When a Diplomat Disagrees with Policy.

AuthorHeimann, Judith
PositionPersonal account

All diplomats have to face the challenge at some point of defending a policy that he or she thinks is wrong. On such occasions one is caught between a duty to present one's government's point of view--which is our assigned duty and the reason why foreigners want to hear us out--and the need not to burn our bridges with the host government by saying things we believe to be untrue, ill-timed, or inappropriate. Such a challenge was forced on me during the buildup to our launching the second Iraq War, a policy with which I personally disagreed.

I am cursed with a face that is easy to read, and thus telling an outright lie would not work for me, even if I were to try. The Iraq war was not the first time I had faced this issue. One earlier instance when I could not present with a straight face the arguments in my government's non-paper concerned our refusal to join the International Criminal Court, the tribunal that prosecutes war criminals. Our argument was that the United States would never commit such crimes and so any charge against us would have to be politically motivated. To deal with that case, I brought along the State Department non-paper and said that I hoped my interlocutor would read it carefully and get back to me with his views. He didn't, and I didn't press. (US views toward that court have since evolved into cooperation, if not membership.)

On another occasion, I asked--and received--permission to eliminate an item from a demarche on the grounds that it wouldn't help obtain what we wanted and risked hurting our overall relations with the host country and damaging my personal credibility in the process. At that point I was working in Brussels as a retiree in late 2003. News had just broken of maltreatment of prisoners at the US military's Abu Ghraib detention center in Baghdad when I was assigned to go to the Belgian Foreign Ministry with a demarche related to a forthcoming UN meeting that included a talking point about "prisoners of conscience." I received prompt agreement from my bosses at the embassy that that week was not the time to approach the Foreign Ministry with the word "prisoners" on my lips.

But even though I had many misgivings about the second Iraq war, as an American diplomat I could not avoid making my strongest efforts to encourage Belgium to support our logistical efforts to get our men and materiel out of Germany via the port of Antwerp to the Persian Gulf in the lead-up to that war. I knew that the war was...

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