Diplomats and Soldiers v. Bush

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation. Posted June 17, 2004.

On Wednesday a group of former senior diplomatic officials and retired military commanders -- several of whom are the kind who "have never spoken out before" on such matters -- issued a bracing statement arguing that George W. Bush has damaged the country's national security and calling on Americans to defeat him in November. It's too early to tell if the statement will have an impact on this fall's campaign. But Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change, as the group is called, reveals (again) how dangerously isolated the Bush Administration is not just around the world but even from America's own bipartisan foreign policy and military establishments.

This latest missive, as both the LA Times and the Washington Post reported last Sunday, is being sent by Democratic and Republican officials who refuse to stay silent in the face of Bush's extremist and ideological foreign policy which, they say, is squandering America's moral standing. These signatories aren't exactly a Who's Who of the American left.

Jack Matlock, who served as Reagan and Bush 41's ambassador to the Soviet Union, has signed the statement, as has Ret. Adm. William Crowe, who served as Reagan's Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Phyllis Oakley, who served as a State Department spokesperson under Reagan, added her name as well. The vast majority of the signatories are, in fact, either conservative Republicans who served under Reagan and Bush 41 or they're bipartisan, consensus-driven ex-diplomats who served their country from Africa to Asia because they believed in America's leadership role around the world.

Now they feel so enraged by Bush's extremist foreign policies that they can no longer stand by as this Administration makes America less secure by upending alliances and alienating much of the world. Against the metastasizing scandal of Abu Ghraib; the botched postwar occupation of Iraq; and the Administration's lies about Iraq's WMDs in the run-up to the war, these old hands are now taking an uncompromising, intelligent stand against what they see as the most arrogant, unilateral and incompetent foreign policy in their adult lifetimes.

Today's signatories join a large and growing chorus of former senior officials who were so enraged by Bush's conduct of the Iraq war that sitting on the sidelines simply wasn't an option for them. John Brady Kiesling, now a retired diplomat, led the charge in February 2003 when he courageously quit his foreign-service job with the American Embassy in Athens, and wrote a stinging rebuke to Bush's headlong rush to wage a war in Iraq. He was followed by another career diplomat Gregory Thielmann who went public, telling Bill Moyers that Iraq didn't pose an "imminent security threat" to America. Thielmann attacked Bush for hyping intelligence reports and for misleading the American people about the need to go to war in the Middle East. The Administration, he said, "has had a faith-based intelligence attitude.We know the answers -- give us the intelligence to support those answers'."

Around the same time, retired military commanders were growing aghast at Bush's utter ineptitude in planning for the occupation of Iraq. That's why, for example, the former Centcom commander Gen. Anthony Zinni ultimately went on 60 Minutes last month and argued that if Bush stayed on the current course in Iraq, America was "headed over Niagara Falls." Retired Marine Gen. Joseph Hoar, who commanded U.S. forces in the Middle East under Bush 41, has publicly declared that the United States is "absolutely on the brink of failure" in Iraq.

Katrina vanden Heuvel is Editor of The Nation.

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