Here’s a modest proposal. Let’s start a Coalition of the Rational to take back our country from this radical rightwing Administration. After all, these are times when true conservatives are as concerned as liberal Democrats about the damage being done to our democracy and international credibility as a result of manipulated intelligence, preemptive war policy and arrogant unilateralism.
The coalition could bring together a broad, transpartisan group of concerned citizens–from Goldwater-style conservatives, Rockefeller Republicans and former State Department and intelligence officials, to progressive Democrats and religious, labor and student leaders–to mobilize Americans in informed opposition to the Bush Administration‘s undermining of US security in our name.
Here are some nominations for charter members of the Coalition of the Rational:
*The dozens of active intelligence officials who are coming forward–mostly through leaks in the press–to describe how Administration officials pressured them to exaggerate the Iraqi threat and deceive the country.
*Veteran Intelligence Professionals For Sanity, a national organization of retired CIA, military and NSA intelligence officers who called into question the Administration’s rationale for war and is now up in arms over the Bush Team’s manipulation of intelligence. Check out the group’s statement released last May, which noted in part: “In intelligence, there is one unpardonable sin–cooking intelligence to the recipe of high policy. There is ample indication that this has been done with respect to Iraq….[N]ever before has such warping been used in such a systematic way to mislead our elected representatives into voting to authorize launching a war.” The group’s recent statement powerfully indicts the vice president and “strongly recommends Dick Cheney’s immediate resignation” for his role in deceiving the public, the media and other policy-makers regarding the true threat Iraq actually posed to the United States.
*Rand Beers, a National Security Council adviser to five administrations, including those of Reagan and Bush 41, who recently resigned as Bush’s special counterrorism assistant. As he stepped down, Beers blasted the Administration’s handling of the war on terror as “making us less secure, not more secure.”
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*Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Adviser to President Carter, who cautions that “our single-minded and…demagogic fixation with Iraq is undermining the credibility as well as the legitimacy of US leadership.”
*Joseph Wilson, the highest-ranking American diplomat in Baghdad immediately before the Gulf War, who argues that the “underlying objective of this war [Iraq] is the imposition of a Pax Americana on the region,” and that “the projection of influence and power through the use of force will breed resistance in the Arab world that will sorely test our political will and stamina.”
*James W. Ziglar, Sr., Bush’s former Immigration commissioner and a self-described “conservative in the Barry Goldwater mold,” recently warned that the Administration’s increasingly aggressive antiterrorism tactics may be violating citizens’ basic constitutional rights.
*Greg Thielmann, the former head of the State Department’s Office of Strategic Proliferation and Military Affairs, and a career foreign service officer who served under three Republican and two Democratic Presidents, recently went public with his anger and disgust at the Bush Administration for completely misrepresenting Iraq as an imminent threat to US security by knowingly distorting intelligence information. “This Administration has had a faith-based intelligence attitude,” Thielmann has said. “We know the answers–give us the intelligence to support those answers.”
*John Brady Kiesling, a career diplomat for nearly twenty years, who resigned last February in protest against the Administration’s drive to war. In his resignation letter, he warned that “Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America’s most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson.” When asked if his views were widely shared among his diplomatic colleagues, Kiesling replied: “Not one of my colleagues is comfortable with our policy.” Several other career foreign service officials resigned in the weeks after Kiesling stepped down.
*George Kennan, the chief architect of the containment and deterrence policies that shaped American foreign policy for more than fifty years, attacked the Administration’s national security doctrine as “a great mistake in principle.” He also denounced dishonest efforts by the White House to link Al-Qaeda terrorists with Saddam Hussein.
*Ray McGovern, who worked for the CIA at high levels for twenty-seven years, and regularly briefed Bush’s father in the 1980s, and who recently quit his post in protest at the Bush Administration’s misuse of intelligence briefings.
*Arthur Schlesinger, presidential special assistant and author, who argues that “the Bush Doctrine converts us into the world’s judge, jury and executioner–a self-appointed status that, however benign our motives, is bound to corrupt our leadership,” and who warns that because of Bush, the “global wave of sympathy that engulfed the United States after 9/11 has given way to a global wave of hatred of American arrogance and militarism.”
*Ted Sorensen, former chief speechwriter to a muscular Democrat–President John Kennedy–who laments that the “long uneasiness with bloodletting and battle that followed Vietnam has been replaced by a new infatuation for war, a preference for invasion over persuasion.”
And there are scores of others inside and outside the Administration; in Establishment circles; in military and business organizations, who are alarmed by the White House’s radical extremism. At off-the-record meetings at the Council on Foreign Relations, for example, prominent figures regularly express shock (and no awe) at how this Administration is undermining America’s security–and reputation in the world.
The Coalition of the Rational could launch nationwide public hearings and town hall meetings to expose the dangers posed by the Bush Administration. Members could propose sane, alternative foreign and security policies. Its key members could speak out on TV, radio and on op-ed pages, and its institutions could join forces with internet-based networks such as MoveOn and TrueMajority to create a broad-based coalition sufficiently powerful to take back this country from the extremists now running our government.
