June 13, 2004

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.

Compelling evidence to be offered in the upcoming national referendum on the CREDIBILITY, COMPETENCE and CHARACTER of the increasingly unhinged and incredibly shrinking _resident. A powerful, significant, UNPRECEDENTED move from the military and foreign policy establishment. Will you hear about it on the Sunday morning propapunditgandist shows? At least, the LA Times understands its signifigance (or unafraid to acknowledged it with suitable gravitas)...

LA Times: 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...
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.

Restore the Timeline, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

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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 … 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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Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times


Posted by richard at June 13, 2004 12:17 PM