Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower.

Walker, Edward S., Jr.

Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower, by John Brady Kiesling. Potomac Books, 2007. 320 pages. $19.95

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.

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.