Edward Peck was going to call his speech on Tuesday to the Cleveland Council on World Affairs "Doing It All Wrong in the Middle East," but changed his mind.

After all, he is a former chief U.S. representative to Iraq. And the best diplomats, as Peck joked, are skillful enough to convince their wives they don't look good in diamonds.

But the first speech title would have been apt. His passionate, often humorous, 45-minute speech pointed to an "unnecessary, poorly conceived and badly planned" Iraq war and pleaded for the United States to be more peaceable and cooperative with the Middle East and the rest of the world.

Peck's theory on why the Bush administration went to war with Iraq is this: It wasn't to fight terrorism. Instead, the war is an effort to make the United States the leader of the world after the demise of the Soviet Union. The occupation of Iraq is aimed at controlling the country's oil, guaranteeing the security of Israel and forcing a regime change, he said.

"I'll fight. I'll die for my country," said Peck, who as a young man served two tours of duty as a U.S. Army paratrooper. "But I'm a little bit queasy about what we're up to in the Middle East."

He worried about Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's declaration that the United States was not going to keep track of Iraqis killed in the conflict, and the government's refusal to say how many sorties the United States has flown during the two-week bombing of Fallujah.

"I find that frightening," he said.

Peck scoffed at the idea that terrorists hate Americans because of freedom here. "That's stupidity. They're not going to blow themselves up because we have fast food and Britney Spears' belly button," he said. "They are dying and killing because their people are dying."

The world sees how the United States supports Israel, a country that oppresses and kills Palestinians on Palestinian territory, then condemns Saddam Hussein for invading Kuwait, Peck said.

"Their perception is that we are hypocrites," he said. "Every nation has done this, but no nation has done this with the impunity that the United States has."

It's arrogant for the United States to assume that all countries should be democratic, he said. Any democracy installed by the United States including one in Iraq is doomed to fail, because democracy must be initiated by those who are governed. "You cannot impose democracy," Peck said. "That's a dictatorship. Whatever you come up with is not a democracy because they have been coerced."

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