So far, to be honest, you have earned a reputation for being out of touch, for spouting platitudes without understanding the underlying issues. You are seen as oblivious to the concerns and sensibilities of groups of foreigners with whom you have met. However noble the abstractions of your rhetoric, your speeches are uniformly received as irrelevant propaganda. Even after objective observers have called attention to this pattern, you have done little to adjust. While it would be unfair to put the entire burden of transforming the image of the United States on you, it is a sad fact that your actions have deepened cynicism about American motives. And your inability to change has been consistent with the administration's unwillingness to shift course in the face of demonstrable failure.
If you still wish to succeed, you must finally come to terms with how you and the administration are perceived. Self-awareness is the first step to recovery. Denial has been more than this administration's pervasive state of mind; it has become its prevailing strategy. When other rationales have been shown to be false, hollow or self-undermining, denial has invariably become the last defense. Even when presented with irrefutable facts -- there were no WMD, there were no links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, and torture has indeed been the official policy -- the administration resorts to transparent gestures of denial: "We do not torture." But repeating a falsehood does not make it true. As one American president who was a keen student of public opinion put it: "You cannot fool all of the people all of the time." But this truism does not seem to have come to the attention of the White House or of your office. I hope it is not a shock to you that the strategy of denial is not working. It is your job, after all, not only to take into account the considered views of others but to assess objectively what works and what does not. Acknowledging that this persistent reaction is not achieving its goal is essential to learning from failure.
The issue of torture is a special case. Torture is state-sanctioned deviant behavior. It is degrading, arbitrary, cruel and illegal. As all responsible intelligence officers know, torture is the least productive technique of all, and torture yields inherently tainted information. Torture destroys the humanity of more than those tortured. It destroys the souls of those performing the torture. When Americans torture, Americans are shattered. Torture feeds secrecy. It undermines democracy. And it is shameful. Even the Gestapo and the KGB tried to hide their torture. Torture is considered uncivilized by most of the world's nations. At the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals, the U.S. tried, convicted and executed Nazi leaders for engaging in torture. Those that do not adhere to international treaties against torture are rightly branded rogue nations. Torture is the mark of tyrannies.
Moral authority is an impalpable but measurable quality in U.S. foreign policy. From our founding, the idea that the nation should be an example to the world has been central to our identity and leadership. When we have fallen short of our ideals, our willingness to engage in self-examination and self-reform has been critical to our reputation as a special nation. Our credentials for leadership have depended upon our capacity for change.
Nations may blunder and presidents may miscalculate. But nations that commit crimes against humanity and presidents who authorize torture have been deemed pariahs, subject to international quarantine and opprobrium. After World War II, the U.S. was widely admired for its leadership in establishing the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Charter for Universal Human Rights. The American conduct at the Nuremberg tribunals set the highest standards and respect for human rights, justice and the rule of law. When U.S. officials such as yourself ask foreign peoples to embrace the ideals and values that they clearly see being violated by the administration's behavior, you succeed only in fostering cognitive dissonance at best and contempt for hypocrisy at worst.
Since the Revolutionary War, at the order of George Washington, Americans have consistently opposed torture as a policy. Only one president, George W. Bush, has adopted torture as a policy. This administration stands outside more than the international treaties we have signed and previous presidents have upheld. This administration stands beyond the American tradition and values.
The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 were heinous and barbarous. But they and subsequent threats are no reason for abandoning our commitment to the rule of law. Other nations that have been subjected to terrorist attacks since Sept. 11 -- Spain and Britain -- have not succumbed to torture. Even in the dark hours after Pearl Harbor torture was not adopted as a policy. During the Cold War, when the U.S. faced the potential existential threat of nuclear annihilation, torture was never adopted as a policy. Goldsmith writes, "The Bush administration's go-it-alone approach to many terrorism-related legal policy issues is the antithesis of Roosevelt's approach in 1940-1941 ... The Bush administration has operated on an entirely different concept of power that relies on minimal deliberation, unilateral action, and legalistic defense."
Not a week goes by without President Bush citing Saddam Hussein's cruelty and butchery as a justification. The tragic irony of pursuing his torture policy while denouncing Saddam's appears to be lost on him and on you. But it is not lost on the rest of the world.
Of course, as someone who has spent years in politics, you must be aware of the polls. According to the most recent Pew poll of global public opinion, taken this June, the downward trend since 2002 of the image of the United States has continued "in most parts of the world. Favorable ratings of America are lower in 26 of 33 countries for which trends are available. The U.S. image remains abysmal in most Muslim countries in the Middle East and Asia, and continues to decline among the publics of many of America's oldest allies. Favorable views of the U.S. are in single digits in Turkey (9 percent) and have declined to 15 percent in Pakistan. Currently, just 30 percent of Germans have a positive view of the U.S. -- down from 42 percent as recently as two years ago -- and favorable ratings inch ever lower in Great Britain and Canada."
Perhaps if you look closely at the problem, the solution to your dilemma may appear. Your words are not forging a new reality. Lying about the war in Iraq, or torture, is not building the bridges of understanding you are so fond of talking about in your speeches. Instead, empty words only fritter away at your ability to influence. There is power in truth.
You might also use your acquired skills in diplomacy among your colleagues in the inner circle of the White House. Perhaps you could talk to them about the dangers of politicizing and militarizing fear. They are a group, as Goldsmith has pointed out, consumed with "fear bordering on obsession." When he informed the White House that one of its counterterrorism programs was illegal, Vice President Cheney's then counsel, David Addington, angrily lashed out, "If you rule that way, the blood of the hundred thousand people who died in the next attack will be on your hands." As Addington demonstrated, when legal artifice falls, bullying takes its place. Fear has become a license for quelling not only political criticism but also the rule of law.
As you know only too well, fear-mongering, though it has worked well politically at home, has backfired abroad, breeding hatred throughout Muslim and Arab lands. Public diplomacy should assuage fear, not fan its flames; enable understanding, not hostility. Perhaps, while you're talking to your colleagues, you might explain that the opinion of the world matters, and that while it might be "soft power," not "hard power" like a piece of military equipment, it directly impinges on global stability. You might tell them that persisting in a policy of torture has threatened our national security.
While you are rethinking how to calm fears and rebuild America's image as a global leader perhaps you ought to begin to think of yourself not as a tool of the Bush administration but as a citizen of the world, not as a propagandist, constantly trying to formulate a hollow ideological phrase or distraction, but as someone who can admit mistakes and correct them.
If you receive this letter as simply a partisan broadside and can't envision your transformation into a true diplomat at large, an envoy of healing, perhaps you should just resign. Nothing will be served by continuing on your current course. Nothing different will happen. You might as well return to Texas now. To date, your diplomacy has consisted of excuses for leaving the damage to the next president to remedy.
Soon you will be reminiscing about the Bush presidency. Will you be agitated and depressed like your former colleagues described in the recent Washington Post report? Will you persist in fantasies of denial? Or you will be, as Comey suggested you should be, "ashamed"?
If you can attend the screening of "Taxi to the Dark Side," please let me know. Otherwise, I can send you a DVD and you can share it with the president.
About the writer
Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton, writes a column for Salon and the Guardian of London. His new book is titled "How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime." He is a senior fellow at the New York University Center on Law and Security.
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