The Foreign Service Journal, March 2004

prefer — I recognized that I had something better to fight for than a career. My finest compliment came from a Greek Foreign Ministry official. He gave a copy of my resignation letter to his 12-year-old son, because he want- ed the boy to recognize the dignity of a profession that sometimes demand- ed such gestures. I was surprised — European diplomats seldom drop the mask of cynical careerism. Support from American colleagues was less surprising. We still have faith in our calling. I wish that I had had the bureau- cratic skills to do something meaning- ful within the system. That would have been heroic, and the Foreign Service needs its heroes. Ours are now engaged feverishly across Iraq. They will do some good, but the stakes for us and for the warring Iraqi factions are too asymmetrical. My friends will return, I hope, prepared to tell the truth about the limits of U.S. power. There is a Washington bureaucrat- ic universe in which American omnipotence is not just a dangerous fantasy. There, the solution to every problem is a budget line, a wiring dia- 16 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 0 4 S P E A K I N G O U T Efforts to predict the costs of the war were stifled brutally enough to show the administration knew an accurate accounting would render it too costly.