When Quitting is the Best Thing to do
A question: why the hell aren’t we seeing more administration insiders tendering their resignations? With the White House listing and keeling over Iraq, you’d think more of them would be scrambling for the lifeboats.
Which is not to imply that they are rats leaving a sinking ship -- or the Bush equivalent of Titanic’s Billy Zane, pushing the women and children out of the way to secure a spot. Indeed, I consider someone quitting on principle -- sacrificing personal standing in the national interest -- to be one of the noblest acts a public figure can perform.
And there is a long tradition of this kind of selfless deed. In 1945, Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes resigned from President Truman’s cabinet, saying: "I don’t care to stay in an administration where I am expected to commit perjury for the sake of the party”. Memo to Scott McClellan: you might want to put that on your iPod and press “repeat”... who knows, it might sink in.
In 1973, Elliot Richardson resigned rather than take part in the Saturday Night Massacre, telling Nixon: “Mr. President, it would appear that we have a different perception of the public interest.” Memo to Condi Rice: see above.
And Cy Vance quit over Jimmy Carter’s military actions in Iran.
So where are the Iraq war equivalents of Ickes, Richardson and Vance?
Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked in the office of the Undersecretary of Defense, Near East Bureau, tendered her resignation back in July of 2003, saying that anyone looking for answers “to why the post-Hussein occupation has been distinguished by confusion and false steps... need look no further than the process inside the office of the Secretary of Defense” (in other words, “Don Rumsfeld is an idiot. Don Rumsfeld is a megalomaniac. If we lose this war, you know who to blame: Don Rumsfeld!”) You may not have heard much about Kwiatkowski when she quit but you will in the coming months -- she’s one of the key figures in “Why We Fight”, a powerful new documentary by Eugene Jarecki, that won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, and is being released by Sony Classics this Winter.
In England, Carne Ross, a member of the British mission to the UN during the run-up to the war, resigned from the British Foreign Office last year. He’s now speaking out, saying that the British government’s pre-war claims about WMD were “totally implausible”.
And though he didn’t quit, Larry Diamond, a former senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad who had been personally recruited for the post by Condi Rice, offers in his new book, “Squandered Victory”, a devastating, as-seen-from-the-front-lines indictment of the Bush administration’s mishandling of Iraq.
A reminder to all Bush insiders: it’s not too late to do the right thing… and abandon ship.
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