Ex-Soldier Brady Kiesling Protests the Iraq War

Kiesling Book Signing Slide Show

Kaleb Horton

Copy Editor

Shasta College’s Fall Forum kicked off Friday, Oct. 6, with a lecture from John Brady Kiesling, the first U.S. Foreign Service Officer to resign in protest of the Iraq war.

Kiesling, author of the new book Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower, talked for an hour about the mistakes of the Bush administration’s approach to the Iraq War and the subsequent military occupation, how diplomacy could have helped them, and the problems the US faces with its worldwide perception.

Kiesling, whose resignation letter was published in the New York Times, touched on the problems of using the CIA as a primary source of information in a situation that could lead to war. “The crucial early failure of Iraq is that we did not have any embassy there,” said Kiesling.

“When you only have an intelligence agency as your source of information on the world, you’re going to get the world wrong,” he continued. “When you rely on that, you’re relying on about 5% of the overall picture: The 5% that will scare the bejesus out of you. Their job is to report the bad stuff. The CIA has always systematically made the world seem more dangerous. Thanks to this, we completely misread Iraq.”

Kiesling supported the belief that the Bush administration’s grounds for the war were simply incorrect. “Hussein had no WMDs. He destroyed them after 1991,” said Kiesling. “That was thanks to the US breathing down his neck, and incredibly tough UN sanctions,” he added.

He also suggested that, regardless, military action would not have been the answer. “The US military is the best in the world. They’re incredible people. If a military solution was possible, we would have done it,” he said. “What Bush and Rumsfeld forgot is that the purpose of military victory is to affect the politics of the country you’re in, which they were not prepared to do.”

He then responded to the claim that, despite what Kiesling considers minimal change in the Iraqi political environment, occupation is needed to defend America from terror. “There is no terror group on the planet that can do any significant damage to us,” he said.

Kiesling proposed a solution to the US’s involvement in Iraq: “America, despite flaws like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, is basically a well-meaning superpower. We’re a lot safer than we think we are. We need to maintain the moral high ground,” he said.

“Ultimately, justice has to be done in the society where the terrorism occurred. That’s the cure. It’s a very long term cure, but it’s a cure. We aren’t able to improve Iraqi life, so we will have to leave. What we need to do is re-legitimize Iraqi government,” concluded Kiesling.

Kiesling also touched on some of the reasons why the US has international perception problems. “In the rest of the world, power is always abused, which is part of why we are seen so badly. People assume our motives are corrupt. You get around that through the use of diplomatic character: by understanding their situation. The US generally has good reasons for doing what it does [militarily],” he said.

Kiesling talked about being a diplomat and the benefits of the job. “The hardest part of being a diplomat,” Kiesling stated, “is telling Washington how much fixing a problem will cost. [Resultantly], good diplomats are a scarce commodity.”

“And being a diplomat gives you intellectual humility, which is very critical,” he added.

Kiesling was introduced by Redding psychologist Doug Craig. “The word hero is thrown around too often, but Brady [Kiesling] is a hero. [His resignation letter] was the first of what I would call many reasonable questionings of Iraq policy. His letter was a denouncement of folly,” he said, in his introduction.

The lecture took place on campus, in room 802, and ran from 7-8 p.m., with a brief question and answer period afterward, as well as a book signing.