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Ex-diplomat saw Iraq as 'I quit' issue

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  • Ex-diplomat saw Iraq as 'I quit' issue

    Ex-diplomat saw Iraq as 'I quit' issue

    John Brady Kiesling's new book tells why U.S. invasion
    plans forced his 2003 resignation

    STYLE & CULTURE

    Los Angeles Times
    September 25, 2006

    By Bob Thompson, Washington Post Writer

    WASHINGTON - When John Brady Kiesling decided, in February 2003, that
    the looming United States invasion of Iraq would make it impossible
    for him, in good conscience, to remain in the U.S. Foreign Service, he
    carefully crafted a letter of resignation from his post as political
    counselor in the Athens embassy. Widely praised for its eloquence,
    the letter briefly made Kiesling semi-famous. Eventually, it helped
    earn him a tiny advance from Potomac Books.

    Yet when he later reread the letter, says the author of the newly
    published "Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower,"
    he was startled to find that it contained a hole.

    "It was so obvious to me that Iraq was going to be a disaster,"
    Kiesling says, "that nowhere in my letter had I explained why it was
    going to be a disaster.... My knowledge that Iraq would be a disaster
    was intuitive."

    One way of looking at his book is as a two-year effort "to figure
    out where that intuition came from."

    The short answer is that it came from 20 years of diplomatic
    postings in places such as Morocco, Greece and Armenia, where he
    worked extremely hard - motivated in part by what he calls his
    "intellectual vanity" - to understand the way Moroccans, Greeks and
    Armenians thought and acted. That is a diplomat's fundamental job,
    he says, and "a resource for the United States of America."

    The longer answer involves specific mistakes made and lessons learned.

    In a chapter titled "Diplomatic Skepticism and the Lessons of Iraq,"
    for example, he tells the story of his "failure to prevent a Florida
    con man from bilking the government of Romania out of $250,000." He
    then speculates pointedly as to whether this kind of humbling
    experience might have kept Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense
    Secretary Donald Rumsfeld from falling so hard for Iraqi exile Ahmed
    Chalabi, "an indicted embezzler who had already been written off by
    both the CIA and the State Department as a swindler."

    Mainly, however, "Diplomacy Lessons" is a plea that Kiesling's old
    profession be taken more seriously.

    "Diplomacy is not a miracle cure for anything," he says. "Diplomats
    bust their butts for years, and most of the time what they achieve
    is that the planet is still spinning around on its axis at about the
    same speed it was when they started. But that's actually an incredibly
    important task."

    http://www.latimes.com/features/lifes tyle/la-et-diplomacy25sep25,1,2541339.story

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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