The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2013

38 JULY-AUGUST 2013 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL While I was handling media matters for Embassy Belgrade during the delicate negotiations leading up to the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, I was keenly aware that a single misspo- ken, “leaked” word, especially if attributed to anyone in the embassy, could derail the fragile, unofficial agreements being reached behind closed doors. The mission had to speak with one official voice. Throughout my career I agreed wholeheartedly with this view, even though I know it sounds rather doctrinaire now, in the age of Twitter. The Seeds of Dissent In 2001, I returned to Washington as a faculty adviser at Georgetown University, where I taught courses on public and cul- tural diplomacy. Suddenly, after many years overseas engaged in work that took far more than eight hours a day, I again had time to read in depth and reflect on the role of America—and its diplomats—in the new, post-Cold War world of the 21st century. In preparation for my courses, I came across a passage from Jacques Ellul’s 1973 book, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. It reminded me of the dangers of a “public diplo- mat” becoming a crude propagandist: “Even in the actual contact of human relations, at meet- ings, in door-to-door visits, the propagandist is…nothing else and nothing more than a representative of the organiza- tion—or, rather, a delegated fraction of it. ... His words are no longer human words but technically calculated words. ... In the very act of pretending to speak as man to man, the propagandist is reaching the summit of his mendacity and falsifications.” The more I learned about President George W. Bush’s plans regarding Iraq, the more I was appalled. His administration failed to explain why the United States was invading a Middle Eastern nation that, no matter how despicable its regime, had never attacked us. The whole enterprise seemed senseless to me—as it did, I believe, to most of the world. So I left the Foreign Service shortly before the March 2003 invasion, and set forth my rea- sons in an e-mail to Secretary of State Colin Powell that I later shared with the media. I was sad to abandon a profession I loved, but relieved no longer to be part of an unjustified, and unexplained, military adventure that was a catastrophe for the U.S. and its public diplomacy. Dissent from Policy Let me now turn to the perplexing question of deciding how and when to dissent from policy, while staying within the system. Perhaps the best way for me to provide a tentative answer is to cite my May 2012 review (in the online journal American Diplomacy ) of Hannah Gurman’s The Dissent Papers: The Voices of Diplomats in the Cold War and Beyond (Columbia University Press, 2012). The key point of this scholar’s monograph, which is well-researched and largely devoid of academic jargon, is that the “voices” of dissenting U.S. diplomats, expressed by the written word, have been all too often ignored or dismissed by formula- tors of foreign policy in the nation’s capital, to the detriment of America’s national interests. The individuals on Gurman’s roster of Foggy Bottom nay- sayers share some characteristics. First, in an often isolation- ist country marked by a “long history of antipathy toward traditional diplomacy,” these dissenting diplomats, like their more conformist State Department colleagues, were the object of hostility from the White House and Congress. Second, the dissidents were paid by an organization that did not, as a rule, encourage dissent or independent thinking. In the United States, dissenting diplomats—when no longer numbered among those in seats of power—are, as Gurman puts it, “transformed from false prophets of the U.S. foreign policy establishment into true prophets of the nation’s foreign policy.” Also worth pointing out: The subjects of Gurman’s study, as she notes, were “not necessarily and absolutely wise.” More important, from her perspective, the dissenters can’t be reduced to modern-day successors of John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness. Rather, they were skeptical about “the predictability of foreign affairs and about the possibility of knowledge more generally.” I also agree with Gurman’s view that the State Depart- Throughout my 22-year Foreign Service career, I did my best to present American policy accurately to local media, whether I agreed with it or not.