Why do you think Bush is pursuing this war?

I'm frankly at a loss. I think he feels an incredible moral responsibility not to have another 9/11 happen again. Since he is not intellectually equipped to understand why such a huge part of the world could have these negative feelings about us, he's looking for a simple answer; and I think he's been manipulated by his Cabinet.

Why do you think Secretary of State Colin Powell has signed off on this war?

Powell has been fighting rear-guard action [against hawks inside the administration] all along. Partly he's dealing with a president who apparently tunes people out if they disagree beyond a certain point. And also I think his instinct is to be a loyal soldier. And that's one of the key issues here. So much of the debate in the United States is not a debate over interests, but a debate over loyalty; are you loyal to the president or not? And put in those terms, the sort of pack mentality does prevail. I guess you could argue that the good of the group requires solidarity in the group, even though that solidarity leads the group to do something insanely stupid.

Do you think Powell should have resigned?

I've said until now, and I guess I still believe, since we're going to war anyway, that the next real issue is to minimize the damage, to rebuild the damaged relationships. And for that you need somebody the Europeans like and respect. While profoundly disappointed in him, the Europeans' respect for [Powell] has not totally disappeared. They hope that out of this fiasco, Powell will emerge with some ability to rebuild.

I saw that in 1994 you won the American Foreign Service Association award for "constructive dissent"?

Yes.

Why didn't you feel you could stay within the system this time and make your dissent known? Why did you feel you had to resign?

For a long time, I was going to dissent within the system. I spent a long time drafting a dissent channel cable, which is a special channel we have.

Can you explain what that is?

There's an institution called the dissent channel which was set up by the State Department after Vietnam, I think. Essentially you send in a telegram and it cannot be blocked by anyone in the State Department. It must go up to the seventh floor and be read at least by an undersecretary, and generally by the secretary himself. It's a very good mechanism for getting dissenting views known.

I started to do one of those, but at a certain stage I simply realized Secretary Powell was not the problem. The problem was an administration that had already made up its mind. So the only weapon I had was to go public -- that was the only way to put the issue into the public debate.

In your resignation letter, you said that "the administration has chosen to make terrorism a domestic political tool." What did you mean by that?

Terrorism is always out there. You can try to address the root causes and improve law enforcement. We cannot totally protect American people from terrorism except by a level of repression that Americans would not accept. The answer to terrorism is mostly good policing, law enforcement and intelligence cooperation between us and, ideally, relatively strong and organized Middle Eastern states.

We cannot go around and monitor the phone calls of everyone in the Arab world, or go arrest people in Saudi Arabia. We need Saudis and other countries for that. We've been doing pretty well since Sept. 11. Now we risk seriously damaging that, not because Saudi Arabia or anybody will want to punish us for invading Iraq, but because the domestic political consent for that cooperation is about to evaporate.

When you turn on CNN today, what's your reaction to unfolding events?

I'm very depressed. I just feel we're entering a new sort of ugly phase where America attempts to be a unilateral power. But we do not realize that the United States was the chief beneficiary of an international system that found alternatives to violence -- the idea that the United Nations provided hope for peaceful resolution. We have just told [the world] that that's not longer operative, and that violence is the last, best resort. And I'm afraid we'll be victims of that violence far more than we are the beneficiaries of that violence.

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