Memo to the President:
TO: President George W. Bush
FROM: A Retired Senior Foreign Service Officer
SUBJECT: Your Failed Foreign Policy

Mr. President, you have sacrificed on the altar of realpolitik --- that misguided school of thought that believes that might makes right --- the good will and high esteem that America once enjoyed. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11 we had the sympathy of the world on our side. The headline in Le Monde on 9/12 said it all: Nous sommes tous Americains! We are all Americans. Our proud history of standing for what is just was once again a great shining truth. I was proud to be a member of our diplomatic corps then.

That was then, now is now.

Mr. President, you have exchanged universal respect for universal fear. You have created a dangerous and unstable world in which the United States stands alone, a world where American tourists overseas have been seen wearing T-shirts that read "I am NOT an American."

How, we may ask, have you managed to squander the prestige America once enjoyed?

Let us count the ways.

You embraced unilateralism as the keystone to your foreign policy. As a true unilateralist you lead without listening. You feel no need to consult with friends and allies. You ignored the UN Security Council, which you termed the "so called" Security Council. As a result we now stand alone in the shambles that is Iraq where our brave soldiers face death every day. That coalition you love to boast of accounts for only seven percent of the troops in Iraq and prospects for other nations joining us in the quagmire that is Iraq diminish day by day.

You engaged in a preemptive war where there was nothing to preempt. It is now clear that Iraq:

1) posed no imminent threat to our national security.

2) had no capability of attacking us.

3) had no demonstrated tie to the al-Qaida terrorist network (though it does now).

4) had no connection to the 9/11 attack on our country.

5) had no capability to use Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) against us.

Mr. President, could Saddam have actually been telling the truth when he furnished the UN Security Council with those dozens of CD ROMs and scores of reports denying the existence of WMD? Remember all those reams of documents you chose to ignore? You thought their evidence was cooked.

Mr. President, you and your Vice President then decided to cook our own intelligence in a vain attempt to fool the American people and the Security Council. In the process, you hung out to dry one of our most respected Secretaries of State with his dramatic, but alas bogus, argument for preventive war before the Security Council. You then bought into obviously forged documents from Niger to justify your claims that Saddam Hussein posed a nuclear a threat to us. As a consequence, our credibility lies in tatters.

Mr. President, could the French have been right to insist that we actually locate the WMD before rushing off to war? But no, your Secretary of Defense--like a school boy with a new toy--was so eager to go to war before the weather got too hot. Yet we found ourselves fighting a war in 120 degree heat.

Mr. President, you and your Secretary of Defense have made us weaker militarily, not stronger. Almost half of the best battalions of the world's superpower are tied down in the sands of Iraq, while the morale of the best trained fighting force in history is at its nadir because it has been asked to carry out a mission for which it has not been trained or equipped to perform.

Mr. President, our country has lost its credibility and its moral bearings. We have embraced realpolitik which asks how our foreign policy will affect the immediate future, such as your next election. Instead, we should embrace a moralpolitik which asks how our foreign policy will be view by humanity in the years to come.

I sympathize with my foreign service colleagues who are left to defend a foreign policy that meets almost universal censure around the world. This leads me,

Mr. President, to ask you the question Attorney Joseph Welch put to Senator McCarthy after the Senator had besmirched the reputation of Wech's assistant during the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings:

"You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

Peter F. Spalding (pet202@aol.com) is a retired senior Foreign Service Officer. He served in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.

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