Richard Haass puts an unbelievably positive spin on the State Department dissenters’ call to attack the Syrian government:
But what these 51 signatories have done is spoken truth to power[bold mine-DL]. And even if what they have to say is rejected now, it might be welcomed by the next occupant of the White House — especially if it were to be Hillary Clinton, who, as secretary of state, showed considerable willingness to use military force in pursuit of US foreign policy aims.
It’s fair to say that the diplomats that signed this memo are challenging administration policy, but it is hardly speaking “truth to power” when one is endorsing a course of action that has the backing of most hawks in Washington. It can’t be “speaking truth to power” when one is urging the government to initiate hostilities against another state. Foreign policy establishment figures have been publicly chiding Obama to “do more” in Syria for years, and now some State Department diplomats are doing the same thing. It would be more accurate to say that they are repeating the conventional wisdom that other powerful and influential people also accept. If their recommendations are likely to be accepted by the next president, that suggests that their dissent from current policy will probably be rewarded in the future.
There is also something distasteful in saying that advocating military action in Syria has something to do with “speaking truth” to anyone. Nothing could be easier or more predictable for someone in our government than calling for U.S. airstrikes against another state, and there is nothing particularly courageous in agitating for the U.S. to inflict death and destruction in a foreign country. Maybe the memo’s signatories genuinely believe that doing this would create conditions to bring the war to a close, but they’re mistaken and it seems clear that they haven’t thought things through or accounted for what could go wrong.