U.S. envoys only reporting the good news

In conformity with the spirit of our times, U.S. Foreign Service officers and their superiors are not allowing negative news about U.S. allies to reach Washington. The Washington Times reports:

U.S. embassies are discouraging or suppressing negative reports to Washington about U.S. allies, sometimes depriving officials of information they need to make good policy decisions, current and former diplomats say.

The article explains that envoys are “self-censoring” to the extent that they report only good news. In one situation, an embassy in the Middle East did not report government interference in elections. In another, officials censored accounts of low morale after a terrorist attack. The article continues:

One diplomat told the Washington Times that he has decided to resign in part because of frustration with “rampant self-censorship” by Foreign Service officers and their superiors that has gone so far as to ban “bad news” cables from countries that are friendly with the United States.

The resigning officer, who asked the Washington Times not to use his name, said that one ambassador had “flat out banned any ‘bad-news’ cables, and made it known at all levels that we were only to produce ‘good-news stories’ about our [host] country.” The host country was a U.S. ally.

“What worries me,” said former Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas Pickering, “is the expectation that reporting has to be tempered to fit the expectations and not the realities. This is dangerous and unprofessional and worse.”

Mr. Pickering is right to be worried. To make sound decisions, officials need candid and unbiased information. Leaders who know only about what is going well are unable to formulate effective foreign policies. In the increasingly complicated realm of international relations, bad news is far more important than positive reports because it reveals what needs to be repaired.

There is a diplomatic way to report the truth, but many diplomats are opting against it to instead give skewed reports of exclusively good news. This eagerness to paint facts in an artificially positive shade likely contributes to these diplomats holding the positions they occupy. Human nature drives us to ignore problems.

President Barack Obama says he wants his administration to become “the most open and transparent administration in history.” But the situation is unlikely to change under the his leadership. Last year, we wrote about our people’s reluctance to think about bad news:

For nearly seven years now, we have gone without a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil—a remarkable feat by any standard, and one that Bush’s critics rarely give him credit for. But this seven-year respite has lulled us to sleep! We now have a false sense of security. Our leaders, the Prophet Isaiah foretold, reassure us with “smooth things”—prophesying deceit (Isaiah 30:10).Despite what men may say, God’s Word foretells the cold, harsh reality of our modern time: The United States is in the midst of a pacifist malaise that rises above the level of appeasement during the 1930s. Ours is the generation God was thinking of when He inspired the Apostle Paul to write, “For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them …” (1 Thessalonians 5:3).

It will soon be made very clear that suppressing reports about negative news does not make it go away.