04.28.2003

Rene — Diplomatic Breakdown

Topic(s): US Analysis | Comments Off on Rene — Diplomatic Breakdown

This story ran in the Boston Globe Magazine on 4/27/2003.
Diplomatic Breakdown
The author, a career diplomat, quit his job at the US Embassy in Athens
because he could not defend the war in Iraq and a foreign policy that he
sees as dangerous to America.
By John Brady Kiesling, 4/27/2003
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.
I was the political counselor at the US Embassy in Athens then, 45 years
old, running a section of some eight people. My mission was to advise the US
ambassador on how best we could, as President Bush’s personal
representatives in Greece, promote and defend US interests. As the war
became inescapable, so, too, became my catastrophic conviction that I could
either represent the president or defend US interests, but I could no longer
do both.
The US Foreign Service does an often creditable job of finding humane
accommodations to depression, alcoholism, or AIDS among its officers, but
there is one disease that still carries a fatal stigma. “Clientitis” is the
infirmity of understanding the motives and interests of one’s host country
better than those in Washington. After two tours of duty totaling seven
years in Greece, my best defense against imputations of the dread disease
was a steady flow of telegrams to flatter Washington that Greeks, unlike
their American counterparts, were unreliable, bureaucratic, or enslaved to
domestic politics. But I was beginning to doubt the justice of that
comparison.
My reassignment notification came through in early January, but I would have
to hold on in Athens until July – then home leave in California, followed by
44 weeks of refuge learning Dari, the dominant Persian dialect of
Afghanistan, at the Foreign Service Institute. Until I arrived at my next
assignment, as political-economic counselor in Kabul, Afghanistan, I would
not be called upon to defend a war that seemed criminal folly. I would not
be called upon to promote policies whose result, if not aim, was to
undermine the progress of international law and discredit any notion of
interdependence between the United States and its European friends and
partners.
Obviously, I did not hold on. After resigning, I came to see myself as the
canary in the mine shaft, the squeamish soul that keeled over first when our
policy became toxic. Greece is a more relevant mine shaft than one might
expect, with one entryway in Europe and another in the Middle East. Most
Greeks feel that the United States betrayed Greece during the 1967-74
dictatorship of the Colonels, having the power to save Greece from tyranny
but – at best – failing to do so. Most Greeks blame the United States,
rather than the Colonels, for the folly that triggered the Turkish invasion
of Cyprus in 1974. Greeks have concluded from their own experience that
power will be abused, and they preemptively distrust the wielders of power.
In this, their view is that of the majority of the Muslim world: The United
States put itself into the ranks of evil by failing to impose the just peace
in the Middle East its power allegedly permitted it.
Even so, the practical relationship between Greece and the United States is
often excellent. Leaving aside admiration for the United States as a land of
opportunity, residual gratitude for the Marshall Plan, and ties to the
Greek-American community, there are geostrategic reasons for keeping the
United States engaged as partner and ally in a troubled region. Moreover,
Greece is a country where personal relations trump ideology most of the
time. The Greeks I gravitated toward had sufficient intellectual
independence to dismiss unreflecting criticisms of the United States. These
journalists, diplomats, academics, and politicians were fair-minded enough
to be persuadable regarding American policy and would speak out in our
defense on many issues where the broad Greek public had reflexively maligned
us.
On Iraq, however, my friends were unconvincible from the outset. As one
cherished contact, a longtime member of parliament, conservative, pro-US,
put it: “I supported you in the Gulf War, I supported you in Kosovo, when 99
percent of the Greeks were opposed, but this war is simply wrong.” I drew
the duty of reproving another friend, a distinguished Greek specialist on
the United States, a longtime US resident, who had produced an editorial
with views of our Iraq policy almost indistinguishable from those of my old
sparring partners in the Greek Communist Party. I knew that if we had lost
this group, we had already lost the whole Middle East and half of Europe.
These were not the only canaries choking in my personal mine shaft. All
parts of the Greek media spectrum had rejected our arguments. Close friends
began to find my status as an American diplomat a barrier to friendship.
European diplomatic colleagues probed for word on the invasion date but said
nothing to suggest that they understood our policy in any but the most
cynical terms. My Greek friends and I watched as decades-old dreams of a
Cyprus settlement melted away, unnoticed collateral damage of our Iraq
policy. New Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan was unable to manage a
two-front war, squelching the hard-line Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash
while managing the massive domestic unpopularity of Turkey’s attempt to
support the United States in Iraq.
At what stage does empathy become career-ending? Living through 9/11 in
Athens, many of my embassy colleagues were spared that moment of sickening
clarity, of realizing that the average Greek genuinely had felt a flicker of
guilty pleasure along with the horror of the Twin Towers: “Kala na pathoun,”
Greeks said. “It served them right, the Americans had it coming.” Most
embassy personnel heard only the real and genuine personal expressions of
sorrow for innocent lives lost on that day. They may have found their Greek
contacts suspiciously quick to understand 9/11 in terms of “root causes of
terrorism” and lessons to be drawn. But Americans were in no mood to be
taught lessons from 9/11, and the conversations trailed off with a generally
safe degree of mutual incomprehension.
My own conversations went less well. I read the Athens newspapers and
watched the Athens talk shows. Fortunately, I am slow to anger, more
interested in finding the “why” of Greek attitudes that most Americans would
find horrifying if they knew them. It was clear that the US image among
average Greeks was seriously awry but also clear that habitual
anti-Americanism was not a useful explanation. No, we had gravely
underestimated how much damage the reality or even the appearance of
unilateral, insensitive US policy decisions could do to an old friendship.
But it was unclear until war with Iraq was imminent, late in 2002, the
extent to which alienation was turning to rage. It was also unclear whether
the loss of old friendships really mattered to US national interest.
I left the embassy 18 months after 9/11 and two weeks before we invaded
Iraq, having concluded that what remained of a disintegrating diplomatic
career was not worth the psychic cost of staying on to defend a foreign
policy and a foreign policy attitude that had become indefensibly dangerous
to US interests. Thus I missed the first sightings of Greeks, and not only
Greeks but millions of normally gentle souls all over Europe, riveted grimly
to their television screens and quietly applauding each American setback on
the road to Baghdad.
In past street protests, the ritualized leftist marches from the Athens
Polytechnic, now the National Technical University, to the US Embassy, we
always joked that Greeks didn’t have much of a throwing arm. Once the war
started, the customary anarchist rocks and bottles, this time impelled by
the anger of mostly a hundred thousand ordinary citizens, shattered the
ambassador’s office windows. The police moved in to defend the heavily
fortified American Embassy, more sluggishly than had been their custom.
In Greece, they refer to the president of the United States as the
Planitarchis, the Ruler of the Planet. The Armenians 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. The title is one we have
earned, in several senses. Without the United States, the world cannot act
on the global scale that a shrinking world and an expanding world population
require. It is not just that fear of our military deters cross-border
aggression around the world or that our excess consumption fuels the world
economy or that American marketing genius has altered forever the language
and culture of the planet. The United States is the sine qua non of the
international system. To the extent that international law has utility, it
is because we accept it. Neither the world’s interests nor our own can be
protected without the engagement of the United States, either as first among
equals in the evolving law-based international system we largely created, or
if, as now seems the case, we are rejecting that system, then as autocrat in
whatever system or non-system we replace it with. And the American president
is the face and voice of the United States to the world.
Nothing in the US Constitution dictates that the president has any duty to
the world at large or that his moral compass should point beyond the narrow
nationalism of the average citizen. Perhaps we should consider amending it.
That ability to convey with John Donne that “Any man’s death diminishes me
because I am involved in mankind” is a strategic asset for any statesman,
one not lightly tossed aside. For a superpower, facing a world automatically
fearful of its power, that ability is vital. In 99 percent of the United
States’ transactions with the world, neither brute force nor outright
bribery is a cost-effective option. Our foreign-affairs practice shies away
from horse-trading, so persuasion is the only alternative.
President Clinton had many flaws, including a lazy and reactive foreign
policy, but he had the ability to convince foreigners that he partook of a
global culture, that he possessed a sense of common humanity that might
ultimately, perhaps, outweigh narrow US interests on any given issue. The
ability to “feel the world’s pain” allowed the United States to escape
almost unscathed with policies such as the Cuban embargo or toleration of
West Bank settlements, policies that did not always differ much from those
of the current administration in pandering to domestic lobbies at the
expense of global US interests.
Even before the new administration took office, it was clear that respect
for world sensibilities was not part of our moral positioning. I remember
the little gasp among Greeks present at the ambassador’s residence during
the televised Bush-Gore debate, as the then-governor of Texas smirked about
his role in putting convicted criminals to death. I remember the political
cost we inflicted on our loyal European allies in the war against terrorism
by “with us or against us,” “dead or alive” rhetoric that thrilled American
ultranationalists but offered no moral basis for our indispensable partners
in this global campaign. The “axis of evil” utterance was more than simply a
foolish declaration of war sine die against three former “states of
concern.” It was, as diplomatic colleagues from other countries made clear
repeatedly for days afterward, a repudiation of the world view of allies who
knew the profound differences among Iraq, Iran, and North Korea and counted
on working closely with us to manage the distinctive risks each posed.
None of these gaffes was a fatal misstep, of course. Our partners are so
locked to us by shared interests and shared commitments that they have a
strong incentive to find moral and political common ground no matter how
badly we behave. British prime minister Tony Blair, in particular, could
articulate for us, when we let him, a moral stature more in keeping with the
political requirements of an anxious Europe. But the decision to launch the
war on Iraq, with the moral face of America turned away from the world,
severed us from the wellsprings of international legitimacy from which any
successful policy – but not our current one – must draw.
As US troops began to mass in the Persian Gulf, the UN Security Council
rallied with Resolution 1441, a sweeping mandate for international
inspections of Iraq. Unfortunately, we badly understood our 15-0 victory.
The purpose of the United Nations is not really to provide legal grounds for
war, though everything it does is couched in legal terms. Rather, the
purpose of the United Nations is to provide international political
legitimacy for the rare, painful moments when action must be taken against a
sovereign state. Putting additional pressure on Hussein to disarm was
perfectly legitimate, partly for its own sake but primarily because it
offered an alternative to unilateral US war.
There is little moral clarity in international relations, alas, mostly a
painful weighing of costs and interests. The costs and benefits of war are
particularly incalculable, and so it is human nature to try to set the
threshold as high as possible. For world populations desperate for
legitimacy, for some approximation of moral clarity generally unobtainable
from their national leaders, the votes of the Security Council and the
blessings of the secretary general are the last, best hope.
A legitimate war meant persuading key world leaders that the danger of
leaving Hussein in place outweighed the danger of attempting to replace him.
We had no arguments that would convince skeptics of this, partly because the
intelligence information we were willing to share was weak, partly because
our grasp of history and human nature was shaky, but largely because key
spokesmen of the administration – including the president himself – had set
forth a vision of America’s arbitrary role in the world that few foreign
leaders could endorse.
Washington began to sense even during the first year of the Bush
administration that the US image had become a problem. Though our
ambassadors in the field sent in the standard upbeat messages, our
popularity, according to the international polls we quietly conducted, was
falling. The State Department acquired in 2001 a new undersecretary,
Charlotte Beers, in the hope that the negative image of the Planetarch could
be remedied through good public diplomacy. She was a specialist on building
and preserving commercial brands, determined to market the United States to
the world. If we could not alter our policies, at least we could alter our
marketing, provided we could agree on what image we were trying to burnish.
For decades after his assassination, the image of John F. Kennedy had been a
key element of the American brand, an avatar of youth, idealism, and endless
possibility. That image had eroded by the late 1980s, but the United States
preserved its image as the land of opportunity, the home of science, the
bastion of freedom, albeit heavily armed. Ronald Reagan’s cowboy charm and
Bill Clinton’s saxophone were marketable elements of the brand. The US
reaction to September 11 put an end to that. We now had a president who
inspired fear but no respect from foreigners.
Congress exacerbated the problem by surrendering to a profound pessimism
about human nature, a fear of terrorism, and a suspicion of swarthy
foreigners that trumped our belief in an open society and ignored our
economic dependence on tourism, foreign students, and international
business. Newly skeptical of the idea of human progress, unless of the soul
after death, we had little of youth or idealism with which to encourage
loyalty to the US brand among increasingly secular Europeans increasingly
seduced by the expansion of the European Union as the institutional
expression of human progress.
With a president incapable of projecting a benign global image, we had
little to prop up the US brand. There was a pitiable effort in 2002 to stave
off the clash of civilizations by buying television time in Muslim countries
and broadcasting scenes of the happy home life of American Muslims, but our
public diplomacy became essentially a sterile litany of Hussein’s crimes
over the past 15 years. This proved a feeble reed, swept away by the nearly
universal world reaction to our unilateral and, at least by Kofi Annan’s and
the pope’s ruling, illegal decision for war with Iraq. The State Department
was not helped by the implicit embrace by senior officials of a new and
distracting jingle. It was not a compliment to our brave Australian allies
that the president’s brain trust had quietly rebranded America as the
Outback Steak House: “No rules, just right.”
Future historians will judge whether it was knaves or fools who asserted,
against both history and human nature, that the Iraqis would welcome their
American liberators and that the war would thus be quick and painless. Lying
to Congress is perhaps an impeachable offense, but deluding ourselves is
simply politics as usual.
All calculations of the utility of this war for US interests were based on
the belief that we could keep it quick and painless, that the television
images of human suffering broadcast around the world would in short order
give way to images of a country blessing its liberators. Regardless of what
happens in the coming weeks or months, we have incurred costs to our
interests around the world, antagonizing the planet and exposing the
American people to new and incalculable dangers in both the short and long
term.
Our rare setbacks (certainly Pearl Harbor and 9/11, arguably Vietnam) have
strengthened the United States rather than made it weaker. The world (like
us, until recently) still operates on a balance-of-power model. Our current
overwhelming power, even when wielded with more deference to world
sensibilities, is a strong incentive for smaller powers to put aside their
differences and unite against us. There is a remarkable amount of reflexive
opposition to US initiatives on general principle. Worse, the absence of any
evident check on our power has legitimized, for an appallingly large share
of world opinion, the suicide bomber as the only effective countermeasure to
overwhelming US technological superiority.
There is a school of thought that says that terrorists are insufficiently
afraid of the United States, and that they will leave us alone only if we
shock and awe them enough. But the terrorists are already terrified. There
is no human being on earth who doubts our power. But the more aggressively
we use our power to intimidate our foes, the more foes we create and the
more we validate terrorism as the only effective weapon of the powerless
against the powerful.
It is practically axiomatic that the United States will remain the favorite
terrorist target for decades. Terrorists will strike us again, and
painfully, but the risk to any ordinary American citizen from unfriendly
foreigners has been and remains microscopic. Other risks are much more
likely to strike Americans at home, in particular the risk to the US and
world economy from irresponsible trade or fiscal policies. To understand and
reduce the risks to American interests, we must take the trouble to listen
to our friends and also to our enemies. To manage the risks will require
that we soften the edges of our power, that we voluntarily restrain
ourselves, that we put on, as President Bush once promised, a certain
humility about our role in the world. If we cannot, for example, support a
viable solution to the Palestinian problem because of US domestic politics,
let us admit it freely and lend our support to someone else who can. More
importantly, we should sign on again, along with the vast majority of the
human race, to the vision of someday creating a body of real international
law that will bind states as firmly as possible to a code of conduct we
ourselves will agree to live by.
International law as we have left it offers us little comfort now in Iraq,
other than a faint hope that our prisoners of war will be treated in
accordance with the Geneva Conventions. We ourselves had made clear that our
security concerns overrule such legal strictures, at least for the prisoners
we take in the War Against Terrorism. Our rejection of the International
Criminal Court means there will be no legitimate international tribunal to
judge Hussein, should he survive, so we cannot afford to let him survive.
The international agreements against proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction are not universal enough or sweeping enough – largely at our
insistence – to fully delegitimize their use. Indeed, wise fools in the US
nuclear weapons programs made clear in the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review their
hope that bunker-busting tactical nuclear weapons will quietly slip below
the threshold of an absolute ban. This administration has not been absolute
enough in its denials that it will use such weapons. The overall signal we
have sent to a watching world is that the only sure defense against an
unpredictable and frightening America is a handful of nuclear warheads.
Fyodor Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground observed that a brick wall
exerts a calming influence on bullies. We hit a brick wall in Iraq, if we
have the wit to recognize it, and perhaps it will calm us. We need to be
calm, to take careful stock of what we gained and lost after September 11,
to assess how important to us are our friends, and how dangerous to us are
our foes. When we take stock carefully, we will realize that the American
people were safer in the months after 9/11, until the war drums began to
beat, than they had ever been in the history of the species. As we took arms
against Al Qaeda, we had good friends, good alliances, the beginnings of
real cooperation against terrorism, and a world population convinced that
terrorism was more a threat than we were. Now we must try to turn the pages
back to that happier era.
That task is difficult but not hopeless. We will depart Iraq with many of
our goals unrealized in any case. Let us adopt as our first priority putting
forth to the Middle East and to the world the message, a truthful message,
that there are limits to our power and limits to our ambition. Let us make
our first priority the rebuilding of our traditional alliances. It is only a
minor nuisance to pretend that all sovereign states have equal dignity, and
it is an act of wisdom, not weakness, to charitably assume that those who
are not against us are with us.
I was briefly a historian, afterward a diplomat, and perhaps in the future a
historian again. As a historian, I learned that power is ultimately
self-limiting. As a diplomat, I learned that the United States is a mirror
for the world. Our endless diversity allows outsiders to pick and choose a
version of the United States that suits their hopes or their fears. The
world’s role models for the exercise of power are mostly ugly ones. We have
better models to offer. But we must recognize that, unless we show this
softer face of American power, we inspire fear more than respect, obedience
more than cooperation, and a level of anger and humiliation that will
continue to haunt us.
Athenian taxi drivers sneer that Americans have no history, at least
compared to their own. I no longer can take pleasure in my scholarly
rebuttal, that history belongs to those that learn from it. Going into Iraq
we forgot not only the history of the overreaching, doomed Athenian Empire
of the fifth century BC, but even our own recent history. Let us see whether
it is too late to go back to the history books one more time.
John Brady Kiesling is a former political counselor at the US Embassy in
Athens.