The Foreign Service Journal, September 2017

44 SEPTEMBER 2017 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL question of Iraq’s possession and development of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, American leadership dis- counted or disbelieved reporting by United Nations inspec- tors, crediting instead information provided by an Iraqi defector and other unreliable sources. “The reports were of remarkable clarity,” said Marc Grossman, then under secre- tary of State for political affairs, in his 2006 ADST oral history interview. “Maybe we should have thought, ‘How can they be so exact, so precise?’ And it was all false.” Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had served in both countries, investigated an alleged sale of uranium ore by Niger to Iraq. “Intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program,” Wilson wrote in a July 2003 New York Times op-ed, “was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.” A refusal to accept as valid information that challenged assumptions or disproved hypotheses left facts in dispute. With no accepted body of fact to build on, analyses could be shaped to fit leadership preferences. Foreign Service officers may have been complicit in the erosion of honesty. In 2008, AFSA Presi- dent John Naland wrote: “Have some senior career officials ‘sold their souls’ over Iraq … to advance their careers? I believe they have.” Despite the strategic failures of the Iraq war, and the col- lapse of the justification offered for its prosecution, Foreign Service dissent from U.S. policy remained at a low level. In contrast to the hundreds who resigned during Vietnam, the number of resignations directly related to the war in Iraq was just three—Ann Wright, John Brady Kiesling and John Brown— all of whom resigned at the war’s outset, in the spring of 2003. Service discipline prevailed. The department threatened to pursue directed assignments but did not need to resort to ordering members of the Service into the region. Over the decade from 2003 to 2012, about 40 percent of the Service had tours of 90 days or more in Iraq or Afghanistan, all as volun- teers. Many had misgivings—Secretary of State Condoleezza In the past 18 months, State Department dissents have twice become public and earned headlines.