A former U.S. diplomat who resigned in protest of the invasion of Iraq said the United States has lost the war and "should pull out very fast."

John Brady Kiesling

The U.S. has asked its military to do a political job it cannot do, "to go in and destroy an old dictatorial political regime and install a democratic government," John Brady Kiesling said in an interview and a discussion with graduate students in the University of Kentucky's Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce.

He spoke last night at UK's William T. Young Library auditorium.

Kiesling, 48, was political counselor in the U.S. Embassy in Greece when he resigned in 2003 to protest the impending invasion of Iraq. He said a pull-out could be accomplished in six months, but he thinks President Bush will probably take 18 months.

Kiesling, who joined the U.S. Foreign Service during the Reagan administration in 1983, said a strong leader will be necessary to create a coalition out of Iraq's Sunni, Shiite and Kurd factions. "Neither the Shiites nor the Kurds will allow the Sunnis to rule," he said.

The U.S. has failed in Iraq because "we, as outsiders, were not legitimate to the Iraqis," Kiesling said.

"I was in Greece, and 90 percent of the Greeks thought we were going to war for oil, imperialism and other selfish reasons," he said. "The Middle East also had no faith in our good intentions. I knew that when we invaded, that all over the Middle East people would resist us, and Muslim solidarity created an imperative to stop us."

Kiesling, who lives in Athens, Greece, was at UK on a national tour to promote his new book, Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower (Potomac Books, 317 pages, $28.95), now in its second printing.

He once worked for former U.S. Ambassador Carey Cavanaugh, a former peace negotiator in several former states of the Soviet Union. Cavanaugh is the new director of UK's Patterson School. Patterson School grad students said they benefitted from talking with Kiesling.

Sasskia Coolen, of Paintsville and a former State Department intern in The Hague, said it was "great to have someone who would speak his mind."

Kiesling called the Bush administration "a bunch of honorable, patriotic people trying to make their behavior moral.

"Unfortunately, morality says we have to leave Iraq better than we found it," he said. "We've created chaos, We don't know how to fix it."

© Copyright 2006 Lexington Herald-Leader

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