Former US officials say 'Bush must be defeated in November'
By Katrina Vanden Heuvel
Friday, June 18, 2004
A group of former senior diplomatic officials and retired military commanders - several of whom are the kind who "have never spoken out before" on such matters - has just issued a bracing statement arguing that President George W. Bush has damaged US national security and calling on Americans to defeat him in November. It's too early to tell if the statement will have an impact on this fall's campaign. But the group, which calls itself Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change, reveals (again) how dangerously isolated the Bush administration is not just around the world but even within America's own bipartisan foreign policy and military establishments.
This latest missive was sent by Democratic and Republican former officials who refuse to stay silent in the face of Bush's extremist and ideological foreign policy which, they say, is squandering America's moral standing. The signatories aren't exactly a "who's who" of the American left.
Jack Matlock, who served as an ambassador to the Soviet Union under the former presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, has signed the statement, as has Retired Admiral William Crowe, who served as Reagan's Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Retired Marine General Joseph Hoar, a Marine who commanded US forces in the Middle East under former President Bush, has added his name to the list, as has Phyllis Oakley, who served as a State Department spokesperson under Reagan. The vast majority of signatories are, in fact, either conservative Republicans who served in the previous Reagan or Bush administrations, or they are bipartisan, consensus-driven ex-diplomats who believe in America's leadership role around the world.
Now they feel so enraged by Bush's extremist foreign policies that they can no longer stand by as the current Bush administration makes America less secure by upending alliances and alienating much of the world. Against the metastasizing scandal of Abu Ghraib, the botched post-war occupation of Iraq and the administration's lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in the run-up to the war, these old hands are now taking an uncompromising, intelligent stand against what they see as an arrogant, unilateral and incompetent foreign policy.
The signatories join a large and growing chorus of former officials who were so enraged by Bush's conduct in Iraq that sitting on the sidelines wasn't an option. John Brady Kiesling, now a retired diplomat, led the charge in February 2003, when he courageously quit his Foreign Service job with the American Embassy in Athens and wrote a stinging rebuke of Bush's headlong rush to war in Iraq. Then another career diplomat, Gregory Thielmann, went public, telling Bill Moyers that Iraq didn't pose an "imminent security threat" to America. Thielmann attacked Bush for hyping intelligence reports and for misleading the American people about the need to go to war. The administration, he said, "has had a faith-based intelligence attitude: 'We know the answers - give us the intelligence to support those answers.'"
Around the same time, retired military commanders were growing aghast at Bush's inept lack of planning for the occupation of Iraq. That's why, for example, a former US Central Command commander, General Anthony Zinni, went on "60 Minutes" last month and argued that if Bush stuck to the current course in Iraq, America was "headed over Niagara Falls." Hoar, the retired Marine general, has publicly declared that the United States is "absolutely on the brink of failure" in Iraq.
Meanwhile, other former ambassadors and career Foreign Service officers began speaking up, on their own timetables. Republican Party strategists with ties to the White House were quick and shameless in denigrating the critics. Ronald Spiers, a former ambassador to Turkey and Pakistan and someone well versed in Middle Eastern politics, argued that Bush administration policies had unraveled America's most important global alliances. Spiers faulted Bush for causing the US to lose "a lot of our international partnerships. We've lost a lot of lives. We've lost a lot of money for something that wasn't justified."
George Harrop, a former ambassador to Kenya and Israel, spoke for many in the diplomatic corps and, I suspect, for onetime Republican administration officials, when he said: "I really am essentially a Republican. I voted for George Bush's father, and I voted for George Bush. But what we got was not the George Bush we voted for." And former Ambassador Joseph Wilson has reminded Americans of just how many lies the present administration was willing to tell in its quest to convince people that Iraq posed a nuclear threat to the US.
Then, of course, there are the former National Security Council officials who, after getting a ringside seat watching Bush's bungling national security strategies, decided that now was the time to take a stand. Rand Beers left the White House after serving under Reagan and the former President Bush, and is now running foreign policy operations for John Kerry's presidential campaign. Richard Clarke is one of the most experienced counter-terrorism officials America has produced in the last three decades; he, too, could no longer stand idly by as the Bush administration pursued a fool's errand by starting a war against Iraq.
Just last month a separate group of 53 former diplomats and other former high-level national security officials wrote a letter to Bush in which they excoriated the president for sacrificing America's credibility in the Arab world and squandering America's status as honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The statement just issued marks the high-water point of dissent among diplomats and military commanders who cannot stomach Bush any longer. But there is still time, and a need, for more officials to come forward and voice their opposition to policies that are undermining US security. The latest letter was a profound wake-up call to all Americans: George W. Bush must be defeated next November.
Katrina vanden Heuvel is the editor of The Nation in New York. THE DAILY STAR publishes this commentary in agreement with Agence Global
dailystar.com.lb |
