When I faxed my resignation letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell on February 25, the United States government was on the verge of its most costly foreign policy blunder since the war in Vietnam. The primary goal the president had announced, protecting the American people from terrorism, could not be achieved through war with Iraq. The goal of establishing democracy in Iraq was one the United States had, alas, no effective legitimacy to achieve. The costs of our attainable goal – cleansing Iraq of a genuinely monstrous Saddam Hussein and his likely arsenal – had been concealed from the American people and their elected representatives for an excellent reason: As two previous presidents had recognized, the material, moral, human, and political costs would be so great as to cancel out the probable benefit.

I was the political counselor at the US Embassy in Athens then, 45 years old, running a section of some eight people. My mission was to advise the US ambassador on how best we could, as President Bush's personal representatives in Greece, promote and defend US interests. As the war became inescapable, so, too, became my catastrophic conviction that I could either represent the president or defend US interests, but I could no longer do both.

The US Foreign Service does an often creditable job of finding humane accommodations to depression, alcoholism, or AIDS among its officers, but there is one disease that still carries a fatal stigma. "Clientitis" is the infirmity of understanding the motives and interests of one's host country better than those in Washington. After two tours of duty totaling seven years in Greece, my best defense against imputations of the dread disease was a steady flow of telegrams to flatter Washington that Greeks, unlike their American counterparts, were unreliable, bureaucratic, or enslaved to domestic politics. But I was beginning to doubt the justice of that comparison.

My reassignment notification came through in early January, but I would have to hold on in Athens until July – then home leave in California, followed by 44 weeks of refuge learning Dari, the dominant Persian dialect of Afghanistan, at the Foreign Service Institute. Until I arrived at my next assignment, as political-economic counselor in Kabul, Afghanistan, I would not be called upon to defend a war that seemed criminal folly. I would not be called upon to promote policies whose result, if not aim, was to undermine the progress of international law and discredit any notion of interdependence between the United States and its European friends and partners.

Obviously, I did not hold on. After resigning, I came to see myself as the canary in the mine shaft, the squeamish soul that keeled over first when our policy became toxic. Greece is a more relevant mine shaft than one might expect, with one entryway in Europe and another in the Middle East. Most Greeks feel that the United States betrayed Greece during the 1967-74 dictatorship of the Colonels, having the power to save Greece from tyranny but – at best – failing to do so. Most Greeks blame the United States, rather than the Colonels, for the folly that triggered the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974. Greeks have concluded from their own experience that power will be abused, and they preemptively distrust the wielders of power. In this, their view is that of the majority of the Muslim world: The United States put itself into the ranks of evil by failing to impose the just peace in the Middle East its power allegedly permitted it.

Even so, the practical relationship between Greece and the United States is often excellent. Leaving aside admiration for the United States as a land of opportunity, residual gratitude for the Marshall Plan, and ties to the Greek-American community, there are geostrategic reasons for keeping the United States engaged as partner and ally in a troubled region. Moreover, Greece is a country where personal relations trump ideology most of the time. The Greeks I gravitated toward had sufficient intellectual independence to dismiss unreflecting criticisms of the United States. These journalists, diplomats, academics, and politicians were fair-minded enough to be persuadable regarding American policy and would speak out in our defense on many issues where the broad Greek public had reflexively maligned us.

On Iraq, however, my friends were unconvincible from the outset. As one cherished contact, a longtime member of parliament, conservative, pro-US, put it: "I supported you in the Gulf War, I supported you in Kosovo, when 99 percent of the Greeks were opposed, but this war is simply wrong." I drew the duty of reproving another friend, a distinguished Greek specialist on the United States, a longtime US resident, who had produced an editorial with views of our Iraq policy almost indistinguishable from those of my old sparring partners in the Greek Communist Party. I knew that if we had lost this group, we had already lost the whole Middle East and half of Europe.

These were not the only canaries choking in my personal mine shaft. All parts of the Greek media spectrum had rejected our arguments. Close friends began to find my status as an American diplomat a barrier to friendship. European diplomatic colleagues probed for word on the invasion date but said nothing to suggest that they understood our policy in any but the most cynical terms. My Greek friends and I watched as decades-old dreams of a Cyprus settlement melted away, unnoticed collateral damage of our Iraq policy. New Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan was unable to manage a two-front war, squelching the hard-line Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash while managing the massive domestic unpopularity of Turkey's attempt to support the United States in Iraq.

At what stage does empathy become career-ending? Living through 9/11 in Athens, many of my embassy colleagues were spared that moment of sickening clarity, of realizing that the average Greek genuinely had felt a flicker of guilty pleasure along with the horror of the Twin Towers: "Kala na pathoun," Greeks said. "It served them right, the Americans had it coming." Most embassy personnel heard only the real and genuine personal expressions of sorrow for innocent lives lost on that day. They may have found their Greek contacts suspiciously quick to understand 9/11 in terms of "root causes of terrorism" and lessons to be drawn. But Americans were in no mood to be taught lessons from 9/11, and the conversations trailed off with a generally safe degree of mutual incomprehension.

My own conversations went less well. I read the Athens newspapers and watched the Athens talk shows. Fortunately, I am slow to anger, more interested in finding the "why" of Greek attitudes that most Americans would find horrifying if they knew them. It was clear that the US image among average Greeks was seriously awry but also clear that habitual anti-Americanism was not a useful explanation. No, we had gravely underestimated how much damage the reality or even the appearance of unilateral, insensitive US policy decisions could do to an old friendship. But it was unclear until war with Iraq was imminent, late in 2002, the extent to which alienation was turning to rage. It was also unclear whether the loss of old friendships really mattered to US national interest.

I left the embassy 18 months after 9/11 and two weeks before we invaded Iraq, having concluded that what remained of a disintegrating diplomatic career was not worth the psychic cost of staying on to defend a foreign policy and a foreign policy attitude that had become indefensibly dangerous to US interests. Thus I missed the first sightings of Greeks, and not only Greeks but millions of normally gentle souls all over Europe, riveted grimly to their television screens and quietly applauding each American setback on the road to Baghdad.

In past street protests, the ritualized leftist marches from the Athens Polytechnic, now the National Technical University, to the US Embassy, we always joked that Greeks didn't have much of a throwing arm. Once the war started, the customary anarchist rocks and bottles, this time impelled by the anger of mostly a hundred thousand ordinary citizens, shattered the ambassador's office windows. The police moved in to defend the heavily fortified American Embassy, more sluggishly than had been their custom.

In Greece, they refer to the president of the United States as the Planitarchis, the Ruler of the Planet. The Armenians used a similar term in the 14th century to flatter their Mongol overlords, but for modern Greeks this is a term of fear and dislike, not respect. The title is one we have earned, in several senses. Without the United States, the world cannot act on the global scale that a shrinking world and an expanding world population require. It is not just that fear of our military deters cross-border aggression around the world or that our excess consumption fuels the world economy or that American marketing genius has altered forever the language and culture of the planet. The United States is the sine qua non of the international system. To the extent that international law has utility, it is because we accept it. Neither the world's interests nor our own can be protected without the engagement of the United States, either as first among equals in the evolving law-based international system we largely created, or if, as now seems the case, we are rejecting that system, then as autocrat in whatever system or non-system we replace it with. And the American president is the face and voice of the United States to the world.

Nothing in the US Constitution dictates that the president has any duty to the world at large or that his moral compass should point beyond the narrow nationalism of the average citizen. Perhaps we should consider amending it. That ability to convey with John Donne that "Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind" is a strategic asset for any statesman, one not lightly tossed aside. For a superpower, facing a world automatically fearful of its power, that ability is vital. In 99 percent of the United States' transactions with the world, neither brute force nor outright bribery is a cost-effective option. Our foreign-affairs practice shies away from horse-trading, so persuasion is the only alternative.

President Clinton had many flaws, including a lazy and reactive foreign policy, but he had the ability to convince foreigners that he partook of a global culture, that he possessed a sense of common humanity that might ultimately, perhaps, outweigh narrow US interests on any given issue. The ability to "feel the world's pain" allowed the United States to escape almost unscathed with policies such as the Cuban embargo or toleration of West Bank settlements, policies that did not always differ much from those of the current administration in pandering to domestic lobbies at the expense of global US interests.

Even before the new administration took office, it was clear that respect for world sensibilities was not part of our moral positioning. I remember the little gasp among Greeks present at the ambassador's residence during the televised Bush-Gore debate, as the then-governor of Texas smirked about his role in putting convicted criminals to death. I remember the political cost we inflicted on our loyal European allies in the war against terrorism by "with us or against us," "dead or alive" rhetoric that thrilled American ultranationalists but offered no moral basis for our indispensable partners in this global campaign. The "axis of evil" utterance was more than simply a foolish declaration of war sine die against three former "states of concern." It was, as diplomatic colleagues from other countries made clear repeatedly for days afterward, a repudiation of the world view of allies who knew the profound differences among Iraq, Iran, and North Korea and counted on working closely with us to manage the distinctive risks each posed.

None of these gaffes was a fatal misstep, of course. Our partners are so locked to us by shared interests and shared commitments that they have a strong incentive to find moral and political common ground no matter how badly we behave. British prime minister Tony Blair, in particular, could articulate for us, when we let him, a moral stature more in keeping with the political requirements of an anxious Europe. But the decision to launch the war on Iraq, with the moral face of America turned away from the world, severed us from the wellsprings of international legitimacy from which any successful policy – but not our current one – must draw.

As US troops began to mass in the Persian Gulf, the UN Security Council rallied with Resolution 1441, a sweeping mandate for international inspections of Iraq. Unfortunately, we badly understood our 15-0 victory. The purpose of the United Nations is not really to provide legal grounds for war, though everything it does is couched in legal terms. Rather, the purpose of the United Nations is to provide international political legitimacy for the rare, painful moments when action must be taken against a sovereign state. Putting additional pressure on Hussein to disarm was perfectly legitimate, partly for its own sake but primarily because it offered an alternative to unilateral US war.

There is little moral clarity in international relations, alas, mostly a painful weighing of costs and interests. The costs and benefits of war are particularly incalculable, and so it is human nature to try to set the threshold as high as possible. For world populations desperate for legitimacy, for some approximation of moral clarity generally unobtainable from their national leaders, the votes of the Security Council and the blessings of the secretary general are the last, best hope.

A legitimate war meant persuading key world leaders that the danger of leaving Hussein in place outweighed the danger of attempting to replace him. We had no arguments that would convince skeptics of this, partly because the intelligence information we were willing to share was weak, partly because our grasp of history and human nature was shaky, but largely because key spokesmen of the administration – including the president himself – had set forth a vision of America's arbitrary role in the world that few foreign leaders could endorse.

Washington began to sense even during the first year of the Bush administration that the US image had become a problem. Though our ambassadors in the field sent in the standard upbeat messages, our popularity, according to the international polls we quietly conducted, was falling. The State Department acquired in 2001 a new undersecretary, Charlotte Beers, in the hope that the negative image of the Planetarch could be remedied through good public diplomacy. She was a specialist on building and preserving commercial brands, determined to market the United States to the world. If we could not alter our policies, at least we could alter our marketing, provided we could agree on what image we were trying to burnish.

For decades after his assassination, the image of John F. Kennedy had been a key element of the American brand, an avatar of youth, idealism, and endless possibility. That image had eroded by the late 1980s, but the United States preserved its image as the land of opportunity, the home of science, the bastion of freedom, albeit heavily armed. Ronald Reagan's cowboy charm and Bill Clinton's saxophone were marketable elements of the brand. The US reaction to September 11 put an end to that. We now had a president who inspired fear but no respect from foreigners.

Congress exacerbated the problem by surrendering to a profound pessimism about human nature, a fear of terrorism, and a suspicion of swarthy foreigners that trumped our belief in an open society and ignored our economic dependence on tourism, foreign students, and international business. Newly skeptical of the idea of human progress, unless of the soul after death, we had little of youth or idealism with which to encourage loyalty to the US brand among increasingly secular Europeans increasingly seduced by the expansion of the European Union as the institutional expression of human progress.

With a president incapable of projecting a benign global image, we had little to prop up the US brand. There was a pitiable effort in 2002 to stave off the clash of civilizations by buying television time in Muslim countries and broadcasting scenes of the happy home life of American Muslims, but our public diplomacy became essentially a sterile litany of Hussein's crimes over the past 15 years. This proved a feeble reed, swept away by the nearly universal world reaction to our unilateral and, at least by Kofi Annan's and the pope's ruling, illegal decision for war with Iraq. The State Department was not helped by the implicit embrace by senior officials of a new and distracting jingle. It was not a compliment to our brave Australian allies that the president's brain trust had quietly rebranded America as the Outback Steak House: "No rules, just right."

Future historians will judge whether it was knaves or fools who asserted, against both history and human nature, that the Iraqis would welcome their American liberators and that the war would thus be quick and painless. Lying to Congress is perhaps an impeachable offense, but deluding ourselves is simply politics as usual.

All calculations of the utility of this war for US interests were based on the belief that we could keep it quick and painless, that the television images of human suffering broadcast around the world would in short order give way to images of a country blessing its liberators. Regardless of what happens in the coming weeks or months, we have incurred costs to our interests around the world, antagonizing the planet and exposing the American people to new and incalculable dangers in both the short and long term.

Our rare setbacks (certainly Pearl Harbor and 9/11, arguably Vietnam) have strengthened the United States rather than made it weaker. The world (like us, until recently) still operates on a balance-of-power model. Our current overwhelming power, even when wielded with more deference to world sensibilities, is a strong incentive for smaller powers to put aside their differences and unite against us. There is a remarkable amount of reflexive opposition to US initiatives on general principle. Worse, the absence of any evident check on our power has legitimized, for an appallingly large share of world opinion, the suicide bomber as the only effective countermeasure to overwhelming US technological superiority.

There is a school of thought that says that terrorists are insufficiently afraid of the United States, and that they will leave us alone only if we shock and awe them enough. But the terrorists are already terrified. There is no human being on earth who doubts our power. But the more aggressively we use our power to intimidate our foes, the more foes we create and the more we validate terrorism as the only effective weapon of the powerless against the powerful.

It is practically axiomatic that the United States will remain the favorite terrorist target for decades. Terrorists will strike us again, and painfully, but the risk to any ordinary American citizen from unfriendly foreigners has been and remains microscopic. Other risks are much more likely to strike Americans at home, in particular the risk to the US and world economy from irresponsible trade or fiscal policies. To understand and reduce the risks to American interests, we must take the trouble to listen to our friends and also to our enemies. To manage the risks will require that we soften the edges of our power, that we voluntarily restrain ourselves, that we put on, as President Bush once promised, a certain humility about our role in the world. If we cannot, for example, support a viable solution to the Palestinian problem because of US domestic politics, let us admit it freely and lend our support to someone else who can. More importantly, we should sign on again, along with the vast majority of the human race, to the vision of someday creating a body of real international law that will bind states as firmly as possible to a code of conduct we ourselves will agree to live by.

International law as we have left it offers us little comfort now in Iraq, other than a faint hope that our prisoners of war will be treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. We ourselves had made clear that our security concerns overrule such legal strictures, at least for the prisoners we take in the War Against Terrorism. Our rejection of the International Criminal Court means there will be no legitimate international tribunal to judge Hussein, should he survive, so we cannot afford to let him survive.

The international agreements against proliferation of weapons of mass destruction are not universal enough or sweeping enough – largely at our insistence – to fully delegitimize their use. Indeed, wise fools in the US nuclear weapons programs made clear in the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review their hope that bunker-busting tactical nuclear weapons will quietly slip below the threshold of an absolute ban. This administration has not been absolute enough in its denials that it will use such weapons. The overall signal we have sent to a watching world is that the only sure defense against an unpredictable and frightening America is a handful of nuclear warheads.

Fyodor Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground observed that a brick wall exerts a calming influence on bullies. We hit a brick wall in Iraq, if we have the wit to recognize it, and perhaps it will calm us. We need to be calm, to take careful stock of what we gained and lost after September 11, to assess how important to us are our friends, and how dangerous to us are our foes. When we take stock carefully, we will realize that the American people were safer in the months after 9/11, until the war drums began to beat, than they had ever been in the history of the species. As we took arms against Al Qaeda, we had good friends, good alliances, the beginnings of real cooperation against terrorism, and a world population convinced that terrorism was more a threat than we were. Now we must try to turn the pages back to that happier era.

That task is difficult but not hopeless. We will depart Iraq with many of our goals unrealized in any case. Let us adopt as our first priority putting forth to the Middle East and to the world the message, a truthful message, that there are limits to our power and limits to our ambition. Let us make our first priority the rebuilding of our traditional alliances. It is only a minor nuisance to pretend that all sovereign states have equal dignity, and it is an act of wisdom, not weakness, to charitably assume that those who are not against us are with us.

I was briefly a historian, afterward a diplomat, and perhaps in the future a historian again. As a historian, I learned that power is ultimately self-limiting. As a diplomat, I learned that the United States is a mirror for the world. Our endless diversity allows outsiders to pick and choose a version of the United States that suits their hopes or their fears. The world's role models for the exercise of power are mostly ugly ones. We have better models to offer. But we must recognize that, unless we show this softer face of American power, we inspire fear more than respect, obedience more than cooperation, and a level of anger and humiliation that will continue to haunt us.

Athenian taxi drivers sneer that Americans have no history, at least compared to their own. I no longer can take pleasure in my scholarly rebuttal, that history belongs to those that learn from it. Going into Iraq we forgot not only the history of the overreaching, doomed Athenian Empire of the fifth century BC, but even our own recent history. Let us see whether it is too late to go back to the history books one more time.

John Brady Kiesling is a former political counselor at the US Embassy in Athens.

downloaded April 29, 2003
from The Boston Globe Magazine