One of Ours

...The women and men of our diplomatic corps and intelligence community are genuine trustees. With intellect and sensibility, character and courage, you represent America to the world. Equally important, you show the world to America. You hold in trust our role and reputation among nations, and ultimately our fate. Yours is the gravest, noblest responsibility. Never has the conscience you personify been more important...

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You know that showcase resignations at the top -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or flag officers fingered for Abu Ghraib -- change nothing, are only part of the charade. It is the same with Secretary of State Colin Powell, who may have been your lone relative champion in this perverse company, but who remains the political general he always was, never honoring your loss by giving up his office when he might have stemmed the descent.

No, it is you whose voices are so important now. You alone stand above ambition and partisanship. This administration no longer deserves your allegiance or participation. America deserves the leadership and example, the decisive revelation, of your resignations.

Your resignations alone would speak to America the truth that beyond any politics, this Bush regime is intolerable -- and to an increasingly cynical world the truth that there are still Americans who uphold with their lives and honor the highest principles of our foreign policy.

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As you consider your choice now, beware the old rationalizations for staying -- the arguments for preserving influence or that your resignation will not matter. Your effectiveness will be no more, your subservience no less, under the iron grip of the cabal, especially as the policy disaster and public siege mount. And your act now, no matter your ranks or numbers, will embolden others, hearten those who remain and proclaim your truths to the country and world.

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...Three ranking Foreign Service officers -- Mary Wright, John Brady Kiesling and John Brown -- resigned in protest of the Iraq war last spring. Like them, you should join the great debate that America must now have.

Unless and until you do, however, please be under no illusion: Every cable you write to or from the field, every letter you compose for Congress or the public, every memo you draft or clear, every budget you number, every meeting you attend, every testimony you give extends your share of the common disaster.

The America that you sought to represent in choosing your career, the America that once led the community of nations not by brazen power but by the strength of its universal principles, has never needed you more. Those of us who know you best, who have shared your work and world, know you will not let us down...