Ex-diplomat saw Iraq as ‘I quit’ issue
John Brady Kiesling’s new book tells why U.S. invasion
plans forced his 2003 resignation
STYLE & CULTURE
Los Angeles Times
September 25, 2006
By Bob Thompson, Washington Post Writer
WASHINGTON – When John Brady Kiesling decided, in February 2003, that
the looming United States invasion of Iraq would make it impossible
for him, in good conscience, to remain in the U.S. Foreign Service, he
carefully crafted a letter of resignation from his post as political
counselor in the Athens embassy. Widely praised for its eloquence,
the letter briefly made Kiesling semi-famous. Eventually, it helped
earn him a tiny advance from Potomac Books.
Yet when he later reread the letter, says the author of the newly
published "Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower,"
he was startled to find that it contained a hole.
"It was so obvious to me that Iraq was going to be a disaster,"
Kiesling says, "that nowhere in my letter had I explained why it was
going to be a disaster…. My knowledge that Iraq would be a disaster
was intuitive."
One way of looking at his book is as a two-year effort "to figure
out where that intuition came from."
The short answer is that it came from 20 years of diplomatic
postings in places such as Morocco, Greece and Armenia, where he
worked extremely hard – motivated in part by what he calls his
"intellectual vanity" – to understand the way Moroccans, Greeks and
Armenians thought and acted. That is a diplomat’s fundamental job,
he says, and "a resource for the United States of America."
The longer answer involves specific mistakes made and lessons learned.
In a chapter titled "Diplomatic Skepticism and the Lessons of Iraq,"
for example, he tells the story of his "failure to prevent a Florida
con man from bilking the government of Romania out of $250,000." He
then speculates pointedly as to whether this kind of humbling
experience might have kept Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld from falling so hard for Iraqi exile Ahmed
Chalabi, "an indicted embezzler who had already been written off by
both the CIA and the State Department as a swindler."
Mainly, however, "Diplomacy Lessons" is a plea that Kiesling’s old
profession be taken more seriously.
"Diplomacy is not a miracle cure for anything," he says. "Diplomats
bust their butts for years, and most of the time what they achieve
is that the planet is still spinning around on its axis at about the
same speed it was when they started. But that’s actually an incredibly
important task."
tyle/la-et-diplomacy25sep25,1,2541339.story
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
