"I don't think there's any question. I think people take a worldwide oath," Rice said on Thursday. "And I do feel strongly that there needs to be a sense within the service that everybody does the hardest work."
Rice added that "nobody has been more concerned about the security of our people than I have," but "unfortunately, the United States is in dangerous places, and we need diplomats in those places."
The uproar began at the end of last month when Harry Thomas, the director general of the Foreign Service, announced that the State Department would order as many as 50 officers to Iraq next year because of expected vacancies. If that had occurred, it would have been the first diplomatic call-up since the Vietnam War.
The prospect of the call-up has sent State Department employees into an uproar over the last three weeks. At a town hall meeting this month, some foreign officers bitterly protested the policy, causing a number of conservative commentators to call them cowards.
Shortly after the town hall meeting, a career foreign officer in Iraq, John Matel, posted "A Letter From Iraq to My Overwrought Colleagues" on the State Department's heavily visited blog, Dipnote, and asked his fellow officers to "get over it" and stop complaining.
Matel said that he assured Marines in Baghdad that most Foreign Service officers were not "wimps and weenies," but that "it is embarrassing for people with our privileges to paint ourselves as victims."
Foreign Service officers said they were being defined by a handful of people who spoke up and unfairly criticized as whiners.
Steve Kashkett, the vice president of the American Foreign Service Association, said that more than 2,000 Foreign Service officers had volunteered to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003.
"We feel very burned in this whole situation," he said, referring to the criticism of diplomats. "The Foreign Service has taken a real beating."
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