A call to conscience
The diplomat who quit over Nixon's invasion of Cambodia asks Americans
on the front lines of foreign service to resign from the "worst regime
by far in the history of the republic."

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By Roger Morris



May 20, 2004 | 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 chaotic, 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 memorandums 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," Sen. 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 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

Roger Morris served on the senior staff of the National Security Council
under Presidents Johnson and Nixon until resigning over the invasion of
Cambodia. An award-winning investigative journalist and historian, he is
the author of several books, including "Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise
of an American Politician." He is currently completing a history of U.S.
policy and covert intervention in Southwest Asia.