The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2003

valuable learning resource will have been lost. The half-million dollars “saved” by shutting the institute down will have no meaning in a Pentagon flush with funds. The wiser choice would be for the Army to reverse its untimely decision, keep the PKI right where it is, strengthen its staff, and rekindle its contributory role in meet- ing the challenges we face in Iraq, Afghanistan, and who knows where else in coming years. This is no time to downgrade the study of peace operations. Robert W. “Bill” Farrand FSO, retired Supervisor of Brcko (1997-2000) McLean, Virginia More on FAS I commend the Journal for the May coverage of the fiftieth anniver- sary of the Foreign Agricultural Service. I was particularly interested in the article by Allan Mustard titled “An Unauthorized History of FAS.” My father, Horace Bolster, was an FAS pioneer. While the author is probably right that the greatly expanded number of agricultural attachés sent abroad after World War II mainly went to Europe and Latin America, my father was posted to Tehran in 1946 as the first U.S. agri- cultural attaché to Iran, and I’m sure there were other agricultural attachés assigned to the Middle East. Mustard’s comments about strained relations between State and Agriculture in those early days ring true. Dad was given a small office in the economic section and had to wait in line for secretarial services, but eventually he appealed to USDA’s Office of Foreign Agri- cultural Relations and was given the funds to hire a skilled Iranian assis- tant and his own secretary. In the Iranian government, agri- cultural information such as crop statistics barely existed, and the data were not kept in a systematic fash- ion. So my father developed his own sources, such as provincial officials and professors at agricultural col- leges. He also traveled a great deal, consulting with officials around the country and visiting fields, which he assessed using skills he had learned as a farmer, an agronomist with an M.S. degree, and an extension agent in Montana. After he’d spent a cou- ple of years there, Iranian officials sometimes came to him for such data when they needed to submit them to the U.N. After returning to Washington, he worked at USDA and was even- tually chief of the Middle Eastern and Eastern European Division of FAS. When the “Point Four” pro- gram came along, he was put in charge of selecting agricultural tech- nicians to go to the Middle East, and in a two-year period recruited 71 experts for duty in that area. In 1954 he was executive secretary of an agricultural trade mission, and later he was European area officer for FAS. He served as manager of an American pavilion at a Fine Food Fair in Munich in 1958 and pushed exports of American seeds as USDA’s seed marketing specialist before retiring in 1963. The furor over using Foreign Service generalists versus sending out specialists is no longer as strong as it was 50 years ago, and FSOs have become accustomed to work- ing with a variety of representatives of Washington agencies at overseas posts. Agricultural attachés such as my father proved that specialists could be recruited to serve ably as diplomats as well. Archie M. Bolster Arlington, Va. Bobbitt vs. Carter After reading the FSJ review of Philip Bobbitt’s The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History in the State Department Library today, I came across Jimmy Carter’s The Nobel Peace Prize Lecture (Simon & Schuster, 2002) in the New Books section. Juxtaposition of the two different concepts told me a lot about the relative values of strategic- socio-economic-political theory and down-to-earth love for one’s fellow inhabitants of Planet Earth. The FSJ review praises Bobbitt’s sweeping thesis: that “the essential ideas that govern statecraft must change. The change will be as pro- found as any that the State has thus far undergone. … Bobbitt’s intel- lectual ambition is truly breathtak- ing.” In one section Bobbitt dis- cusses three possible scenarios for reorganizing international relations to cope with “various military attacks ... and assorted technologi- cal, economic and environmental developments during the next half- century.” (Breathtaking indeed!) The review tells us that Bobbitt freely admits that none of the sce- narios will eliminate war, and all have advantages and disadvantages. (... and humble!) I think I will have to pass on this book because my modest grasp of military-political- economic theory will impede my ability to understand and appreci- ate it. Now to Jimmy Carter’s Nobel address: “Great American power and responsibility are not unprece- dented and have been used with restraint and great benefit in the past. We have not assumed that super strength guarantees super wisdom, and we have consistently reached out to the international community to ensure that our own power and influence are tempered 8 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 3 L E T T E R S