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| Volume XIV, Fall 2007, Number 3 |
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BOOK REVIEW
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Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower,
by John Brady Kiesling. Potomac Books, 2007. 320 pages. $19.95
Edward S. Walker, Jr.
(U.S. Foreign Service, ret.), Christian A. Johnson Distinguished Professor
of Global Theory, Hamilton College; former assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs
and ambassador to Israel, Egypt and the U.A.E.
In February 2003, John Brady Kiesling, a mid-level Foreign Service officer stationed in Greece
as head of the political section, resigned in protest against American preparations for "bloody
regime change in Iraq." In his book Diplomacy Lessons, Kiesling says that he "wanted to leave an
accurate account of how many stars aligned to make one diplomat act bravely." He also said that
his book sought to answer the question of what U.S. power could realistically accomplish. Kiesling
says that on the basis of his 20 years in the Foreign Service, he has gone from being an idealist to a
State Department realist, which he defines as one who makes the "hard-nosed calculation of cost
and benefit to the American people, based on an accurate understanding of human nature and the
workings of power." His conclusion is that we cannot afford to defend our interests through
means other than by presenting ourselves to the world in moral terms. From this foundation he
arrives at two principal conclusions: the United States best uses its power by strengthening states
rather than subverting them, and we amplify our power when we support international institutions,
laws and agreements. Most of us in the profession would agree with those conclusions.
Kiesling writes well, and he is convincing when he writes about issues and events with which
he had been engaged during his career. His complaints about the talking points embassies receive
from Washington and our largely ineffectual public-diplomacy efforts reflect what many of us have
felt. But it is not an easy problem to fix. Kiesling highlights the problem of the president, whose
public statements at home undo the efforts of the Foreign Service to paint American policy in
palatable hues for foreign audiences. When I was preparing press guidance in Washington, it was
for the American press and the Congress, not the Greek or Egyptian Foreign Ministry. And when
we were drafting talking points for the ambassadors and their staffs, we had to homogenize
differing views in the U.S. bureaucracy while conforming to the outlines of policy directed by the
White House. In my four ambassadorships, I used talking points as a guide, never as a script. Mr.
Kiesling's contention was that ambassadors fill their report cables with their Washington-scripted
presentations to prove their loyalty. I did the opposite, because I almost always amended
Washington's talking points to take account of the foreign audience, not the Washington audience.
And of the many cables I received from ambassadors as assistant secretary, very few
followed the course that Kiesling suggests was common.
Kiesling's observation about the need for the Foreign Service and U.S. policy makers to take
account of the domestic political pressures on foreign leaders is sound advice. At times we forget
those pressures at our peril. I have seen major negotiations fail with Syria and with the Palestinians
because we did not take adequate account of the pressures on Arafat and Asad. However, it is not
always possible to focus on foreign political pressures in the face of U.S. domestic political
pressures. While Kiesling may be right that we would be more effective if we had a better fix on the
internal political situation in a given country and played to it, we cannot put their structural and
political problems above U.S. interests, even when those interests are based on domestic U.S.
politics. That is the fastest way for an ambassador to be dismissed as having gone native and to
lose credibility in Washington. I have seen ambassadors do exactly as Kiesling proposes by
defending a foreign country and protesting U.S. policy. That ambassador may gain credit with the
foreign government, but from then on, his advice will be ignored in Washington. And it will be his
last ambassadorship.
Kiesling says that his book is not meant to be partisan. Neoconservatives, conservatives and
the Bush administration might be excused if they do not believe him. He criticizes President Bush
for supporting the death penalty in the United Sates because it goes against the moral sensibilities
of foreign publics and calls this an indefensible "gaffe." He goes on to condemn Bush's "inept"
repudiation of the International Criminal Court and the Kyoto Climate Change Protocol. These are
but samples of the politically charged language Kiesling employs at several points in this book.
There are certainly arguments one could mount to support Kiesling's many conclusions about Iraq,
the CIA, the FBI and the U.S. policy-making structure, but he seldom enlists them. And this is one
of the principal limitations of his book. He does not give us enough evidence to support his
conclusions, and his career did not put him in a position to speak knowledgeably about many of
the subjects he takes on. I found myself agreeing with Kiesling at many points, but based on my
own experience of 35 years in the Foreign Service, not Kiesling's arguments or the weight of his
experience.
Kiesling's Greek language capability and his service in Israel and Morocco as a junior officer,
as well as postings in Greece and Armenia and three postings on country desks in Washington, do
not qualify him as an expert on Iraq, Arab affairs, the Middle East, nonproliferation, covert intelligence
operations or senior-level policy making in Washington. Yet these are the subjects that
occupy a substantial portion of his book and on which he discourses freely. Kiesling says that he
"had no bureaucratic standing" to comment on Iraq policy. As a private citizen, of course; as a
Foreign Service officer, no.
Kiesling's resignation did not have the impact on the administration or on the American public
that he may have hoped. He broke the general convention in the Foreign Service that a resignation
should take effect prior to making public statements. Instead, he had a copy of his resignation
letter forwarded to The New York Times and spoke from Athens to its reporter in New York about
his motives. As Kiesling says, his story merited a few incoherent remarks on page 13 of the Times,
and his letter was carried on the Times web site. Thereafter, there was a flurry of support but no
discernible impact on policy.
I respect Kiesling's courage and his commitment to his principles. The questions he asks
himself are asked by most Foreign Service officers at some point in their careers. A few, like
Kiesling, resign on principle. Most do not. Kiesling passes judgment on his colleagues when he
says: "To criticize the war would directly or indirectly challenge the moral accommodation each of
us had made to our profession." The implication that we compromise our morals to serve our
careers, as Kiesling asserts, is insulting and suggests a flawed knowledge of what the Foreign
Service is.
Foreign Service officers are hired to serve the elected president of the United States and his or
her appointees. Our job is to give the best policy advice possible based on our knowledge of the
countries in which we serve, to recommend policies and actions that will further the president's
objectives, and to then implement those policies to the best of our ability. Once the president has
decided on a policy, it is no longer a subject of legitimate debate unless it proves unworkable or
conditions change.
Kiesling has some of it right. He makes a good case for the role of the Service in understanding
a foreign country and what motivates its leaders. He seems to have a more tenuous grasp of
the duty of the Service to interpret America and our politics to friend and foe alike in foreign
countries. It was inconceivable to me that as political counselor in Athens, he had paid little
attention to our presidential election. It was equally strange when he criticized his ambassador in
Athens, Tom Miller: "Miller woke up hours before the rest of us, read everything that came from
Washington, and used his superior knowledge of Washington's likes and dislikes to keep control
of the mission." An ambassador has to know what Washington is thinking if he or she wants to
participate in the policy debate and guide the embassy properly.
It is difficult for many of our officers to understand how tenuous the relationship is between
the professional service and our political masters. The politicians I have worked for have generally
been hypersensitive to questions of the loyalty of the Foreign Service. Republicans think we are all
Democrats and therefore do not respect politicians or accept their decisions. We are suspected of
taking sides in the internal political fights that any administration encounters between its most
senior members. The American political process is confrontational, as the intensity of any political
campaign demonstrates. It is a process of deep emotion that can be compromised by any hint of
disloyalty. As Foreign Service officers, we serve and have impact when a politician listens to our
advice, plumbs our expertise and is confident that we will not abuse our knowledge to embarrass
him or her. When Kiesling resigned to, in his words, "marginally increase the political cost the
warmongers would pay for the harm they wreaked on America's image and interests," he broke the
rules and undercut his colleagues who remained at their posts in the hope of moderating the worst
aspects of a policy that required the best and the brightest.
It is over Iraq that Kiesling resigned, and it is on Iraq that he devotes much of his book's
heavy criticism of the administration, the Washington bureaucracy, the CIA, the FBI and many
others. He says that policy is hammered out in a competitive process involving senior officials
from different departments whose careers are judged, not on whether the policies they advocate
serve U.S. interests, but whether their policies prevail. He claims that "90 percent of the world's
population knew instinctively that invading Iraq was a bad decision. The other 10 percent could
have reached that same correct conclusion if they had asked the right questions of the experts
whose specialty it was to understand Iraq and its people." He also claims that mid-level Foreign
Service officers should shoulder the burden of reality checking on behalf of the American people.
According to Kiesling, President Bush launched the war because Saddam Hussein had
weapons of mass destruction; he was motivated by irrational hatred of the United States; and
legitimate leadership alternatives were available. He suggests that "balding senior officials sitting
around a conference table in the White House" are guilty of group-think. When I sat around the
conference table in the White House, I never found that group-think was the problem. In the latter
part of the Clinton administration and the beginning of the Bush administration, we were, as
Kiesling suggests, focused on Iraq - but not for the reasons Kiesling suggests.
Saddam had demonstrated twice that he was prepared to go to war with his neighbors in the
Gulf, and he had shown no evidence that he had abandoned his dream of hegemony. His statements
said just the opposite. We focused on Iraq because the sanctions regime that had served us
well for a decade was crumbling under the triple attack of sanctions fatigue, Saddam's effective public diplomacy characterizing the Iraqi people as "victims," and the money that Saddam used to
bribe countries and individuals to subvert the sanctions.
We knew that, if the sanctions were lifted or simply disintegrated, we would never be able to
reconstitute them through the Security Council, given Russian interests in Iraq and China's allergy
to sanctions. We recognized that air power, as used by Clinton in 1998, was inadequate to stop
Saddam if he could relieve himself of the sanctions. We had it on the authority of the CIA that the
chances of a silver-bullet solution were about 5 percent. Regime change, first raised in the Clinton
administration, was not the subject of discussion in the initial days of the Bush administration. In
fact, Donald Rumsfeld, in one meeting, as I recall it, said he did not give a damn about Saddam or
regime change. What he cared about was the danger of opening the door to a sanctions-free and
inspection-free Saddam Hussein to do as he pleased in the development of WMD and the use of
surrogates to deliver them. In the pre-9/11 days, we were concerned with the mid-term threat that
Saddam posed to our interests and the security of our friends in the region. Through our deliberations,
we were increasingly being stymied by the lack of effective alternatives to a military solution
employing U.S. forces.
Kiesling gives Ahmed Chalabi a great deal of credit for misleading the president, the vice
president and Secretary Rumsfeld. Just because Ahmed Chalabi wanted us to take care of Saddam
and the neoconservatives for their own reasons wanted to flex American muscles, it does not mean
that there were no valid reasons for eliminating the Saddam problem. Had Ahmed Chalabi never
existed, it is unlikely that the course of history would have been different. I never challenged the
rationale or the goal of eliminating Saddam Hussein. I had severe doubts about how well we were
positioned to deal with the aftermath of an invasion.
Many of Kiesling's observations and recommendations are sound when he is dealing with
structures and issues that he confronted in his own career. The book could have used more of that
to highlight the important role our mid-career officers play in the game of diplomacy. However, his
proposals for corrective action in areas where he had no discernible experience, such as combining
the personnel systems of the State Department and the CIA with exchange assignments, make no
sense and demonstrate a profound ignorance of the differing roles and responsibilities of these two
organizations. His proposal to expand the UN Security Council's permanent veto-wielding
membership from five to nine and to require a veto to be sustained by three permanent members
demonstrates very little knowledge of our own national interest. Based on my time as deputy
permanent representative in New York, each of the other four permanent members would equally
rebel at such a thought.
If it is true, as Kiesling contends, that many others in the Service share Kiesling's attitudes
toward U.S. foreign policy and the senior authorities who design and carry it out, then we are doing
an abysmal job of bringing our young officers up through the ranks. We appear to have very little
vertical communication in either direction. As Kiesling suggests, we can do better.
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