The Foreign Service Journal, September 2013

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2013 49 Keith W. Mines William R. Rivkin Award, 2003 Regarding Iraq and the United Nations Briefly describe the dissent that your AFSA award rec- ognized. I wrote a Dissent Channel cable in the spring of 2003 titled “Let the U.N. Manage the Political Transition in Iraq,” based largely on my experience while seconded to the United Nations for the UNOSOM II peacekeeping mission in Somalia, and interacting closely with the U.N. missions in El Salvador and Haiti. I was convinced that the U.N. simply has better senior diplomats for this sort of thing, and a neutral, informed approach to political reconciliation and nationbuilding that would yield a better outcome than we would have produced on our own. I also suggested that what we were getting into was going to be much harder than we thought, and we would need to get all our tools out of the toolbox and ready to engage. I did not believe the policy of confronting Iraq militarily over its weap- ons of mass destruction programs was wrongheaded, and do not today. I was just concerned with how we were going about it. Did your dissent lead to any change in policy? Things were pretty far along at that point, and a pro-U.N. Keith Mines at Jebel Moon with Darfur rebels, 2006.