It was the kind of thing diplomats routinely do, this last mission Brady Kiesling undertook. He was anticipating trouble, attempting to forestall it, keeping the lines of communication open.
On the morning of February 13, Kiesling, who was then serving as the political counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Athens, took an embassy car down into the Plaka, the old section of the city, for a meeting at the office of the archbishop of Athens.
War was in the air; in two days, there were to be massive demonstrations, in both Europe and the United States, to protest what for some time now had looked like the inevitable American invasion of Iraq; and Kiesling was worried that Greece's number one churchman — "a highly political archbishop, who likes to see what public opinion is doing and put himself at the head of it" — might encourage his priests to join the demonstrators or might himself let slip some comment that would inflame anti-American feelings even further. He had made an appointment to see Father Thomas, the archbishop's chief political adviser, to try to head off these possibilities.
For maybe 40 minutes Kiesling sipped coffee and, speaking in fluent Greek, pleaded his government's case. This was to be a necessary war, a war of self-defense, he argued, and in the end, Father Thomas agreed to keep the church out of the demonstrations as much as possible. His mission accomplished, Kiesling left the meeting with a feeling of triumph. "In this narrow professional sense," he recalls, "I thought it was a masterpiece of persuasive diplomatic — I guess hypocrisy is the only term. But the thing is, when you're saying it, you believe it."
Yet at the same time, he was thinking: What have I done? Because, in truth, he didn't believe the coming war was justified at all.
The conflict between duty and belief had made him miserable for months, but he hadn't known what to do. That night, lying sleepless in bed, the answer became clear. He would end his nearly 20-year career in the Foreign Service, and he would use the occasion to state publicly what he did believe: that a unilateral, "preemptive" strike against Iraq would be not simply wrong, but harmful to the United States as well.
He gave himself a week to reconsider his decision. By fortunate chance, he was about to leave for Armenia to help observe an election there. He spent an exhilarating seven days negotiating snow-covered mountain passes, "hanging out with all these strange election officials and people in black leather bathrobes" — and not changing his mind. Back in Athens, he drafted a resignation letter full of restrained diplomatic language, realized it wouldn't do, and reworked it for what he hoped would be a broader audience.
"The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests," Kiesling wrote. "Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America's most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson." The path we were on would lead to "instability and danger, not security."
Then he faxed his letter off to Washington, addressed to Secretary of State Colin Powell, with no idea what kind of reaction it would receive.
Thus began Brady Kiesling's historical moment: a roughly two-month period during which a previously unknown, 45-year-old Foreign Service officer became, while not exactly a household word, at least a noteworthy voice in the post-September 11 struggle to define America's foreign policy interests and the best ways to achieve them.
The full text of Kiesling's letter, which was promptly posted on the Web site of the New York Times, was pasted into e-mails that flew around the Foreign Service, the broader American foreign policy establishment and the world. Before long, if you typed "Brady Kiesling" into the Google search engine, up would come thousands of hits. Arriving in the United States from Greece in early March, Kiesling gave an extensive round of interviews and spoke at college campuses across the country. When he returned to Athens a few weeks later, he faded somewhat from view, but in the meantime he'd been invited to Princeton University to give a keynote speech at a colloquium on morality in public and international affairs. This generated another round of interviews and nudged him back into the limelight.
Even at the height of his newfound semi-fame, there were good reasons to think it would be temporary. "Who is John Brady Kiesling?" read a question in a satirical quiz in the April 14 New Yorker: "(a) The Christian conservative who withdrew his nomination to Bush's Advisory Council on H.I.V. and AIDS after it became known that he referred to AIDS as 'the gay plague.' (b) The commentator who said, referring to Bush's plan to eliminate taxes on stock dividends, 'This isn't even trickle-down economics. It's mist-down economics.' (c) The State Department diplomat whose resignation letter said, 'Until this Administration it had been possible to believe that by upholding the policies of my president I was also upholding the interests of the American people and the world. I believe it no longer.' "
Yet Kiesling's protest also accomplished far more than he reasonably could have anticipated. It served to highlight the widening fault lines between the old-school foreign policy internationalists, who tend to be identified with the State Department, and the go-it-alone, military-oriented policymakers who so decisively seized the initiative after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
In his April 25 speech at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, a couple of weeks after the fall of Baghdad, Kiesling made an explicit attempt to rally the internationalists. Princeton, he told the 200 or so students, faculty and foreign policy professionals in his audience, "used to be the heartland of a brilliantly successful foreign policy coalition" that shaped American diplomacy for most of the 20th century. It was a bipartisan alliance between liberal "Wilsonian idealists," with their humanist worldview, and the kind of conservative pragmatists who used international institutions to advance American economic interests. But the coalition now "lies in tatters," he said, and he offered his views on how this had happened:
September 11 offered a golden opportunity for anyone "savvy and unscrupulous enough to manipulate public fears," and the advocates of "hard-nosed neoconservatism" promptly seized it. They adopted "the power politics of the schoolyard as their model of human interaction" and reduced a complex moral universe to a permanent face-off between "the forces of light and the forces of darkness." They used "lies and half-truths" to build a case for invading Iraq as "a step toward a more complete power grab." As the neoconservatives began to drive American policy, old-school internationalists tried to come to terms with them, hoping to retain influence. But accommodation has proved no easy task.
"This is an administration at war, and you are with them or you are against them," Kiesling said.
He is a tall man, at 6 foot 2 inches, though he has a tendency to stoop a bit, as if trying to be modest about his height. His voice this day was calm, but his bluntness was startling in someone trained to articulate a diplomatic middle ground. It echoed the take-no-prisoners rhetoric that is so commonplace now in Washington, and which, just that week, had reached an especially high pitch.
Three days before Kiesling's Princeton appearance, former House speaker Newt Gingrich, widely assumed to be a proxy for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, fired off a rhetorical nuke in the direction of Colin Powell's State Department. "The last seven months have involved six months of diplomatic failure and one month of military success," Gingrich charged in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, and he went on to blame State for pretty much everything except SARS and mad cow disease. A day later, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Powell's right-hand man, returned fire in USA Today. "It's clear that Mr. Gingrich is off his meds and out of therapy," Armitage observed.
It was a classic Beltway slanging match, but beneath the testy exchange lay a critically important issue. For if it's true that the United States is tilting away from international alliances and diplomatic persuasion and toward the use of military means to accomplish its objectives, then no one — whether supportive of the change or not — can doubt the magnitude of the stakes involved.
This point was underscored by the speaker who preceded Kiesling at Princeton.
William Kristol, the Weekly Standard editor and veteran conservative powerhouse, had long been one of the strongest voices calling for U.S. action against Saddam Hussein. After September 11 in particular, Kristol became closely identified with the band of neoconservative activists both in and out of government — the most important being Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz — whose push for Hussein's overthrow would prevail.
September 11, and America's response to it, Bill Kristol said, was a genuine historical "big deal": the beginning of a new era equivalent to the late 1940s, when the United States first engaged the Soviet Union in the Cold War. At the time George W. Bush was elected, he noted, few would have believed that a year later the United States would be at war in Afghanistan or that 18 months after that it would be invading Iraq. "Two regime changes in 18 months, that's not bad," he joked, drawing a somewhat nervous laugh. "I kind of like that pattern." Kristol went on to argue more soberly that while the Bush administration's anti-terrorist strategy, with its explicit endorsement of preemptive war and U.S.-instigated regime change, presents "more than a bit of a challenge" to the "liberal kind of international law point of view," the alternative — "without American strength, without American leadership" — would be "a really, really chaotic and dangerous world."
Kristol's reference to leadership goes to the heart of the neoconservative conflict with those, like Kiesling, who held no brief for Saddam Hussein but who see America's international legitimacy as a fragile but invaluable commodity and who fear that the United States is no longer leading anyone significant besides Tony Blair.
"Here's the rub," said Wilson School Dean Anne-Marie Slaughter during the question period after Kristol's remarks. "In 1945, we were perceived as a defender, as a benign power, as a power for good." This meant that the world was inclined to believe our assertions that we stood for freedom and democratic values. "We are now perceived as an aggressor, as an imperialist nation," which makes our talk of democracy come across as "a blind for American power." Slaughter was a qualified supporter of the Iraq war, but it frightens her, she said later, that her country is starting to be "seen as an outlaw state."
"I don't think we're being hysterical here," she said. "I think there's a real danger. And Brady Kiesling is a lightning rod for that."
In the spring of 1983, Kiesling and his new wife packed their meager possessions into their VW Bug and drove from California to Washington to begin the diplomatic life. He hardly knew what to expect.
He was born in Texas but grew up mainly in the upscale suburbs of the San Francisco peninsula. A shy boy in a family of achievers, he excelled in school, did less well on the playground, and soaked up everything from 1930s pulp fiction to James Frazer's The Golden Bough. He virtually memorized The Lord of the Rings.
By the time he decided to take the Foreign Service exam, he was a graduate student in ancient history and archaeology at Berkeley, but worried that an academic career would leave him with "no clue about the real world." After completing his basic training — one theme of which was that a Foreign Service officer must faithfully represent the president and his policies, whatever they were — he headed for his first assignment, in Tel Aviv. Two years later, he was shipped off to Morocco, to a newly created position for an economics expert. Kiesling had no background in economics. He felt lost.
That started to change one night when he encountered a Moroccan student studying under a street lamp and struck up a conversation in his halting French. Pretty soon he was learning about life at the university, where the undercover police were called "AWACS," after the American surveillance aircraft, and where the Libyans were funding the campus Islamic movement. He wrote a cable about this, which Washington thought was wonderful, "and it's just really from talking to this one kid!" And while he got up to speed on economic issues soon enough, the most important thing he learned was to trust his own judgment about what was important, and act on it.
He put this lesson to full use during his third overseas assignment, as a political officer in Athens from 1988 to 1992. Kiesling was "the paradigm for what Foreign Service people should be like," says Greg Mattson, his immediate superior at the time: dedicated, intelligent and skilled at developing contacts across the political spectrum. A political officer's job involved both maintaining government contacts and "reporting," which simply means trying to understand the country to the greatest extent possible. "The joy of the work was to be out of the embassy, to be talking to Greeks, to be reading the Greek papers, to travel," Mattson says, and Kiesling excelled at this. He had majored in Greek in college, and his superior language skills both facilitated person-to-person contacts and allowed him to read the Greek newspapers more closely than most of his colleagues. He took pride in his ability to predict election results more accurately than the CIA.
Yes, the Athenian smog was horrible, and yes, there was a persistent threat from a terrorist group called November 17, which had claimed its most recent American victim a month before Kiesling and his family arrived. But his wife had found an apartment where, if you stood on the fire escape, you could see the Parthenon. His daughter was happy at school. He felt like he was in a job he'd been born for.
Life was good.
And the coming of the first Iraq war didn't change that at all.
If there's a single historical event that highlights the split between the old idealist/pragmatist coalition Kiesling talks about and the people currently driving American foreign policy, it is the Persian Gulf War.
Chas. W. Freeman Jr. falls in the former camp. Now retired from a three-decade Foreign Service career, Freeman was ambassador to Saudi Arabia when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 and was driven back out in 1991. Asked to contrast this first war with the more recent one, he doesn't mince words.
"There's no comparison at all," Freeman says. The first war was fought "in the context of virtually unanimous international support for the liberation of Kuwait." It was fought by a genuine coalition, with 34 countries "contributing troops or treasure." The war's outcome "reaffirmed the authority of the United Nations and the importance of international law," and the United States emerged with "a greater leadership role in the international community."
He's just warming up.
"We undertook that war in a context in which the broader Islamic world was part of the coalition, rather than a kind of incendiary mass into which we were throwing a match," he says. "This war arguably may have brought about the clash of civilizations that we ought to fear." At the very least, it's likely to "sputter on in ways that do great damage to our international influence, erode our power militarily and ultimately prove very divisive at home."
The neoconservatives, too, applauded the Gulf War — up to a point. But many were outraged that the American military wasn't permitted to finish off Saddam Hussein, whether or not the United Nations had authorized it to do so. "We went in, kicked Saddam out of Kuwait," Bill Kristol said at Princeton with an edge in his voice. "God forbid we should actually go to Baghdad."
As for Kiesling, he was happy to see the 1991 war end when it did, but he admired the way the first President Bush had handled it, and he fully supported the decision to fight. "I spent a fair amount of time with my Greek counterparts explaining, 'Look, this is not about oil, this is about international law,'" he recalls. Greek public opinion was against the war, but Greece's leaders knew better, and "did the right thing."
In 1992, after his Athens tour, he took a job as the State Department desk officer for Romania. No sooner did he arrive than he was drawn into the agonizing debate over U.S. policy in Bosnia, which, while not his immediate territory, involved almost everyone with whom he was working. This was at the height of the "ethnic cleansing" of Muslims in the former Yugo-slavia, and as the pattern of massacres by the Serbs became horrifyingly clear, virtually everyone working day-to-day on the issue at State became convinced that there should be military intervention to stop them. One desk officer, George Kenney, had already resigned in protest over the failure to act, and three other resignations would follow. But in the meantime, a dozen officers put together an internal memo urging forceful action.
Kiesling was not an instigator of this protest, but he contributed a paragraph urging that airstrikes be backed up by the credible threat of additional force. Eventually, belatedly, American policy did change, and the memo's signers got an award for "creative dissent" from the American Foreign Service Association.
"I'd like to be a pacifist," he says. "But history does not encourage that viewpoint."
A few years later, when it was time to go back overseas, the most interesting available job was in Armenia. It offered an up-close look at "democracy-building" that was both frustrating and illuminating, and would make him highly skeptical, a few years later, of grand plans to remake Iraq. But with his weekends free — his daughter was at boarding school, and his wife soon took a job in Athens — he could indulge his yen for scholarly adventure, roaming the rugged countryside in a search for obscure historic sites that he eventually turned into a published guidebook. Looking back, he rates this as an unexpected high point of his Foreign Service years.
The low point — which was equally unexpected — was about to arrive.
At 9:15 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Tuesday, January 29, 2002, which made it not yet 6 a.m. in Afghanistan, veteran Foreign Service officer Mary A. Wright and 10 or so colleagues sat in an underground bunker in the newly reopened American Embassy in Kabul, watching President Bush deliver his first State of the Union address.
Ann Wright — like Kiesling, she goes by her middle name — was no stranger to hardship posts. She had served in Somalia immediately after the "Black Hawk Down" disaster, and in 1997 she had earned a State Department award for heroism after leading a difficult evacuation during an outbreak of horrific violence in Sierra Leone. After September 11, she had volunteered to do anything she could to help, and ended up flying into post-Taliban Afghanistan as part of the team that reopened the embassy there. A few weeks later, she and her colleagues had scrambled to get the new Afghan leader off to Washington so he could be there for the president's speech.
Now there they were in their bunker, watching it on TV, and now here was Bush, welcoming Hamid Karzai and saying that America would be a partner in rebuilding his nation. And now — Wait a minute.
What was Bush saying about an "axis of evil"?
"All of us in the room kind of went, 'Oh my God, man, this is trouble for us,'" Wright recalls of the reaction to the president's strongly worded condemnation of Iraq, North Korea and Iran. Why change the topic from al Qaeda and Afghanistan "when we're sitting right here in ground zero, so to speak, and we haven't solved this problem at all?"
Over the next year, she watched the run-up to war in Iraq from her new post in Mongolia. Hours before the bombing began, she resigned. "I believe the Administration's policies are making the world a more dangerous, not a safer, place," she wrote to Colin Powell.
For John Brown, a third diplomat who quit in protest before the war began, the alarm bells went off with what he calls an "appalling" remark by White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card Jr., who told the New York Times last September that the administration had waited until then to start selling the public on the war because "from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." Brown had spent his career in "public diplomacy," working to make the American case in the arena of foreign public opinion — the "complete disregard" of which by the Bush administration, he believes, will have huge negative consequences.
Back in Athens, meanwhile, where he'd been posted since July 2000, Brady Kiesling was finding the Greeks increasingly wary of the man they caustically called the Planitarchis, the Ruler of the Planet: George W. Bush.
After the attacks on September 11, which he had watched in horror on his office television, Kiesling saw that his Greek contacts were quietly holding their breath. "Everyone knew that the 900-pound gorilla had just been hurt very painfully," he says, "and everyone was staring at us to see if we were just going to lash out in a frenzy." Instead — to his relief, and the relief of the people he was dealing with — the American response was measured. "We did exactly the right thing," he says. "We started quietly presenting evidence that it was al Qaeda and we said we're going to go into Afghanistan."
But by the fall of 2002, relief had been replaced by alarm. Around September, he began to see how focused the administration was on confronting Iraq. He thought this would be exactly the wrong thing. "The cost-benefit equation from this was terrible," he explains. There were excellent reasons to get rid of Hussein, "but to do it at a reasonable cost, you need a reasonable amount of legitimacy. And we didn't have it."
Kiesling thought a unilateral attack on Iraq would dissipate the sympathy we had gained after September 11, put at risk the international cooperation we needed to fight terrorism and hand the terrorists a powerful recruiting tool. He thought the administration's attempts to link Iraq and al Qaeda were a cynical effort to redirect Americans' anger in Hussein's direction. He thought that while the Iraqi dictator might well have weapons of mass destruction, the evidence being presented was thin; indeed, it appeared that intelligence information was being deliberately distorted to frighten the American public. Most of all, he worried that the massive disconnect between America and the rest of the world over Iraq — combined with the administration's disdain for multi-lateral problem-solving in other areas — would end, as he later wrote, with the dismantling of "the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known."
Other factors were contributing to his discontent. His marriage was ending — he and his wife had separated in December 2001 — and for a number of reasons, he was less happy in his work. He and the new ambassador pushed each other's buttons, he says, and this kind of conflict with a superior was new to him. He now had a sizable staff to run, and he didn't particularly enjoy his management role. He would be eligible to retire from the Foreign Service in five years, when he turned 50, and he had started to think he might want to change careers then, before he got too old.
Still, he had cheered up when his next assignment came through. He would be heading for Kabul, which he thought would be fascinating. He loved languages, and was excited about learning Dari. The idea of resigning now had not yet occurred to him, and looking back, he has no doubt he'd have served out his five years — at least — had not his unhappiness with the Iraq policy become so deep.
He couldn't convince anyone in Greece that it made sense. Vehement opposition came not just from congenital anti-Americans, but from people of all political persuasions whom he considered smart and sensible. Concerned at one point that he might be getting seriously depressed, he visited the embassy doctor and came away with a box of Paxil that he eventually returned unused. One January night, he found himself awake at 4 a.m., banging out an angry memo on his laptop — not intending to do anything with it, just wanting to get his feelings off his chest. In February, he had his meeting with Father Thomas, came to his decision, and resigned.
The striking thing, in retrospect, is that while he hadn't even thought of quitting before, he didn't agonize. He is close to his three siblings and his parents, but he didn't consult them, or any of his friends, about what he planned to do. Not long after he'd faxed his resignation letter off, feeling simultaneously relieved and anxious, he called an old boss, former ambassador to Greece Robert Keeley, who briefly misunderstood him and thought he was asking whether to resign. No one would pay any attention, Keeley advised him, so he'd be throwing away his career for nothing.
Too late.
Two months later, as he sat in the crowded Wilson School auditorium waiting to give his Princeton speech, Kiesling was still adjusting to his new identity, The Diplomat Who Resigned in Protest. Yet he also knew he'd be needing another one soon.
It will be 17 years before he's eligible for a partial pension: 38 percent of his high pay, at today's dollars. (Had he retired at 50, his annuity would have been larger and would have started immediately.) But he gave up more than a salary and a fully funded retirement when he quit the Foreign Service. He left behind a career that had shaped his sense of who he was. Asked to describe him, his sister, Jennie Kiesling, a military historian at West Point, says she used to say immediately, "He's a diplomat." She believed he had found the work for which he was perfectly suited.
Kiesling believed that, too, and he's still not exactly sure what will replace it. He's going to try to write a book this fall, using his own experience to talk about American foreign policy. Next year, he hopes to "disappear into a good library" in pursuit of a PhD and a late-blooming academic career. He worries some about his future, and he has worried a great deal more, since he quit, about whether he has done the right thing with his modest fame — second-guessing himself on how well he has communicated his views, fretting about being dismissed as a "peacenik" and agonizing, once the war actually started, about how to make clear that his fervent hope was for a quick, clean American victory.
But he has never doubted the rightness of his resignation itself.
The chaos of postwar Iraq, he believes, was easily predictable, and there's no guarantee that what comes out of it will serve U.S. interests. The idea that the war will produce American-style democracy in the Middle East seems to him the equivalent of dynamite fishing: You toss explosives in a pond and hope the right thing floats to the surface. As for Iraq's elusive weapons of mass destruction, he says, even if they are found, it's now clear that the intelligence on which we based our attack was worthless. This is no small problem. "If you're going to talk about preemption or preventive war," he explains, "you have to have some standard, some threshold of action." If preemptors don't care about that, the precedent is "terrifying."
Among Kiesling's former State Department colleagues you can find a variety of opinions on the need to forcefully remove Saddam Hussein. But there appears to be near-consensus on one point: American foreign policy in general has been dangerously militarized, and the diplomatic point of view devalued. "There's a seeming lack of ability, at this point in our history, to take policy decisions following careful analysis of costs and benefits among competing interests," is how one senior Foreign Service officer carefully puts it. Chas. Freeman, the retired ambassador, is more direct. "We have a national mentality now that says, if you see a problem, shoot it! Because we know that we're very, very good at shooting things."
This, of course, is just one side of the ongoing debate. And from the neoconservative perspective, the change in our national mentality looks completely different. The essential problem of the 1990s was "American weakness, American uncertainty, American unwillingness to see that good and evil are real," Bill Kristol told his Princeton audience. "We need to err on the side of being strong," he said on Fox News around the same time. "And if people want to say we're an imperial power, fine."
But at 10:45 on this April morning, history's judgment lay far in the future. Kristol had said his piece and departed, leaving Kiesling in possession of the microphone.
He made a joke about job hunting, then began.
He talked for about 40 minutes. He spoke quietly, and his listeners stayed quiet to hear him. When he was done, they stood to applaud — clapping and clapping, as if they knew Brady Kiesling's unlikely moment was almost over and wanted, against all odds, to see it prolonged.
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