The Foreign Service Journal, February 2005

between massive, but not unlimited, U.S. power and a planet full of potentially hostile foreigners. A Cold War response to 3,000 deaths would have dispatched Powell as well as the CIA to build a Holy Alliance against the diseased local politics that allowed Islamist terror groups to flourish. Washington quickly realized, how- ever, that 9/11 was not only a horrible blow to America’s self-esteem — it was also the largest political and bureaucratic windfall in American history. The State Department responded, correctly, in traditional prob- lem-solving terms, but others understood better what the president thought he wanted. In a Cabinet room emancipated from the real- world consequences of its decisions, Colin Powell became a dignified ghost. The influence of the State Department depended on expert knowledge and mutually beneficial relationships with foreigners. In the new, self-referential Washington consensus, Congress and the White House would judge success and failure not in terms of American lives and liveli- hoods, whose protection required specialized exper- tise, but by their continued ability to mobilize the spending authority of the richest nation on earth. Bills for the Iraq War will still be trickling in two decades from now. Powell did not mobilize his experts to assess those costs. Going public with the depart- ment’s superior knowledge of the Middle East would have been seen as disloyalty to the president, and Powell was loyal. Yes, he questioned the intelligence community prior to his U.N. performance on WMD, but he did not push the questions far enough. Diplomatic Capital Wasted Powell was not the only U.S. diplomat to destroy his hard-earned credibility overnight. A politely raised eyebrow will pursue a whole generation of Foreign Service officers from post to post around the world. The myth of superior U.S. intelligence information, once a prop used by every U.S. diplomat to justify America’s pretensions to lead the world, has been blown to hell. From the narrowest diplomatic stand- point, the war made it political suicide for Third-World governments to align themselves too fully and publicly with the U.S. in fighting terrorism. Powell did not fight hard enough for international law. Supported by the uniformed military, Powell could have prevailed, for example, had he mobilized his friends in the Senate and the media to defend the Geneva Conventions and other basic human rights pro- tections from the sadists that bide their time in the bowels of even the most civilized democracies. The results of expanding America’s repertoire of approved torture techniques have been too meager to be made public. The results were more evident when we left the torturing to others. Friendly dictatorships handed the CIA, FBI and military some welcome vic- tories against terror cells, but part of the price we have paid was a blind eye to their broken promises of politi- cal reform. America’s violation of its founding principles had a dire impact on Muslim opinion. What al-Qaida could not achieve with 9/11 — to neutralize the U.S. as a political model for the Arab world — we achieved our- selves with Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. We con- vinced a generation of Middle Eastern school children that “liberty” was as cynical a slogan for us as “peace” had been for the Politburo 40 years before. Diplomatic capital was wasted in pursuit of an ideo- logical fantasy loosely based on the International Criminal Court. Powell dutifully fulfilled the congres- sional mandate that American war criminals must be protected, but this theoretical protection came at a real cost to ordinary American soldiers. Angered by our ICC stance, allies like Greece began to withhold the far more practical protection from local prosecution that American service members used to enjoy under bilat- eral status-of-forces agreements. The neoconservatives did U.S. national interests a grave disservice by vaunting their victories over Powell F O C U S F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 5 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 51 John Brady Kiesling joined the U.S. Department of State as a Foreign Service officer in 1983. He served in Tel Aviv, Casablanca, Athens, Yerevan and Washing- ton, D.C. His final assignment, beginning in 2000, was as political counselor at Embassy Athens. Dismayed at the course of U.S. diplomacy under the Bush adminis- tration, Kiesling resigned at the end of February 2003. His letter of resignation, protesting the Iraq War and the harm done to the U.S. image and interests, was widely republished and circulated on the Internet. Since his resignation, he has been writing and speaking on U.S. foreign policy. During the 2003-2004 academ- ic year he was a visiting fellow and lecturer at Princeton University. He is working on a book on effec- tive diplomacy for an unloved superpower.