21 February NY Times - Negroponte Advises New Diplomats to Seek Challenging Posts by Thom Shanker.

Entering his first full week as deputy secretary of state, John D. Negroponte on Tuesday urged a graduating class of new diplomats to seek overseas assignments in challenging, difficult and even hazardous posts.

Mr. Negroponte, only the third career Foreign Service officer to hold the deputy position, said the diplomatic corps was shifting its weight from historic centers of politics and policy to increase the American presence in world capitals more subject to turmoil.

Potential assignments in Iraq were very much on the minds of many students at the Foreign Service Institute, where 4 members of this class of 75 will go to work in Baghdad or with provincial reconstruction teams throughout the country.

Mr. Negroponte’s comments will resonate across the diplomatic corps because of an animated interagency debate here in Washington about the proper way to share the burden among the government’s civilian agencies and the military to carry out the Bush administration’s new Iraq strategy...