The Foreign Service Journal, May 2023

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2023 11 of the old saying: “Experience is what’s left over after you’ve for- gotten everything you’ve been taught.” Experience is what we acquire in the career Service. Properly applied in the right place and at the right time, it is the essential element of successful policy formulation and implementation. John Fer’s insightful analysis perfectly sums up the dilemma ( “Why Senior Leaders Cannot Reform the State Depart- ment” ). Until we figure out a way to empower a career Foreign and Civil Ser- vice, we risk blundering into more unwise wars and other misguided decisions. Assigning empowered career employ- ees to the right place at the right time will be our salvation. Charles O. Cecil Ambassador, retired Washington, D.C. 9/11 Attackers Were Not “Shia-Led” My sincerest apologies to The Foreign Service Journal for the unintentional error in my letter to the editor in the March 2023 FSJ , “Resigning in Protest, ” in which I referred to the 9/11 hijackers as “Shia- led.” Bin Laden and his al-Qaida followers were, of course, Sunnis. SaddamHussein, who considered Osama Bin Laden a rival for influence in the region, was the wine-drinking, superfi- cially religious, brutal, Baathist, Sunni dictator of Shia-majority Iraq. My only excuses for this error are my aging brain and the memories of that shameful period in U.S. history that flooded in as I read FSO (ret.) Steve Walker’s powerful article on dissent in the December 2022 Journal ( “When Is It Ethical to Resign in Protest?” ). My own decision, 17 years ago, to quietly resign in protest over what I consider to be the “lies” proffered by the George W. Bush administration, resulted in the hastily written letter I sent to the FSJ in January. Patricia McArdle Senior FSO, retired Oceanside, California Editor’s Note: The FSJ regrets not catch- ing this error; we have corrected it in the online versions. Eyes on Hyphenation Our FSJ is hardly the only offender, but I urge a human eye on hyphenation (a technique that has my full support). In the January-February FSJ , in the Talking Point item “Soccer Diplomacy” on page 13, “ethnonationalism” is hyphen- ated for a line break between the second “n” and the first “a.” I would consider making this a hyphenated word regardless of line breaks, but your version, surely inspired by software, implies a confusing and non- sensical pronunciation. I do enjoy my union rag, and please take this constructive criticism from some- one who spends too much time working and editing. (EERs, here we come!) And please, stay with the serif typeface. Derek S. Worman Management Officer U.S. Embassy Abuja Hailing the Open Forum’s Revival The December 2022 FSJ on Honoring Excellence and Dissent struck a spe- cial chord with me. The history of the State Department’s handling of dissent communications is long and sometimes checkered. But I want to point out a long-ago incident that very favorably impressed me at the time and has continued through the years to resonate positively. I began my Foreign Service career following the election of Jack Kennedy. My first assignment was to Lima in 1961, and I was excited to be a part of the new Alliance for Progress program and to share the heady feeling of representing a U.S. policy of support for democracy and economic development in Latin America. I felt the same way in 1967- 1969 in San José. However, by 1971-1973 in Bogotá and 1973-1975 in Medellín, I had become disenchanted with U.S.–Latin American policies under President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. I asked for a transfer out of the then– Bureau of Inter-American Affairs (ARA) to Europe. (I was assigned to Helsinki, which opened a whole new world to me and became the principal focus of most of the rest of my career.) But before leaving Medellín in 1975, I wrote an “airgram” highly critical of U.S. policies in Latin America, which I described in sharp terms as supporting right-wing military or military-supported governments and discouraging nascent reformist and liberal-left movements on the grounds of anti-communism and countering Soviet Union maneuvering there. I also contrasted what I saw as positive developments in the fields of education and health in Cuba compared to their limited availability in most of the rest of Latin America. Because I was principal officer of the consulate in Medellín, I was able to authorize my own messages to be sent directly to State. I advised both the ambassador and deputy chief of mission