Geodog

An honest man

I've spent all day at a conference, and I'm going to another one tomorrow that I have to get up 6:30 AM on a Saturday morning to make, so I don't have a lot of insightful writing in me tonight. However, via Dave Farber's IP, I ran across the amazing U.S. Diplomat's Letter of Resignation. As the son of a career American diplomat, I have some idea of just how frustrated someone who has spent his whole career representing different administrations would have to be to write such a letter. So tonight I am just going to quote John Brady Kiesling's letter:

The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests. Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America’s most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security... we have not seen such systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic manipulation of American opinion, since the war in Vietnam.

...this Administration has chosen to make terrorism a domestic political tool, enlisting a scattered and largely defeated Al Qaeda as its bureaucratic ally. We spread disproportionate terror and confusion in the public mind, arbitrarily linking the unrelated problems of terrorism and Iraq. The result, and perhaps the motive, is to justify a vast misallocation of shrinking public wealth to the military and to weaken the safeguards that protect American citizens from the heavy hand of government. September 11 did not do as much damage to the fabric of American society as we seem determined to so to ourselves. Is the Russia of the late Romanovs really our model, a selfish, superstitious empire thrashing toward self-destruction in the name of a doomed status quo?

...We are straining beyond its limits an international system we built with such toil and treasure, a web of laws, treaties, organizations, and shared values that sets limits on our foes far more effectively than it ever constrained America’s ability to defend its interests.

I am resigning because I have tried and failed to reconcile my conscience with my ability to represent the current U.S. Administration.

John Brady Kiesling, an American hero.

Update 3/14/2002: Good radio interview with John Brady Kiesling. Reinforces my sense of his heroism.