John Brady Kiesling, a career diplomat, was the first of three State Department veterans who resigned their posts — his was at our embassy in Athens — in protest on the eve of our second Iraq war. By his account below, his was a brave act of necessity. By my thinking, it made him the first official American refusnik. He published the following long explanation of his resignation and his thoughts on American policy under the Bush administration (clearly written before the war ended) in the Boston Globe magazine this Sunday. It’s well worth reading, not only because he’s an articulate, even — as his letter of resignation showed — eloquent writer, but because he’s a modest and moderate State Department veteran, an open man, ready to listen to other voices elsewhere, but distinctly no radical. So it tells you exactly how extreme a moment we’re in when a man like Kiesling uses the Greek term Planitarehis, or “Ruler of the Planet,” and not in a complimentary sense either. The Armenians, he tells us, “used a similar term in the 14th century to flatter their Mongol overlords, but for modern Greeks this is a term of fear and dislike, not respect.” When a State Department veteran can say, aghast, that “the more aggressively we use our power to intimidate our foes the more we validate terrorism as the only effective weapon of the powerless against the powerful,” you know you’re in a terrifying new imperial age. The piece is, in its own way, a remarkable document of our times. Tom
Diplomatic Breakdown
By John Brady Kiesling
The Boston Globe
April 27, 2003When I faxed my resignation letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell on February 25, the United States government was on the verge of its most costly foreign policy blunder since the war in Vietnam. The primary goal the president had announced, protecting the American people from terrorism, could not be achieved through war with Iraq. The goal of establishing democracy in Iraq was one the United States had, alas, no effective legitimacy to achieve. The costs of our attainable goal — cleansing Iraq of a genuinely monstrous Saddam Hussein and his likely arsenal — had been concealed from the American people and their elected representatives for an excellent reason: As two previous presidents had recognized, the material, moral, human, and political costs would be so great as to cancel out the probable benefit.
John Brady Kiesling is a former political counselor at the US Embassy in Athens.
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When I faxed my resignation letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell on February 25, the United States government was on the verge of its most costly foreign policy blunder since the war in Vietnam. The primary goal the president had announced, protecting the American people from terrorism, could not be achieved through war with Iraq. The goal of establishing democracy in Iraq was one the United States had, alas, no effective legitimacy to achieve. The costs of our attainable goal — cleansing Iraq of a genuinely monstrous Saddam Hussein and his likely arsenal — had been concealed from the American people and their elected representatives for an excellent reason: As two previous presidents had recognized, the material, moral, human, and political costs would be so great as to cancel out the probable benefit.
John Brady Kiesling is a former political counselor at the US Embassy in Athens.