The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2013

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2013 33 My Decision-Making Process To be persuasive, one of my ambassadors taught me, you need to come up with a minimum of three reasons why your chosen decision is the right one. Here are some of mine: Point One: When a Foreign Service officer can no longer well and faithfully perform his or her duties, resignation is the honorable course. I was a good analyst, able to read between the lines of a National Intelligence Estimate or my own effi- ciency report. I had taken justifiable pride in what the U.S. government was doing and my role in doing it. But by mid- 2002 I no longer did. Diplomats have a duty to their country to be competent. I could no longer competently represent President George W. Bush and his administration’s policies to the world. Point Two : By November 2002, the faithful performance of diplomatic duties in Greece was of no importance to anyone who mattered in Washington. On the con- trary, the political agenda of the White House was incompatible with the hon- est assessment of costs and benefits—in this case, of the Iraq War—that is a diplo- mat’s basic duty to provide. Point Three: By the fall of 2002, the Bush administration had convinced me of its inability to answer fundamental questions of national interest: • Was there truly an imminent military threat to the United States or its allies that justified a war the Iraqis themselves were desperate to avoid? • Were the arguments we could present for that war adequate to protect the hard-won, fraying legitimacy of U.S. leadership of the international community? • To the extent our motives were humanitarian, would mili- tary intervention to decapitate a blood-drenched dictatorship preserve more lives than it destroyed? • Could we replace Saddam Hussein with an Iraqi gov- ernment willing to take our orders and legitimate enough to implement them? Would we not be stuck with a permanent, costly U.S. military presence that delegitimized any Iraqi gov- ernment we installed? • Was there any successful model we could point to for democratizing a bitterly divided tribal society with no tradi- tion of representative government? • If our goal was instead to readjust the regional balance of military power in favor of Israel and Saudi Arabia, who would counterbalance Iran once we had taken out Saddam Hussein? You and I know the answers to all these questions in hind- sight, of course. But they were knowable and known in 2002. As the U.S. government’s expert professionals, we had a duty to provide those correct answers and insist on them. Supporting and Defending the Constitution Some may say that the wisdom or folly of a president’s policy is above our pay grade as FSOs. I would disagree. The Nuremberg war crimes trials established that certain orders are intrinsically unlawful, and officers and officials have a duty under international law to recognize and disobey such orders, despite any oath of obedience they have sworn. Foreign Service offi- cers—unlike a handful of CIA colleagues who led death squads and torture teams—dodged the clearly illegal orders. But we did implement policies that undermined the economic security and basic freedoms of the American people. Our oath of office puts our official duties last and defending the U.S. Constitu- tion first, for good reason. America’s external threats can be managed, if we choose, with our civil rights intact and with a national security establishment much smaller and cheaper than the one we pay for currently. The darker threat we face comes precisely from the politicians and government officials who serve their personal ends by preying on the public’s fear. The so-called Global War on Terror was first and foremost an assault on the U.S. Constitution. After 9/11, most Ameri- cans embraced the massive intrusion of executive power into our homes and correspondence, drone-sanitized death squads and, most recently, the useless lockdown of a whole city. Foreign Service officers serving in the many countries around the world where the state wields arbitrary power learn to value the rule of law, by talking to activists whose friends are in jail or have become unrecognizable corpses dumped by the side of the road. We are also the first to pay the price when U.S. policy, or a perception of it, outrages the sensibilities of ordinary foreigners and leads to violence. As public servants living under the constant threat of terrorism, our views on the When a Foreign Service officer can no longer well and faithfully performhis or her duties, resignation is the honorable course.