Dissenting Diplomats

By Laura Flanders, Working Assets Radio. Posted April 4, 2003.

This interview originally aired March 13. To listen to the audio version online, click here.

I'm Laura Flanders and this is Working Assets Radio. Two top United States Diplomats have resigned from their posts, saying they cannot support the Bush Administration's plans for war. In his resignation letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell, John Brady Kiesling, a former U.S. diplomat based in Athens, Greece, said the Bush Administration was involved in, and I quote, "a systematic distortion of intelligence and a systematic manipulation of public opinion not seen since the days of Vietnam."

Kiesling dedicated 20 years of his life to diplomacy and civil debate. He sent his resignation letter to Secretary Powell on February 27. Friday, March 7, was his last day in the Foreign Service.

Another veteran Diplomat, John Brown, joined Kiesling just three days ago. Brown was a senior member of the Foreign Service who also served in the State Department for more than 20 years. He was stationed primarily in Eastern Europe and most recently in Moscow.

In Brown's letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell, he said he agreed with John Brady Kiesling. Brown wrote, "The president's disregard for views in other nations borne out by his neglect of public diplomacy is giving birth to an anti-American century."

John Brown will join the conversation in the second half of today's program. Joining us now from upstate New York is John Brady Kiesling. Welcome, very much so, to Working Assets Radio, sir.

JBK: Thank you very much, it's good to be here.

LF: Tell us first off, you're going down in history as the first U.S. diplomat to resign in protest over the Bush Administration's Iraq policy. Are you getting used to the feeling? How does it feel?

JBK: Well, there was a certain amount of just relief, when I did it. There had been such a burden growing on my shoulders as I felt we were sort of walking into a swamp. I was going out and fighting the good fight every day with arguments I didn't believe, speaking to people who did not believe them, convinced myself that we were about to do something that would really damage our interests, talking to people who believed that it would really damage our interests. It was a terrible feeling. And when I resigned, I felt much better. I'm now coming to grips however with the reality of that resignation and I'm starting to be more than a little nervous.

LF: Can you elaborate?

JBK: Well, at a certain point, I have a child to support, I've got obligations in the world. It's wonderful to be a hero to those people who are looking for a hero on this issue, but -- um -- I have to figure out where to go from here.

LF: The [U.S.] Embassy in Athens, Greece has been forced to respond, of course, your resignation having gotten attention worldwide. They're telling the press that you resigned for personal reasons.

JBK: Well, I mean, any resignation is a personal decision and the reasons were personal. My conscious, my sense of my duty to my country, came into conflict with what I was required to do professionally. I must admit, my ability to do my job had seriously diminished in the last month, especially as it became absolutely clear, that the rhetoric we were using -- that the only way to prevent war was to sound ready for war -- was in fact specious; that we were determined to go to war under any circumstances. When I realized that, my ability to promote the policy just sort of diminished dramatically.

LF: Can you tell us some more about what your job entailed?

JBK: As a political counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Athens, my job was to run a political section of several people. Our first goal was to understand how Greece worked so that we could more effectively promote U.S. policies in Greece. My job was to advise the ambassador on strategy, to report to the state department on what was going on in Athens, to say, this is what the Greeks need, this is how we can do what we need to do with the Greeks based on their political concerns.

LF: Now, when you say you began to believe your job was impossible to do, how did the Administration's line affect your work?

JBK: The thing that stunned me was that, we had a policy that you could argue whether it was good or bad. I'm certainly convinced that in invading Iraq, the costs outweigh the benefits. But, it was a policy you could at least argue about. The Administration, pretty systematically, made clear that there were no ... that dissenting views were not going to be heard. That, if the Europeans didn't like it, it was because the Europeans were wimps. And they were going to essentially undercut the whole logic of the alliance that we had built up over 50 years. An alliance that gave us the legitimacy to act sort of in the name of the world.

LF: Now you make an interesting point in your letter to Colin Powell about that alliance and, in fact, you make a point about September 11th. You say, "the tragedy left us stronger than before, rallying around us a vast international coalition to cooperate for the first time in a systematic way against the threat of terrorism." Now, it's the standard line in this country that, of course, September 11th made us weaker and vulnerable.

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