last February out of frustration with the Bush administration's dangerous foreign policy, recently gave a speech at Rice University, sponsored by the local chapter of Amnesty International. Kiesling grew up in Houston; his friends and relatives in the area prevailed upon him to speak. A reader, who attended the lecture, recently sent me a transcript. To me, the speech, while in many ways pessimistic, is inspiring in its honesty, intelligence, vision, genuine patriotism, and call "to stand up to the schoolyard bullies in Washington." It's quite long, but well worth reading.
American Moral Capital and the Misprojection of U.S. Power
John Brady Kiesling
Rice University, Houston
April 28. 2003
I'd like to thank Katharine Teleki and Amnesty International for making this possible. I am truly honored to be back in the city that bore me. Thanks to Ambassador Djerejian from the Baker Institute.
I would like to start tonight with an appeal to public service. Representing your country abroad is one of the great and noble careers of this world. We live on a small planet. Our health, our wealth, our safety, are entangled with that of the rest of the planet.
But human beings are condemned to misunderstand one another. If you consider the confusion and conflict that rage within families and communities where everyone speaks the same language and shares reasonably consistent values and practices, it is easy to understand why the international arena is a messy place. Diplomacy is a vital art, as even Newt Gingrich implicitly acknowledged when trashing the State Department the other day.
American diplomats represent the greatest country on earth, certainly the most powerful and the richest. Almost all doors are open to us, even now; there is access to the great and good, or at least the semi-great and semi-good, and definitely to some of the most interesting people on the planet. Our opinions are hung upon with hope or fear by a world anxious to hear what America plans for them. Our values are seen as America's values, our character becomes America's character. We have the opportunity to do great good, or great harm.
I assume you would shrink from the notion that your education conveys particular virtue or a special claim to rule the world. I hope however, that you have not lost a much more precious sense, that your education and opportunities come with a duty to your country and your planet. I hope some of you will consider joining the State Department, or at any rate will look beyond the narrow borders of the United States to contribute something to that vast, complex, mysterious, but magnificent abstraction of the international community.
There is an unadvertised privilege that comes with devoting yourself for 20 years to a great calling. When the day comes that you must walk away from it in order to be true to yourself, you walk away with a moral strength, a sense of legitimacy, that transform you and the rest of your life. I do not feel particularly courageous. My career had lost much of its savor over time, for reasons that had as much to do with my character as with that career. My resignation gave me a platform to criticize the course taken by this Administration, a course I find frightening for our country. This criticism will not condemn me to being shot, or imprisoned, or (I hope) made destitute. Dissidents elsewhere are much more courageous, as I know well from a career that has given me the privilege of meeting some of them.
Why did I resign?
My recent experience is with Greece. A week ago a responsible Greek newspaper, pragmatic, center-left, pro-government, To Vima, Greece's Washington Post, chose to publish the following letter to the editor, from a senior in a Greek public high school in an upper middle class suburb.
"The terrorist policy of the superpower directly and indirectly threatens mankind and the environment. Humanity now has a sacred duty to respond. We need to protect human life, dignity, and freedom and avert the total destruction of our planet. For all these reasons and for many others we must struggle to eliminate the American threat against universal peace and security, to restore the authority and credibility of the UN, and to permanently end the danger of mass terrorism by the USA. We must likewise raise the consciousness of the world's peoples so that they can democratically elect their governments without the guidance and guardianship of the hawks of Washington, who arbitrarily and dictatorially impose their own democracies. In other words, we seek the disarmament of the Americans."
I would be happy to dismiss young Vangelis as a campus radical, an Amnesty International member, or worse. And perhaps he is, I don't know. But I do know that his fear and anger have become the mainstream view of Greeks across the whole political spectrum. Every Greek newspaper is full of stuff much stronger than this, by grown, professional journalists, whose prose is contorted by anger and even hatred of the United States. A whole Greek population has come to the conviction that the United States is evil and dangerous, or at least that its leaders are. Few other than high school students are naive enough to believe that America can be disarmed, but most Greeks would agree that the world is under threat and the only safe course is for the world to band together to resist us.
Greeks have historical and sentimental and rhetorical reasons for resenting us. They have disagreed with us plenty of times before when we were probably right and they were certainly wrong. But this is different. We have lost our reliable friends, the traditional pro-U.S. politicians and intellectuals. Moreover, this time the Greeks are no longer alone at the fringe of European opinion. Eighty percent of Europeans feel the same way.
Greeks and Europeans saw a very different war from the self-congratulatory war Americans experienced on Fox TV, and they were horrified and furious. Greeks saw mangled babies, ruined buildings, a systematically looted and destroyed state, and crowds of angry, miserable people, with the kids who greeted our troops with flowers either dismissed as staged, or else shown as a grudging footnote. Which view of the war is truer? It depends.
The goal of American foreign policy, and of the President, is to safeguard the security, prosperity, and democratic institutions of the American people. Is that more or less difficult to achieve when our traditional friends and allies fear us and think our values and theirs have become estranged? The Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz answer is that it makes no difference. Let them hate us so long as they fear us, as Caligula said. We are militarily untouchable. We will assert our interests as we choose.
The President and his advisors have bolstered this unilateral approach with a rhetoric -- and apparently a world view -- of the American government as the arbiter of good and evil in the world. Our "moral clarity" dictates, for example, that Saddam Hussein was part of an "Axis of Evil" while Ariel Sharon is a "Man of Peace," The logic of good and evil is politically impeccable. It has helped mobilize for the President the populist energy and anger unleashed by 9/11. It has silenced meaningful political debate, helping his party win the mid-term elections, making political pressure for tax cuts and big military spending increases unstoppable. Successfully maintained, it will win the President a second term.
Thomas Jefferson wrote "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just. And most of us would agree that Thomas Jefferson's God was probably a just one. But not every theology dictates that God has to be just. As Montesquieu said: "if triangles had a god, he would have three sides."
The President's version of God seems to be very similar to the President himself, a god of light at war with the forces of darkness. This is a heresy called dualism, a religion that did well in the glory days of the Roman Empire, but now in disrepute.
Europeans have shrunk away in recent generations from any clear and strict division between good and evil. A long, bloody history of divinely-mandated warfare, and the existence and mixed performance of state churches have encouraged a substantial degree of secularism and an explicit or implicit moral relativism. Europeans and most others will fight for their intellectual integrity in seeing the world in terms of shades of gray.
It is somewhat evident to me, it is probably evident to you, it is self-evident to President Bush, that we are the good guys in any war between good and evil. America is, by definition, the greatest country on earth, the highest point of human civilization. If there is a baseball game between the sons of light and the sons of darkness, we are starting pitcher and clean-up batter for the team of light, not just the team owner. There is only one problem, the rest of our team.
Dualism is self-enforcing. If a gun were held to the heads of Europeans, and they were forced to declare between black and white, 80 percent of them would conclude, at least at the moment, that the United States is evil rather than good. I suspect that the percentage of Middle Easterners would be closer to 95 percent; I'm not qualified to speak for Asians or Latin Americans, but the trend seems similar. For me a logical conclusion from this is that U.S. interests would not be the beneficiary of too Manichaean a distinction between good and evil.
If we are good, and all the rest of the world disagrees with us, then the rest of the world is evil. We have already seen the demonization of France and Germany. Their efforts to repair relations with us bring us up against one serious flaw of a policy of good and evil. We have, and know we have, important political and economic interests with our newly evil partners. But having launched the anger of an aroused, nationalistic American public against an evil foe, we cannot call back that anger without an expenditure of political capital our President will not expend.
An additional danger is that our born-again American certainty of knowing we are virtuous absolves us of the responsibility to seem virtuous. The means -- war or terrorism -- are sanctified by the end, the triumph of our light over their darkness. Alas, this gives our adversaries the same luxury. It is no accident that the Pope and most other religious leaders, fearful of heresy and determined to maintain a more rational moral calculus of just war, denounced our invasion of Iraq.
Ideology
The depressing thing about studying ancient history, as I did, that it is easy to conclude that human nature is not really improvable, at least in this life. The power politics of the schoolyard are apparently a sufficient model of human interaction, and this is indeed the model of the neoconservative faction currently closest to the President's ear. That view is challenged by only one fact. Human nature may be deeply flawed to the point of being unimprovable, but human institutions can evolve and progress.
Though never a pacifist, I started out as a soft-headed California liberal, for whom tolerance and rationalism were the highest virtues. I hope to be one again when I die. The Cold War put constraints on American idealism, but when the Cold War ended it seemed to me that a new day of enlightened internationalism was free to dawn. I was profoundly influenced by the success of George Bush the elder and Secretary Baker in responding to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Saddam Hussein had violated the one rule of international behavior that everyone seemed to agree with, that thou shalt not invade another sovereign state for purposes of annexing it. Kuwait needed to be restored, both to confirm that international law was not completely meaningless, and to prevent a major threat to the world's energy supplies. We built a coalition, wrapped it in the UN flag, got non-military contributors to pay for our services, and showed the world that the US was a useful country to have around, the world's policeman.
There were moral and practical reasons for not finishing off Saddam in 1991. We cared about international legitimacy, we were beginning to sicken ourselves with the slaughter of defenseless Iraqi soldiers troops, and we also had in the back of our minds that the balance of power in the region would be upset, turning Iran into a dangerous threat, if Iraq were demolished. I certainly had no problem with those arguments. I was in Greece then. Greeks were sentimentally opposed to Gulf War I, and only reluctant allies, but our correct handling meant there was no lasting damage to U.S. interests in Greece.
I went on from my first tour in Greece to work with Romania, India, and then the former Soviet Republic, now independent country of Armenia. The goal was stability, democracy, free markets, and integration into Europe. My experience convinced me that no bureaucratic skill, no amount of money, will implant democracy in a country unless both rulers and ruled are captured by some shared vision. In Romania and Armenia, America helped a goodly number of fine individuals to a better life but found ourselves ineffectual at the real task of creating independent democracies. Without "the vision thing", the best we could do was maintain a certain tolerable stability and humanitarian relief amid the corruption of dreary oligarchs.
I went casting about for a new vision that offered some prospect of human progress. I found it in the European Union and in the project, which till now we have supported, of building a Europe whole and free. That vision transformed Greece from being another Balkan state into something genuinely European. I watched Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia gradually transforming themselves. Romania and Bulgaria are at last moving on the same track, and Turkey, its candidacy accepted, is for the first time willing to introduce difficult democratic reforms of a kind we never cared to insist upon even during our days of maximum leverage.
For the democratic reform process I can tell you flatly that, as far as most of the world is concerned, the US currently has no useful vision to offer. We used to have one, an idealistic vision of the community of nations, a vision energized by pragmatic Cold War calculations but not completely captive to them. That vision was instrumental in the triumphant rebuilding of post-war Western Europe and the creation of the EU. Our vision since 9/11, what we project to the world, is simply a defensive, angry, sullen and selfish response to fear of terrorism. This vision, if it is a vision at all, earns no respect but only fear in return. It is certainly not seen as providing a model of society or governance to be emulated.
Obviously, the vision thing has serious implications for our adventure in Iraq.
The only thing that redeems American honor in Iraq is that a prudent plurality of the Iraqi people have been willing to convey to waiting TV cameras -- and in many cases sincerely believe, despite the debacles that accompanied the first days of military occupation -- that a few months or years under President Bush is an acceptable price to pay for ridding them of decades of rule by a family of monsters. In any case, they have no choice but to pay it.
The United States had no useful legitimacy in the Middle East when we began the war, and we have gained none since. It mattered very little that our soldiers fought as cleanly as they knew how. The absoluteness of our power has meant that we would be branded by the Muslim world with the shame of all the deaths, all the mutilations, and all the crimes committed since our invasion began. Our troops did not loot, did not wantonly murder, but they were ill-equipped and ill-led to cope with the collapse of Saddam's regime. By protecting the Oil Ministry while failing to protect the Iraqi National Museum and Library, Secretary Rumsfeld and General Franks have written themselves into the history books as vandals of the same order as the Mongol warlord Hulegu in 1258. Kurdish gratitude will buy us nothing from the great mass of the Iraqi population.
There is little hope of implementing a democracy in Iraq that we will be fond of, not only because of Iraq's manifold problems but also because of ours. Democracy in the US grew up in the context of a humanist philosophy that saw the individual as the fundamental measure of morality, that looked for progress in this world, that used God as justification for behaving morally as individuals, not as a state. The Iraqis have little experience with this intellectual tradition, and have little of it to look for from us currently. A top-down democracy based on divine sanction will look very different from what we had in mind, and I fear that we have no choice now but to get used to it.
After Iraq, our policy regarding the Muslim world is at a crossroads. The U.S. has spent money a shrinking economy could scarcely afford to fight a war whose benefits to the American people remain inscrutable. We have undertaken massive, expensive responsibilities for rebuilding Iraq, as for Afghanistan, responsibilities we will not be able to live up to. Financial constraints and overstretched military manpower argue against new foreign adventures in the near term, particularly a continued project to "democratize" Syria, Iran, and any other potential threats, presumably, though we do not say so explicitly, to Israel, since they are not threats to
the United States.
Terrorism
There is a widespread conservative belief, one my personal experience of the Middle East tells me is fatuous and dangerous, that we are the victims of terrorism because Islamic extremists doubt our strength and resolve, and that the easy cure for terror is, as with Iraq, a massive and disproportionate display of American strength and resolve. I believe the problem of terrorism is the opposite. Terror is almost by definition a weapon of despair, used by the weak against the strong. Against a militarily, economically, and politically all-powerful enemy, terrorism is the only weapon that offers the weak any hope, even if not a realistic one, of changing an unacceptable status quo.
Our war in Iraq did nothing to reduce the terrorist threat to the US, despite the lies America's leaders told its people. Bin Laden's brand of Islamic absolutism had little or nothing to do with Saddam's Iraq though it may flourish in the new one. We have in any case no obvious alternative but to continue the same counterterrorism course as before. This means a systematic law enforcement campaign based, as before our invasion of Iraq, on close international law enforcement and intelligence cooperation, backed, in the limited instances where it is necessary, by the resources of the U.S. military.
In the case of Palestinian terrorism, we are in a morally untenable situation. We have identified ourselves, for Palestinians and their European sympathizers, as the guarantor of a status quo of creeping Israeli annexation of the Occupied Territories. This status quo is one that in any humanist moral framework would be intolerable. But we are also the only faint hope for bringing about a Palestinian state. Thus, the Palestinians have of late exempted the U.S. from terrorist attacks, though the certainty of massive retaliation has not deterred Palestinian terrorism against Israelis. September 11 added new fervor to our insistence on a set of rules of the game that excludes terror, at a time when the Palestinians seem to have no other means of putting meaningful pressure on the Government of Israel to accept a Palestinian state within viable borders.
We have confirmed to the Muslim world our absolute power, while offering little assurance that we will use it justly, we have guaranteed that most Muslims will continue to blame America for the past two generations of failure, humiliation, and repression. It would be excellent if they were to take personal responsibility for collective action to shape their destinies, rather than search for external scapegoats. But again I see no signs that human nature is about to transform itself.
Lies and Hypocrisy
My impression as the second Bush administration took office was that this was a group united by a tough-minded pessimism and deep cynicism regarding human nature. It rejected with contempt the idea that either human nature or human institutions have progressed since the dark ages. It was fixated on America's military security, even before September 11, and seized upon technological progress, particularly in military hardware and intelligence gathering, as the core arena for struggle. At a certain point, I assumed, we would drift into a mindless America-first policy with a healthy dose of isolationism. Regrettable but not too dangerous.
Indeed this is what I saw happening, at least at the start. Our breathtaking double standard on disarmament treaties, our poltroonery on the International Criminal Court, our dim and selfish rejection of Kyoto or any restraint on greenhouse gases, fell into an old, predictable, lamentable pattern of U.S. populism and parochialism. Since the Congress had already pronounced these treaties dead before the Bush Administration came to power, the practical differences may not have been great, but I and most of our international interlocutors found the new rhetoric of refusal crass and brutal in comparison to Clinton's doleful excuses.
But we have clearly moved in the past few months beyond that predictable pattern. September 11 has totally shifted the balance of power within the U.S. foreign policy apparatus, unchaining a new and frightening rhetoric, unchaining practically limitless resources for any bureaucrat savvy and unscrupulous enough to manipulate public fears.
Even on the most primitive level, it is bad for U.S. interests abroad when an American president adopts a rhetoric of transcendental morality combined with a policy viewed by 90 percent of the human race as brutal, cynical and selfish. Were we to present a view of the world based on rational interests, our world interlocutors would have more hope of finding ground for shared interests. Were we to have a policy whose moral basis was somehow humane, we could hope for cooperation at least from those countries with similar values.
Since we do not have those, we should at least have enough sense to pay the tribute vice pays to virtue, and emulate President Clinton in successful hypocrisy. But this is an Administration that rejects hypocrisy as unworthy of a state enjoying absolute power. In that case, it should also reject lying.
To justify our war with Iraq we told a number of lies to the American people, about the Iraqi threat, about Iraqi involvement in September 11. These lies served the bureaucratic and budgetary purposes of Secretary Rumsfeld and his brain trust. They served the electoral purposes of Karl Rove and his political operatives. But in an age of global information, it is impossible to tell one story to the American people and another to the rest of the world. A harmless lie told to manipulate the American voter or to delude the U.S. Congress becomes, I would submit, less harmless as it crosses our borders.
These lies produced a sense of fear and cynicism among our allies, and contributed to the near-universal belief that oil was the underlying motive for our intervention. They damaged our credibility, and mean in practice that, for example, no discovery we make in Iraq regarding weapons of mass destruction will be accepted unless validated by the United Nations and Dr. Blix. This will be a domestic political problem now, as well as an international one.
Wars are fought, or at least were fought until now with Iraq, when perceived vital interests were infringed. This has been a relatively peaceful half-century, calmed by a growing confidence that we lived in a world large enough and rich enough to afford the search for common moral ground and viable practical compromises. Violence, though it plays an unavoidable role in human affairs, has consequences that are almost always more expensive and dangerous than would be a negotiated outcome, particularly a negotiated outcome where the power and moral values of the United States are properly engaged.
Ladies and Gentlemen, when I resigned from the State Department I was convinced that America had forsaken a perhaps short-sighted, sometimes lazy but fundamentally decent internationalist foreign policy for a unilateralist one that was manifestly short-sighted, selfish and - dare I say it? -- evil. I had personal experience of enough successful examples of multilateralism to believe America's political and economic security depends on reinforcing, not weakening a multilateral framework of international law. There was no compelling reason for a change. But it is painfully clear that a weak and uninformed president, unglued by the September 11 tragedy and misled by his own rigid and fundamentally unchristian religiosity, has allowed a coalition of ideologues to make irrelevant the traditional diplomatic instruments of U.S. power projection. The war in Iraq, founded on lies and half-truths, was simply a step toward a more complete power grab by one ideological faction, garnished of course with massive and unjustified new resource shifts at the expense of a staggering US and world economy.
Much is at risk. Congress and the courts have shown themselves willing to set aside basic constitutional protections on behalf of American citizens and residents. The checks and balances of the American system cannot be taken for granted. And we have declared that the checks and balances of the international system no longer apply. We have a new and frightening strategic doctrine of preemption that not only has no evident limits but which by its own logic suggests it should be indefinitely repeated. Never before has America been tempted by the lure of such unchecked power in the world.
What power is there on earth to stop us short of some catastrophic failure? I submit that there must be one. For now, I see little prospect of the rest of the world uniting against us. I do not believe it will be Iraq. We will make a hash of Iraqi reconstruction, as we have been painfully unable to live up to our promises in Afghanistan. At a certain stage this Administration or the next will walk away and find some way to distract the American people from the ensuing chaos. But I have no faith that there will be an accounting.
A more likely check on our triumphalism would be the failure of our current economic experiment. It may well prove that the world loses its willingness to fund our balance of payments deficit, to continue shifting investment capital to American safe harbor and the dollar. The American business community may at some point grow frightened of the trade implications of our policy, either because we deliberately or accidentally scuttle the WTO and the rest of the multinational mercantile system, or because our policies generate such distaste that we find ourselves shut out of major markets by formal or informal boycotts. This will take a while to be felt.
I do not think we should wait until then. I think it is time and past time to stand up to the schoolyard bullies in Washington, not on partisan political terms but to defend threatened national values and interests. We should demand from the American electorate, from the American business community, from the academic world, a foreign policy based on understanding that the world's interests and our interests are inseparable. America's security is enhanced by a clear, strong, and universal system of international law, policed by strong international institutions that we dominate through a generous allocation of our energy, skill, funding, intelligence-gathering capability, and military prowess. The alternative is Hobbesian and dark.
America had a vision once, and its vision made us a great power in the world and a good power in the world. We must not be deterred or manipulated away from finding that vision again. Thank you.
L'etat, c'est moi