Barbara Ferguson, Arab News

WASHINGTON, 17 June 2004 — Former US diplomatic and military officials, including many who say they voted for President Bush, released a joint statement yesterday condemning the Bush administration’s foreign policy, which they say has harmed national security. Many of the 26 signatories were appointed by Republican administrations and include former ambassadors and retired career military leaders, including 4-star generals.

The statement appeared yesterday as a letter in the French daily Le Monde.

Phyllis Oakley, deputy State Department spokeswoman during former President Ronald Reagan’s second term and an assistant secretary of state under former President Bill Clinton, said: “What has caused us to speak out in what could be seen as a partisan or political way is simply our deep, deep concern about the future security of the United States.”

Oakley said the group is representative of very senior, former government officials who “have spent their lives working to erect the stature and posture of the US as a leader in the world...and we simply see that edifice crumbling.”

Releasing the statement was not an easy decision, she told journalists: “We’re all career (public) servants who have never taken a political stand.”

Military commanders who signed the document include retired Marine Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, commander in chief of US Central Command over-seeing the Middle East in 1991 and retired Admiral William Crowe Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff 1985-89. Admiral Stansfield Turner, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is also part of the group.

Called “Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change”, (www.diplomatsfor change.com), they insist Bush’s policies have undone the diplomatic results they and their colleagues worked hard to achieve during their careers.

The group cites foreign policies by the Bush administration which they say have isolated the US from the international community, harmed national security and tarnished the image of the US.

They say the US-led war in Iraq, which they call unilateral, has put the United States at odds with many of its closest allies.

While they insist they are not specifically supporting Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. John Kerry, they say their members simply want to alert voters to the damage Bush’s policies have done to America’s long-standing alliances and hard-won prestige. “Never in the two and a quarter centuries of our history has the United States been so isolated among the nations, so broadly feared and distrusted,” the statement says, and accuses Bush of adopting “an overbearing approach to America’s role in the world” that has weakened US security and “led the United States into an ill-planned and costly war from which exit is uncertain.”

Chas Freeman, ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the first President Bush, accused the current president of practicing a “diplomacy-free foreign policy”.