Diplomacy Lessons

John Brady Kiesling, former U.S. Foreign Service Officer

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"Necessary Sacrifices" (S & H September 2006)

"Gran Rifiuto" (S&H July 2003)

Spirituality & Health
September/October 2006

  Necessary Sacrifices

When I joined the State Department in 1983, I assumed that the purpose of American power was to save the world. My colleagues and I discovered saving the world was harder than it looked. In 1993 we wrote a fervent, useless memo to the secretary of state about Bosnia. Rape, pillage, and murder were the instruments of “nation-building” in that little former Yugoslav republic, and we wanted to end such atrocities. The secretary was sympathetic to our insurrection. The Pentagon, however, vetoed risking American lives and treasure, because U.S. interests were not at stake.

In February 1994, our arguments gained traction. A mortar round had hit the Sarajevo market, and the blood of 68 innocent civilians was oozing from television screens into the American conscience. Under that moral pressure, the intervention we had demanded began to seem like acceptable U.S. politics. Bureaucrats and generals clanked into action. A cease-fire was imposed, and a few hundred Bosnians lived who might otherwise have died. In retrospect, our memo had not been useless.

Rwanda in 1994 was too far away from the television cameras. Fervent memos from our Africa Bureau colleagues were too bloodless to compel the modest military intervention that would have stopped the killing. By the time the horror had sunk in, half a million people had been hacked to death by their neighbors.

Some day we may evolve into godlike beings who intervene automatically whenever fellow humans are suffering. America’s standard for “paying any price, bearing any burden” will no longer be domestic political calculation but rather the collective welfare of a fragile planet. For the next hundred years, however, it is safer to assume that security and prosperity will depend on imperfect leaders, weak international institutions, and the innate moral sensibilities of ordinary human beings. Diplomats therefore study those sensibilities carefully.

The Sermon on the Mount and its blessing for the peacemakers would have vanished without a trace had Jesus not consented to die gruesomely on the cross. Leaders have dipped their hands in His or other innocent blood for thousands of years, for noble purposes like rescuing Sarajevo, or vile ones like exterminating the neighboring tribe, because they have discovered no better way to mobilize us.

Turning moral instinct into practical politics is seldom straightforward. The White House bought the right to intervene against the ugly regime of Saddam Hussein by allowing the American people to believe they were avenging the victims of 9/11. Freeing the Iraqi people was and remains a noble goal. The diplomat’s duty, however, was to determine whether we could respect the basic moral standard for successful intervention by outsiders: to save more innocent lives than we destroy.

I wrote in February 2003 to warn Secretary Powell that invading Iraq would be a disaster for U.S. interests, because Iraqis and their neighbors would not perceive our intervention as legitimate. My letter was read and admired, but not because of how well written or even how true it was. In the irrational calculus by which society validates its critics, I had earned the right to be read by my resignation. Ultimately, that resignation may become part of the process by which America learns from its mistakes.

A more routine sacrifice diplomats make is to say less than they think and feel. Even after leaving the profession, it is impossible to abandon the moral relativism that helped me navigate a world of unknowable motives and blinding shades of gray. But 20 years as a diplomat left me certain that moral relativism is not the same as amorality.

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Spirituality & Health v.6#3

June/July 2003

Reflections on a Career Diplomat's Time to Say No!

Working as a U.S. diplomat in Athens exposed me to the poems of Constantine Cavafis, the great Greek poet of Alexandria. One of them, Che Fece … il Gran Rifiuto, might translate roughly like this:

A day comes to some when they
Must say the great "Yes" or the great "No"
And it shows immediately who holds
Ready inside himself that Yes, and saying it

He goes on in honor and assurance.
The naysayer does not repent. If asked again
He would still say No. And yet that No --
The correct No -- refutes him a whole lifetime.

When I resigned from the State Department to protest the dangers of our new strategic doctrine of preventive, unilateral war beginning with Iraq, I was hardly the ancient and saintly Pope Celestine V, whose "grand refusal" of the papacy in 1294, damned by Dante in his Inferno, gave Cavafis the Italian title for his poem. My own grand refusal was un-dramatic. I told the ambassador and my staff, faxed my letter of resignation to Human Resources, and started moving my belongings out of the embassy-leased apartment and into surprised friends' basements.

My resignation was a surprise to myself as well. Some accident in my upbringing left me with a character trait common in the Middle East, a great reluctance to say "no." Well-mannered Middle Easterners, like well-mannered diplomats, will turn themselves inside out to avoid giving a flat "no" to anyone. They are protected, among their fellows at least, by reciprocal good manners that make it an act of rudeness to put anyone in a position where "no" is the only answer.

The right to say "no," particularly to authority, is at the heart of the American dream. Ordinary Americans enjoy -- if that is the right word -- a wider range of options than at any previous time in human experience. The four basic freedoms Franklin Roosevelt promised in 1941 as an attainable vision for the whole planet -- freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear -- are ours if we want them. We have won the right to look beyond our immediate personal security and to demand legitimacy, a social or religious or philosophical or legal or political framework within which the choices we make seem to be, and are, the right ones.

 The U.S. government, too, has attained such preponderance of military and economic might around the globe that we enjoy a terrifying freedom of foreign policy choices. Previous administrations recoiled from the full exercise of that freedom. Perhaps it was respect for the Founding Fathers, or perhaps it was only caution dictated by the existence of powerful, potential adversaries, but history and human nature suggested it was wise to invest a fraction of our wealth and our freedom of action to generate legitimacy, through international law, through binding treaties, or through international organizations such as the UN.

This U.S. administration has drawn the conclusion that there are indeed no limits to our power, no need for international legitimacy, nor even need to respect the truth. States and their structures are inanimate abstractions, inherently amoral mechanisms for diluting responsibility. President Bush is a God-fearing man, even if he used the "F" word about Saddam Hussein, and he has little risk of being held accountable for the half-truths and evasions to the U.S. Congress, to the American people, and to our troops in the field to justify war with Iraq. The war succeeded militarily, and successful violence creates its own legitimacy.

Still, governments are comprised of individuals whose every action and inaction is charged with moral content. I did not discover until I resigned, the unannounced fringe benefit of a 19-year career in government service: the energy and sense of clarity that came from walking away from it. My mood improved, my health improved, and dear friends of decades past found me again, with new love and respect.

Cavafis' poem is hardly a summons to mass renunciation. Such moments come seldom, and the costs are generally much higher than what I paid. Still, the right to make a "gran rifiuto" is inborn in all of us. If asked again, I would still say no. The U.S. administration has harmed the interests of the American people and the planet through its contempt for international law and institutions. No longer the instrument of a foreign policy I find immoral, I still have the freedom to hope that each new day will prove me wrong.