The Foreign Service Journal, March 2004

M A R C H 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 13 A new vice consul quickly learns on the visa line that people tell us what they think we want to hear. When I was a diplomat, for- eigners politely agreed with U.S. poli- cy. They lied, but they meant well. Now that I am a dissident, my inter- locutors take a much less polite view of the U.S. role in the world. I must summon up my former Foreign Service colleagues by face and name to remind myself of what I once knew instinctively: that even the most ambi- tious and unscrupulous of us work for a benevolent superpower. My new dissident friends shake their heads at the notion of American benevolence. But they are wrong. Nearly a year has passed since March 20, 2003, a year that has blown to hell any illusion that we had launched our remaking of Iraq based on a rational, selfish, cost/benefit calculation of American interests. Was it an inno- cent mistake? Efforts to predict the costs — Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki’s honesty about the troop lev- els needed to maintain security in Iraq, attempts by Congress to coax out of the White House even a sketchy estimate of occupation expenses, INR’s analyses of the likely Iraqi and world reactions to an invasion — all were stifled brutally enough to show the administration’s foreknowledge that accurate accounting would render the war too costly. But the war was launched nevertheless. That decision would suggest that the people who ordered the war put their own political or bureaucratic interests above the interests of the American people they were sworn to serve. To confound that logic, the Bush administration has made a rhetorical leap. No longer are Ameri- cans foreign policy “realists” bound by sterile calculation. Now we are heav- ily-armed Wilsonian idealists, doing battle with a paean to universal democracy on our lips. While still an FSO in Athens, I made myself deliberately offensive to an invited pundit from the American Enterprise Institute. I told him in October 2002 that no one who had ever spoken to Arabs or been involved in U.S. democracy-building efforts could possibly believe that America had the capability forcibly to democ- ratize Iraq and then Iran and Syria at any cost we could afford. I said he and his friends who advocated this war were living in a dream world. He disagreed, more politely than I deserved, but at least obviously. What is less obvious is the State Department’s own view. Perhaps those of us who had winced at the anger and humiliation of our Middle Eastern interlocutors assumed America’s lack of standing there didn’t matter, that experience elsewhere had confirmed our prowess at democracy building. Or perhaps those of us who had tried with little success to incul- cate free elections among our docile new friends in the former Soviet bloc believed it would be easier in Iraq at gunpoint? No, the State Department had ample expertise to know — even if it was a lonely and unrewarding knowledge — that Iraq would be an expensive fiasco. We chose, however, to keep saying what the president wanted to hear. Newt Gingrich complained last summer that U.S. diplomacy failed to convince our allies because we were disloyal to President Bush. The oppo- site is true: because we were loyal to the president and our careers, we failed the American people. Repack- aging the administration’s populist rhetoric for foreign audiences is a safe bureaucratic strategy. It is not enough, and it never was, to lead a skeptical planet. Did any of us warn the president that the mantle of “Leader of the Free World” does not come automatically with the office? He will never wear that mantle now, not on a planet convinced, as the polls show, that the character and ideology of George W. Bush make the world a U.S. Diplomacy and Other Sacrifices B Y J OHN B RADY K IESLING S PEAKING O UT After 9/11, though diplomacy became more vital than ever to American security, our reaction left little room for allies.