and that
… members of al-Qaeda, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq.
Then, of course, there is the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 which cited Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as “countries of particular concern” for whom the President may invoke all sorts of economic sanctions.
There is also the North Korea Human Rights Act of 2004, which, among other things, established within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security the “Weapons of Mass Destruction Informant Center” to ensure that foreigners who have information on weapons of mass destruction receive the proper visas and provide information to the appropriate agencies of the U.S. government.
North Korea has repeatedly, and recently formally, accused the United States of using “human rights” as a pretext to try to destroy its political system, and said that it has therefore been forced to increase its “self-defensive deterrent force.”
But, it is important to note that – the influence of the human-rights activists on Congress notwithstanding – all the public opinion polls showed that Americans would not support an invasion and occupation of Iraq or Iran or North Korea just because of “human rights” abuses.
Hence, the Resolution Authorizing the Use of U.S. Armed Forces Against Iraq of 2002 required the President to make available to Congress his “determination” that reliance by the United States “on further diplomatic or other peaceful means alone will not adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq.”
There can be no doubt that the congressional leadership – at a minimum – knew perfectly well that Bush II had not met the requirements set out in their resolution. They knew that the “determination” he sent them was based upon “intelligence” long since thoroughly discredited by the UN inspectors on the ground in Iraq.
Furthermore, they knew from the testimony before the UN Security Council in the days, weeks, and months before Bush II made his “determination” that Iraq was in substantial compliance with all Security Council disarmament resolutions, and was, hence, not a threat to anyone, especially the United States.
All our congressional representatives knew Bush II had launched a war of aggression, not sanctioned either by the UN Security Council or by the Congress.
But, Bush II got away with it.
Hence, Bush II has successfully challenged the authority and seriously damaged the effectiveness of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the UN Security Council, and made congressmen – including John Kerry – look like fools.
If ever terrorists somehow get their hands on a North Korean nuke and use it against us, there will be no question as to who is principally to blame for that. Bush II!
He is the President who unilaterally abrogated Clinton's Agreed Framework. He is the President who is responsible for North Korea withdrawing from the NPT. He is the President who went ahead and invaded Iraq knowing that North Korea had restarted its weapons-grade plutonium producing reactor. He is the President who made invading Iraq his Number One Priority, even before he became President. He is the President who didn't make keeping nukes out of hands of terrorists his Number One Priority.
Well, it's been thirteen years since the Russian delegation first came to us for help in keeping nukes from getting loose. Because of the billions of “Nunn-Lugar” dollars spent on programs that had nothing to do with nukes – to say nothing of the hundreds of billions spent invading Iraq to keep Saddam from giving his non-existent nukes to terrorists – by all accounts the loose nuke threat is greater now than it has ever been.
THE EDITORS' GLOSS: This open letter by Roger Morris originally appeared on May 20, 2004, in Salon.com. It does not mince words regarding what he sees as the disastrous consequences for America of the Bush administration's approach to foreign affairs. More important than that, though, is the concern Morris evidently has for both integrity and professionalism. It is this, more than any perspective on what “the Republicans are up to” or how “the Democrats are simply playing partisan politics,” that makes Morris's stark words both inspiring and tragic.
His letter speaks of responsibility. As we have noted elsewhere regarding the role of the professional military and those in the intelligence community, Morris reminds those in the foreign-service branch of the government's employ that “just doing their job” cannot, ultimately, be a legitimate answer to the crisis facing the “new” American approach to foreign affairs. How could it be so? If men and women witness in private, in whatever form, the kind of scandals that only occasionally make the news – think Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, etc. – and remain silent for fear of the powers-that-be, of what use to America is the kind of service we are getting from them? If there is no core of integrity, of honor, of humility, of Christian values at work in such an important field of the nation's life, then what we have is a putrid body politic masquerading as government, with salaries acting as a kind of Ten Commandments. “Every cable you write to or from the field,” he says, “every letter you compose for Congress or the public, every memo you draft or clear, every budget you number, every meeting you attend, every testimony you give extends your share of the common disaster.” Never were truer words said, for the buck stops with everyone in a position of proportionate influence when the question is one of life and death.
As Morris notes: it is well past time for professionals in government service to consider their duty to the reigning administration in light of their higher duty to the common good of the nation. Let us all, collectively, wherever we are and whatever we do, figure out how to mend the political mess we're in, and restore a culture of honor and responsibility in government life that is immune – as much as possible – from the attempts of any merely partisan, elected official to tamper with it.
CHAPTER
22
A Call to Conscience
………
Roger Morris
DEAR TRUSTEES,
I am respectfully addressing you by your proper if little-used title. The women and men of our diplomatic corps and intelligence community are genuine trustees. With intellect and sensibility, character and courage, you represent America to the world. Equally important, you show the world to America. You hold in trust our role and reputation among nations, and ultimately our fate. Yours is the gravest, noblest responsibility. Never has the conscience you personify been more important.
A friend asked Secretary of State Dean Acheson how he felt when, as a young official in the Treasury Department in the 1930s, he resigned rather than continue to work for a controversial fiscal policy he thought disastrous – an act that seemed at the time to end the public service he cherished. “Oh, I had no choice,” he answered. “It was a matter of national interest as well as personal honor. I might have gotten away with shirking one, but never both.” As the tragedy of American foreign policy unfolded so graphically over the past months, I thought often of Acheson's words and of your challenge as public servants. No generation of foreign affairs professionals, including my own in the torment of the Vietnam War, has faced such anguishing realities or such a momentous choice.
I need not dwell on the obvious about foreign policy under President Bush – and on what you on the inside, whatever your politics, know to be even worse than imagined by outsiders. The senior among you have seen the disgrace firsthand. In the corridor murmur by which a bureaucracy tells its secrets to itself, all of you have heard the stories.
You know how recklessly a cabal of political appointees and ideological zealots, led by the exceptionally powerful and furtively doctrinaire Vice President Cheney, corrupted intelligence and usurped policy on Iraq and other issues. You know the bitter departmental disputes in which a deeply politicized, parochial Pentagon overpowered or simply ignored any opposition in the State Department or the CIA, rushing us to unilateral aggressive war in Iraq and chaot
ic, fateful occupations in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
You know well what a willfully uninformed and heedless President you serve in Bush, how chilling are the tales of his ignorance and sectarian fervor, lethal opposites of the erudition and open-mindedness you embody in the arts of diplomacy and intelligence. Some of you know how woefully his national security advisor fails her vital duty to manage some order among Washington's thrashing interests, and so to protect her President, and the country, from calamity. You know specifics. Many of you are aware, for instance, that the torture at Abu Ghraib was an issue up and down not only the Pentagon but also State, the CIA and the National Security Council staff for nearly a year before the scandalous photos finally leaked.
As you have seen in years of service, every presidency has its arrogance, infighting and blunders in foreign relations. As most of you recognize, too, the Bush administration is like no other. You serve the worst foreign policy regime by far in the history of the republic. The havoc you feel inside government has inflicted unprecedented damage on national interests and security. As never before since the United States stepped onto the world stage, we have flouted treaties and alliances, alienated friends, multiplied enemies, lost respect and credibility on every continent. You see this every day. And again, whatever your politics, those of you who have served other Presidents know this is an unparalleled bipartisan disaster. In its militant hubris and folly, the Bush administration has undone the statesmanship of every government before it, and broken faith with every presidency, Democratic and Republican (even that of Bush I), over the past half century.
In Afghanistan, where we once held the promise of a new ideal, we have resumed our old alliance with warlords and drug dealers, waging punitive expeditions and propping up puppets in yet another seamy chapter of the “Great Game,” presuming to conquer the unconquerable. In Iraq – as every cable surely screams at you – we are living a foreign policy nightmare, locked in a cycle of violence and seething, spreading hatred continued at incalculable cost, escaped only with hazardous humiliation abroad and bitter divisions at home. Debacle is complete.
Beyond your discreetly predigested press summaries at the office, words once unthinkable in describing your domain, words once applied only to the most alien and deplored phenomena, have become routine, not just at the radical fringe but across the spectrum of public dialogue: “American empire,” “American gulag.” What must you think? Having read so many of your cables and memoranda as a foreign service officer and then on the NSC staff, and so many more later as a historian, I cannot help wondering how you would be reporting on Washington now if you were posted in the U.S. capital as a diplomat or intelligence agent for another nation. What would the many astute observers and analysts among you say of the Bush regime, of its toll or of the courage and independence of the career officialdom that does its bidding?
“Let me begin by stating the obvious,” Senator Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said at the Abu Ghraib hearing the other day. “For the next 50 years in the Islamic world and many other parts of the world, the image of the United States will be that of an American dragging a prostrate naked Iraqi across the floor on a leash.” The senator was talking about you and your future. Amid the Bush wreckage worldwide, much of the ruin is deeply yours.
It is your dedicated work that has been violated – the flouted treaties you devotedly drew up and negotiated, the estranged allies you patiently cultivated, the now-thronging enemies you worked so hard to win over. You know what will happen. Sooner or later, the neoconservative cabal will go back to its incestuous think tanks and sinecures, the vice president to his lavish Halliburton retirement, Bush to his Crawford, Texas, ranch – and you will be left in the contemptuous chancelleries and back alleys, the stiflingly guarded compounds and fear-clammy, pulse-racing convoys, to clean up the mess for generations to come.
You know that showcase resignations at the top – Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or flag officers fingered for Abu Ghraib – change nothing, are only part of the charade. It is the same with Secretary of State Colin Powell, who may have been your lone relative champion in this perverse company, but who remains the political general he always was, never honoring your loss by giving up his office when he might have stemmed the descent.
No, it is you whose voices are so important now. You alone stand above ambition and partisanship. This administration no longer deserves your allegiance or participation. America deserves the leadership and example, the decisive revelation, of your resignations.
Your resignations alone would speak to America the truth that beyond any politics, this Bush regime is intolerable – and to an increasingly cynical world the truth that there are still Americans who uphold with their lives and honor the highest principles of our foreign policy.
Thirty-four years ago this spring, I faced your choice in resigning from the National Security Council over the invasion of Cambodia. I had been involved in fruitful secret talks between Henry Kissinger and the North Vietnamese in 1969–1970, and knew at least something of how much the invasion would shatter the chance for peace and prolong the war – though I could never have guessed that thousands of American names would be added to that long black wall in Washington or that holocaust would follow in Cambodia. Leaving was an agony. I was only beginning a career dreamed of since boyhood. But I have never regretted my decision. Nor do I think it any distinction. My friends and I used to remark that the Nixon administration was so unprincipled it took nothing special to resign. It is a mark of the current tragedy that by comparison with the Bush regime, Nixon and Kissinger seem to many model statesmen.
As you consider your choice now, beware the old rationalizations for staying – the arguments for preserving influence or that your resignation will not matter. Your effectiveness will be no more, your subservience no less, under the iron grip of the cabal, especially as the policy disaster and public siege mount. And your act now, no matter your ranks or numbers, will embolden others, hearten those who remain and proclaim your truths to the country and world.
I know from my own experience, of course, that I am not asking all of you to hurl your dissent from the safe seats of pensioners. I know well this is one of the most personal of sacrifices, for you and your families. You are not alone. Three ranking Foreign Service officers – Mary Wright, John Brady Kiesling and John Brown – resigned in protest of the Iraq war last spring. Like them, you should join the great debate that America must now have.
Unless and until you do, however, please be under no illusion: every cable you write to or from the field, every letter you compose for Congress or the public, every memo you draft or clear, every budget you number, every meeting you attend, every testimony you give extends your share of the common disaster.
The America that you sought to represent in choosing your career, the America that once led the community of nations not by brazen power but by the strength of its universal principles, has never needed you more. Those of us who know you best, who have shared your work and world, know you will not let us down. You are, after all, the trustees.
Respectfully,
Roger Morris
When will this President's most theologically articulate supporters admit that the absence of weapons of mass destruction and the absence of compelling evidence of a link with al-Qaeda mean there was no just cause for this war, and that the incompetence and duplicity of the current administration mean that there was no competent authority for this war? If, alternatively, the war's agile Catholic defenders think getting rid of Saddam counts as a just cause, they have some serious rewriting of the tradition to do. Most of all, as George Weigel reminds us, they must explain their moral muteness in a time of war.
—Peter Dula, “The War in Iraq: How Catholic
Conservatives Got it Wrong,” Commonweal,
December 3, 2004
DEFYING WORLD ORDER: REACTIONS FROM VATICAN AND UN PERSPECTIVES
THE EDITORS' GLOSS: Neoconservative Catholics generally reacted with disgu
st at the efforts – ineffective though they were – of the Catholic hierarchy in the U.S. and around the world to stave off the Iraq war. Appeals to the UN were hateful both to them and (in what is as remarkable a case of “strange bedfellows” as will be found) to some “ultra-conservative” Catholics clustered around bizarre outfits such as Tradition in Action and Tradition, Family, Property. Like it or not, the calls coming from Catholic prelates for working on the U.S.-U.K.-Iraq problem through the medium of the UN were not inconsistent with what the Catholic tradition says about the need for nations to conduct foreign affairs with regard not only to the national interest but also to international law as well. The next chapter should make clear just how consistent the UN Charter is with the just-war tradition. Furthermore, whatever is valuable in current international law can be traced back to the sterling work done by Spanish Jesuits and other Catholic thinkers over the last several hundred years, so much so that a rejection of their work is a rejection of them, and potentially of the Catholic faith as well.
Another reaction to the anti-war efforts of Catholics on the part of their “conservative” co-religionists were accusations of “pacifism” and a willingness to “appease” a “tyrant” simply in order to “save lives.” The conservative Charley Reese put these assertions to rest with his characteristic frankness: “Let me spell it out for the mentally impaired: people are anti-war because they do not wish to see anyone die – our soldiers, their soldiers, our civilians, or their civilians. Anti-war is pro-life.”
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