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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Career diplomat John Brady Kiesling talks about his resignation over U.S. policy in Iraq, and a president "not intellectually equipped" to understand worldwide opposition to the war.
Mar 19, 2003 | Don't count career U.S. diplomat John Brady Kiesling among those surprised by the administration's failure to rally support among its traditional allies for a war on Iraq. As political counselor assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Athens, Greece, he found himself in charge of explaining U.S. talking points for the war. And late last month, frustrated by an inability to make sense of the administration's need to invade Iraq, Kiesling finally gave up and quit in protest.
"The talking points were pathetic," he says.
Now, after having served 20 years in embassies from Tel Aviv to Casablanca, Kiesling has become the first American diplomat to leave his job in opposition to U.S. policy on Iraq. In a blunt letter dated Feb. 27, Kiesling told Secretary of State Colin Powell, "The policies [diplomats] are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests."
Moreover, in the push toward war, "We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known," wrote Kiesling. "Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security."
Two weeks after Kiesling's departure, John Brown, another career foreign service officer, followed his lead and submitted his resignation. They're the first public resignations since 1994, when five State Department officials quit their jobs, frustrated by the Clinton administration's inaction on the crisis in the Balkans.
At first, Kiesling's resignation received minor play from the Beltway press. The New York Times covered the story in 400 words, while the Washington Post gave it just 100 words. (The Post's ombudsman recently concluded that the decision was an oversight.) Time magazine ran a lengthy interview, but it was only printed in international editions.
But Kiesling's letter struck a chord on the Internet -- today, a Google.com search for it retrieves nearly 800 hits. And just last week on the Senate floor, Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., mentioned Kiesling's "eloquent and heartfelt explanation" for resigning, and wondered how many other U.S. diplomats privately felt the same way.
In an interview with Salon, Kiesling explained in more detail the reason for his resignation, the reaction it received from his colleagues, and why the coming war will ultimately do America more harm than good. He describes President Bush as "not intellectually equipped" to understand the worldwide opposition to the war, and says he is now convinced that the White House never wanted inspections or diplomacy to work, but was determined to wage war no matter what the facts were on the ground.
And, in answer to Sen. Leahy's question about whether other diplomats feel the same as he, the former diplomat replies without hesitation: "Oh, yeah."
What has been the reaction to your letter?
It's interesting. First of all, thanks to the Internet, it spread much more widely, much more rapidly than I had any conception of. It sort of broke free of my traditional understanding of how newspaper and television determine public opinion. So I was pretty gratified by that.
But what I've discovered from the people who've searched me out is that there seems to be this incredible unhappiness in the traditional American internationalist foreign policy community that the president, just out of ignorance and ideology, is taking apart what these people had built through careers.
What exactly do you mean when you say "the traditional internationalist foreign policy community?" Would that be considered -- I hate to put simple tags on it -- to have a mainstream political bent? Would it be liberal?
They're mainstream foreign policy people, the ones who believe the United States is locked in a web of international interests and must protect those interests by a combination of unilateral force, but more importantly, by a set of institutions and relationships that we can control. There are very hard-nosed people in this community. But they were convinced that these institutions we set up served United States interests and their perspective has always been based on United States national interests.
What did you want to accomplish when you decided to resign?
I was completely appalled. I was in Athens, so perhaps I was getting a distorted view. But the International Herald Tribune, for example, is a pretty good reflection of the mainstream news coverage, and based on that, it was clear to me that the costs of war were not being entered into the equation for the American people. I just found it profoundly sickening. And when you combined that with the general discontent with the policies that are there for us to defend, my zest for doing my job was pretty much gone. So I hoped that by resigning I would help prompt a real debate.
Do you think you were able to do that?
In some ways, yes. After I resigned, it did seem that a number of columnists who had been sort of wishy-washy started asking more questions. I think I helped that. I'm not going to say I was crucial in it. But I think I helped some people who had a lot of doubts to get brave. The fact that they'd been sent this same resignation letter 15 times by e-mail from people whom they respected meant they were not alone.
