Always The Diplomat Whitman Alum Talks Of Years In Foreign Service
Ryan Crocker was a sophomore at Whitman College in 1969 when he realized he had to make some decisions about his future or “be stuck in one place forever.”
He wanted to travel and considered the Peace Corps. But there was an exam coming up for the Foreign Service. It was on a Saturday, and it was free. He took the exam, doing well enough to be offered an interview with the agency that staffs America’s embassies around the world.
It was one of those little twists of fate that led Crocker, a Spokane native and Air Force brat, to become what he is today: The U.S. ambassador to Kuwait.
Another little twist came when he graduated from Foreign Service training. Because he had spent several high school years in Turkey and traveled through the region, he listed Middle Eastern countries as his top five choices. There were no openings.
He was assigned to Guatemala, but a week later, the State Department called and asked if he would instead like to become vice consul to Khorramshahr.
“I said ‘Sure.’ Then as soon as I hung up, I looked it up to find out where it was,” Crocker, recalled Friday during a brief visit home.
His instincts that this was a Middle Eastern city were correct. After studying Farsi, the language of Iran, he was on his way to one of that country’s coastal cities.
Crocker’s two years in Iran taught him the dangers of imposing your own assumptions on another nation’s reality. Having spent the late ‘60s and early ‘70s on an American college campus, he was convinced that the world was about to undergo dramatic changes.
“I spent most of my time in Khorramshahr trying to find evidence that the shah was doomed,” he said. He talked to labor unions, students and the upper middle class, looking for evidence of a revolution from the left.
“I was right about the shah, but I was 100 percent wrong about the direction it came from.”
The shah was toppled a few years later by Islamic fundamentalists.
Except when he left for special training in languages, Crocker, 47, has spent his diplomatic career in the Middle East, in posts from Beirut to Baghdad. He was in Washington, D.C., awaiting his confirmation hearing to be ambassador to Lebanon, in 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.
Like the rest of the diplomatic corps and the leaders of other countries in the region, Crocker was stunned. Saddam had done what no one believed he would do, prompting one of Crocker’s colleagues to say that “to surprise the world, you should do something unbelievably stupid.”
After three years in Lebanon, Crocker was appointed ambassador to Kuwait in 1994.
Although he received one ambassadorship from President Bush and one from President Clinton, Crocker said that’s not unusual in foreign service. Although the public may have an impression that the posts go to wealthy campaign donors of the winning presidential ticket, in fact about two-thirds of ambassadors are career diplomats.
In the Middle East, the ratio is even higher - 22 of the 25 countries have career diplomats in the top posts.
The U.S. embassy in Lebanon is heavily secured, with barricades and bunkers throughout, he said. No one ever goes off the compound without bodyguards.
Kuwait is a much friendlier, less threatening place, even though it shares a border with America’s last wartime enemy.
“After Lebanon, anything looks safe,” Crocker said. “Kuwait is actually a very hospitable place for Americans to be.”
Although the Iraqi military is well contained by the no-fly zones and has been relatively quiet in recent months, Crocker said he agrees with the Kuwaiti view of Saddam.
“He’s a clear and present threat as long as he’s in power,” said Crocker, who spent part of this week in Walla Walla speaking and teaching at Whitman. “We can’t just think in terms of his intentions at the moment, we have to look at his capabilities.”
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