On March 19, 2003, I resigned from the U.S. Department of State. I was the Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia, and the third U.S. government employee to resign in opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq. I resigned on the day the Bush administration began the ten-year U.S.
The names of the authors of this war on the world—the “War on Terror”—still live in infamy: Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and, of course, Vice President Dick Cheney.
Bush had already lied about the reason to send U.S. military into Afghanistan. Instead of mounting an international police dragnet for the leaders of al-Qaeda who planned and executed the events of 9/11, the Bush administration wanted to have a platform next to Iran from which to conduct a war on Iran.
But the small, underfunded, poorly trained Taliban kept the U.S. military and the highly trained and poorly motivated Afghan Army on the run for the 20 years that the U.S. was in Afghanistan.
I was a part of the team that reopened the U.S. embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, in December 2001. Our small group of diplomats quickly realized that going after al-Qaida was not the main objective of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan. The focus of U.S. policies and funding in 2002 was elsewhere…and it turned out to be in overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
3·17 days ago