[lbo-talk] "J'accuse": LA Times - Former diplomats and commanders say "Bush must go!"

[dano]

Understatement of the article: "It is unusual for 
so many former high-level military officials and 
career diplomats to issue such an overtly 
political message during a presidential campaign."




http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/2004/la-na-diplo13jun13,1,1142936.story?coll=la-home-headlines 


THE RACE TO THE WHITE HOUSE

Retired Officials Say Bush Must Go

The 26 ex-diplomats and military leaders say his 
foreign policy has harmed national security. 
Several served under Republicans.
By Ronald Brownstein
Times Staff Writer

June 13, 2004

WASHINGTON - A group of 26 former senior 
diplomats and military officials, several 
appointed to key positions by Republican 
Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, 
plans to issue a joint statement this week 
arguing that President George W. Bush has damaged 
America's national security and should be 
defeated in November.

The group, which calls itself Diplomats and 
Military Commanders for Change, will explicitly 
condemn Bush's foreign policy, according to 
several of those who signed the document.

"It is clear that the statement calls for the 
defeat of the administration," said William C. 
Harrop, the ambassador to Israel under President 
Bush's father and one of the group's principal 
organizers.

Those signing the document, which will be 
released in Washington on Wednesday, include 20 
former U.S. ambassadors, appointed by presidents 
of both parties, to countries including Israel, 
the former Soviet Union and Saudi Arabia.

Others are senior State Department officials from 
the Carter, Reagan and Clinton administrations 
and former military leaders, including retired 
Marine Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, the former commander 
of U.S. forces in the Middle East under President 
Bush's father. Hoar is a prominent critic of the 
war in Iraq.

Some of those signing the document - such as Hoar 
and former Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill A. 
McPeak - have identified themselves as supporters 
of Sen. John F. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic 
presidential nominee. But most have not endorsed 
any candidate, members of the group said.

It is unusual for so many former high-level 
military officials and career diplomats to issue 
such an overtly political message during a 
presidential campaign.

A senior official at the Bush reelection campaign 
said he did not wish to comment on the statement 
until it was released.

But in the past, administration officials have 
rejected charges that Bush has isolated America 
in the world, pointing to countries contributing 
troops to the coalition in Iraq and the unanimous 
passage last week of the U.N. resolution 
authorizing the interim Iraqi government.

One senior Republican strategist familiar with 
White House thinking said he did not think the 
group was sufficiently well-known to create 
significant political problems for the president.

The strategist, who spoke on the condition of 
anonymity, also said the signatories were making 
an argument growing increasingly obsolete as Bush 
leans more on the international community for 
help in Iraq.

"Their timing is a little off, particularly in 
the aftermath of the most recent U.N. 
resolution," the strategist said. "It seems to me 
this is a collection of resentments that have 
built up, but it would have been much more 
powerful months ago than now when even the 
president's most disinterested critics would say 
we have taken a much more multilateral approach" 
in Iraq.

But those signing the document say the recent 
signs of cooperation do not reverse a basic trend 
toward increasing isolation for the U.S.

"We just felt things were so serious, that 
America's leadership role in the world has been 
attenuated to such a terrible degree by both the 
style and the substance of the administration's 
approach," said Harrop, who served as ambassador 
to four African countries under Carter and Reagan.

"A lot of people felt the work they had done over 
their lifetime in trying to build a situation in 
which the United States was respected and could 
lead the rest of the world was now undermined by 
this administration - by the arrogance, by the 
refusal to listen to others, the scorn for 
multilateral organizations," Harrop said.

Jack F. Matlock Jr., who was appointed by Reagan 
as ambassador to the Soviet Union and retained in 
the post by President Bush's father during the 
final years of the Cold War, expressed similar 
views.

"Ever since Franklin Roosevelt, the U.S. has 
built up alliances in order to amplify its own 
power," he said. "But now we have alienated many 
of our closest allies, we have alienated their 
populations. We've all been increasingly appalled 
at how the relationships that we worked so hard 
to build up have simply been shattered by the 
current administration in the method it has gone 
about things."

The GOP strategist noted that many of those 
involved in the document claimed their primary 
expertise in the Middle East and suggested a 
principal motivation for the statement might be 
frustration over Bush's effort to fundamentally 
reorient policy toward the region.

"For 60 years we believed in quote-unquote 
stability at the price of liberty, and what we 
got is neither liberty nor stability," the 
strategist said. "So we are taking a 
fundamentally different approach toward the 
Middle East. That is a huge doctrinal shift, and 
the people who have given their lives, careers to 
building the previous foreign policy consensus, 
see this as a direct intellectual assault on what 
they have devoted their lives to. And it is. We 
think what a lot of people came up with was a 
failure - or at least, in the present world in 
which we live, it is no longer sustainable."

Sponsors of the effort counter that several in 
the group have been involved in developing policy 
affecting almost all regions of the globe.

The document will echo a statement released in 
April by a group of high-level former British 
diplomats condemning Prime Minister Tony Blair 
for being too closely aligned to U.S. policy in 
Iraq and Israel. Those involved with the new 
group said their effort was already underway when 
the British statement was released.

The signatories said Kerry's campaign played no 
role in the formation of their group. Phyllis E. 
Oakley, the deputy State Department spokesman 
during Reagan's second term and an assistant 
secretary of state under Clinton, said she 
suspected "some of them [in the Kerry campaign] 
may have been aware of it," but that "the 
campaign had no role" in organizing the group.

Stephanie Cutter, Kerry's communications 
director, also said that the Kerry campaign had 
not been involved in devising the group's 
statement.

The document does not explicitly endorse Kerry, 
according to those familiar with it. But some 
individual signers plan to back the Democrat, and 
others acknowledge that by calling for Bush's 
removal, the group effectively is urging 
Americans to elect Kerry.

"The core of the message is that we are so deeply 
concerned about the current direction of American 
foreign policy Š that we think it is essential 
for the future security of the United States that 
a new foreign policy team come in," said Oakley.

Much of the debate over the document in the days 
ahead may pivot on the extent to which it is seen 
as a partisan document.

A Bush administration ally said that the group 
failed to recognize how the Sept. 11 attacks 
required significant changes in American foreign 
policy. "There's no question those who were 
responsible for policies pre-9/11 are denying 
what seems as the obvious - that those policies 
were inadequate," said Cliff May, president of 
the conservative advocacy group Foundation for 
the Defense of Democracies.

"This seems like a statement from 9/10 people 
[who don't see] the importance of 9/11 and the 
way that should have changed our thinking."

Along with Hoar and McPeak, others who have 
signed it are identified with the Democratic 
Party.

Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., though named chairman 
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Reagan, 
supported Clinton in 1992. Crowe has endorsed 
Kerry. Retired Adm. Stansfield Turner served as 
Carter's director of central intelligence and has 
also endorsed Kerry. Matlock said he was a 
registered Democrat during most of his foreign 
service career, though he voted for Reagan in 
1984 and the elder Bush twice and now is 
registered as an independent.

Several on the group's list were appointed to 
their most important posts under Reagan and the 
elder Bush. These include Matlock and Harrop, as 
well as Arthur A. Hartman, who served as Reagan's 
ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1981 through 
1987; H. Allen Holmes, an assistant secretary of 
state under Reagan; and Charles Freeman, 
ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the elder Bush.

Many on the list have not been previously 
identified with any political cause or party. 
Several "are the kind who have never spoken out 
before," said James Daniel Phillips, former 
ambassador to Burundi and the Congo.

Oakley, Harrop and Matlock said the effort began 
this year. Matlock said it was sparked by 
conversations among "colleagues who had served in 
senior positions around the same time, most of 
them for the Reagan administration and for the 
first Bush administration."

Oakley said frustration over the Iraq war was "a 
large part" of the impetus for the statement, but 
the criticism of President Bush "goes much 
deeper."

The group's complaint about Bush's approach 
largely tracks Kerry's contention that the 
administration has weakened American security by 
straining traditional alliances and shifting 
resources from the war against Al Qaeda to the 
invasion of Iraq.

Oakley said the statement would argue that, 
"Unfortunately the tough stands [Bush] has taken 
have made us less secure. He has neglected the 
war on terrorism for the war in Iraq. And while 
we agree that we are in unprecedented times and 
we face challenges we didn't even know about 
before, these challenges require the cooperation 
of other countries. We cannot do it by ourselves."



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