The Deep State's Last Crusade

America’s Aging Diplomatic Corps Wants a Win, Even if it's an Illusory One

This is the second Carousel guest piece from Twitter anon @DegreeStudies. The first can be found here.

I once heard a former US diplomat speak at Princeton about his time in the Embassy in Iraq in the years after the 2003 invasion. He began with a devastating anecdote. In occupied Iraq, one of his first tasks was to map the local constellation of potential liberals to identify individuals who the Americans would encourage to run for parliament. His favorite potential candidate was a women’s rights activist campaigning in her neighborhood for issues like reproductive health and education. The woman, still in her thirties, came to the diplomat and said that if she ran, she would be killed, and that groups in her community had told her as much. The diplomat told her not to worry, that he had seen this all before. In the post-Soviet states where democracies were just getting off the ground, vestiges of the old regime used similar fear and intimidation tactics, but they never had the energ…