Drip...drip...drip...

I expect you've already heard about this but it does bear repeating. According to the Los Angeles Times for June 13,

[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. ...

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.

The statement is remarkable both in that such statements are rare and in the explicit and clear denunciation of Shrub's foreign policy, one marked by "arrogance, by the refusal to listen to others, the scorn for multilateral organizations," which has "undermined" "America's leadership role in the world," in the words of William C. Harrop, one of the signers. Harrop was the first President Bush's ambassador to Israel, and earlier to four African countries, notes AP, which quote him as saying

"We agreed that we had just lost confidence in the ability of the Bush administration to advocate for American interests or to provide the kind of leadership that we think is essential."

While not endorsing John Kerry (in fact, only two of the signers have done so), the group admitted that the net effect was to express support for him, which of course lead one GOP strategist to dismiss the coming statement as simple partisan politics. (He also engaged in some cheap Psych 101 psychoanalysis, claiming the group just couldn't deal with the fact the Bush was pursuing a different policy. Every notice how often in the face of criticism they deal in personal attack and/or innuendo and how rarely they actually deal in logical argument?) The claim of partisanship, of course, came despite the fact that the signers include officials who were appointed to posts by both Reagan and Bush I, as well as by Carter and Clinton.

The bottom line is that the statement is not so much pro-Kerry as it is anti-Bush. Phyllis E. Oakley, assistant secretary of State for intelligence and research in the Clinton administration, summed it up this way:

"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."

Footnote one: That same goppy strategist also argued, the LA Times said, that

he did not think the group was sufficiently well-known to create significant political problems for the president.

Isn't it interesting that that's the first thing that sprang to mind? Not if the argument had any merit, but its potential effect on Bush's re-election. At least they're consistent.

Footnote two: Cliff May, a Bush administration ally, was quoted as saying

"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."

Now, Shrub had zippo foreign policy experience before being appointed president. But that's not true of the Shrubberies, many of them part of the Reagan gang who'd spent the intervening years plotting their return. So isn't May's remark actually an admission that the Bush crowd, despite their recent protestations about all they were doing about terrorism, actually had no flaming clue what they were doing?