisoner scandal -- which is almost certain to grow -- has made an already arduous effort far harder.

“There is no question that these pictures ... make our work much more difficult,” Secretary of State Colin L. Powell acknowledged in an interview with Agence France-Presse news agency Friday.

“These images are very destructive to our foreign policy efforts,” he said, including the effort to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.

To get more international help in Iraq, the United States will seek a new United Nations resolution next month on the scheduled June 30 transfer of sovereignty. And the prison abuse scandal “is not helping our case,” Powell said. “That’s why we are spending so much time telling the world that let’s not lose sight of what we really have to get accomplished in Iraq.”

Powell’s remarks came a day after Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said he had seen “a fair amount” of diplomatic backlash already from the photographs, particularly in Europe, where, Armitage said, the scenes captured in the photographs were seen as “tantamount to torture.”

“I think it’s quite clear that we have a lot of work to do,” Armitage said on CNN. “And we’re in a bit of a hole.”

One European diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, noted that European governments had been circumspect in their comments on the photographs. It was the press and public opinion, the diplomat said, that registered outrage. A front-page editorial cartoon published by the French daily Le Monde showed a U.S. soldier with his boot on the head of an Iraqi: “Repeat after me,” the soldier orders his victim. “Democracy.”

The need for global damage control could not have come at a worse time for a State Department already stretched thin.

Even as photos of the prison abuses were broadcast, the department was struggling to calm the diplomatic storm unleashed last month when President Bush offered Israel written assurances that in any final peace settlement with the Palestinians, Israel would probably retain some of its West Bank settlements and Palestinian refugees would probably not be allowed to resettle in the Jewish state.

Those assurances, seen as a dramatic shift in long-standing American policy, enraged Palestinians and Arab governments, which said Bush had ended Washington’s role as an honest broker between Israel and the Arabs by weighting the outcome of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

The State Department also is struggling to prepare what is expected to be the largest U.S. embassy in the world at about the same time as the June 30 transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi interim government.

June promises to be a busy month for diplomacy. Bush kicks off a series of meetings with a visit to Paris and Normandy for a commemoration of D-Day. That trip is to be followed by presidential attendance at scheduled summits of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the G-8 organization of major industrialized nations. He will be seeking allied support in Iraq and for Middle East peacemaking efforts.

With so much going on, one State Department official noted gratefully, there was at least a glimmer of good news in the fallout from the prison scandal. Reaction in the Arab world, the official said, has not been as bad as it might have been.

“I don’t mean to minimize it, because it’s a serious problem,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “But it’s worth noting that you aren’t seeing massive demonstrations in the street over this. None of our embassies have been sacked, none of our cars have been burned.”

The first real test of how the scandal may have harmed U.S. diplomatic efforts in the region is expected Saturday, when Arab leaders gather for a summit. The U.S. hopes they will endorse its plan for promoting regional democratic reforms.

U.S. officials said that Jordan’s King Abdullah II indicated during talks Thursday with Bush that he believed the summit would still endorse the plan -- but might also call for the United States military to release all Iraqi detainees.

“It seems,” one senior State Department official said, “that the reform process is on track.... But the test will be when we see the Arab foreign ministers and the Arab leaders get together.”

What is needed, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity, “is something correcting and dramatic” to prove that the U.S. is serious when it says it will eliminate abuses in Iraq.

The official said discussions are underway within the administration on a range of options, including the suggestion by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that Abu Ghraib, a hated symbol of Saddam Hussein’s regime, be leveled; inviting in human rights organizations; or even turning over some measure of control of the prison system to another coalition partner.

“Everybody in the State Department and the foreign services spends their entire day meeting with international figures who look at the U.S. and say: ‘We don’t believe in your leadership, we question your goals,’ ” said Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Studies program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. “All the things that the State Department is trying to do become harder and harder.”

One ray of hope, Alterman said, is that while some U.S. enemies are gloating over Washington’s humiliation, “deep down, there is a sense that if we don’t have U.S. leadership ... who’s driving the train?”