The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2008

department had an effective secur- ity program. It labeled McCarthy’s charges a “hoax and fraud.” McCarthy charged President Tru- man and the Democrats with “20 years of treason.” He accused Secre- tary of State George Marshall of join- ing “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previ- ous venture in the history of man.” He called Secretary Dean Acheson “the Red Dean.” And those were powerful men. Thousands of reputations and the financial security of many less pro- minent families were ruined by the unsubstantiated charges, bullying and, yes, blacklisting employed by Mc- Carthy and his acolytes. Yet McMa- han downplays these as merely “dis- agreeable tactics.” Truman rightly referred to Mc- Carthy as “the best asset the Kremlin has.” TheMcCarthyites blackened our name around the globe, giving aid and comfort to the enemy — while finding precious few real internal enemies. Dana Deree FSO Consulate General Tijuana Editor’s Note: For more on the China hands and Joe McCarthy, see this month’s FS Heritage column, “‘Grace Under Pressure’: John Paton Davies” (p. 46). Defending Us Richard Hoover’s letter in the May FSJ , “Defending the U.S.,” asserts that “no U.S. diplomat worth his salt would permit an insult to his country to go unanswered.” Who could disagree with that? Well, in my last overseas assign- ment, Pakistan, and many other posts, if I had spent every waking hour of every day answering outrageous insults and uninformed diatribes, I would never have done anything else. Further, some of our severest crit- ics were those who were also admirers of the U.S., but believed that U.S. for- eign policy had gone wrong. Re- sponding to those people in kind would have cut off any deeper com- munication. Some of them were open to a genuine dialogue but never had one with us, because the embassy con- sidered them enemies. Of course, unjustified attacks are infuriating and often must be ans- wered quickly and forcefully. But we have to leave it to the people on the scene to make the call on whether to respond, and in what manner. I tried, not always successfully, to correct factual errors immediately and en- gage the critic in a deeper dialogue, through personal contact and USIS programs. But some critics are be- yond the pale — real American-haters — and in those cases we have to con- test the message and ignore the mes- senger. Bill Lenderking FSO, retired Washington, D.C. Cooperation for Africa Congratulations on your May sur- vey of the U.S. role in Africa over the past 50 years, especially the important articles by Hank Cohen and Bob Gribbin surveying the goals of U.S. policy during and after the Cold War and describing the envisaged role of AFRICOM. Overall, the United States has indeed sought to help African post- colonial economic development, en- courage democratic change and re- spond to humanitarian catastrophes. But Cohen’s acknowledgment of our failure to prevent genocide in Rwanda and inability to do more to prevent genocide in Darfur, in part because of U.S. engagement in Iraq and Afghani- stan, is an important reminder that Africa still remains a low priority. I want to highlight two points not discussed sufficiently in these articles. First is the importance of working closely with our European partners, especially the United Kingdom and France, as well as the European Union, to provide coordinated eco- nomic, political and security support to the African Union and regional eco- nomic communities (ECOWAS, SADC, etc.). We are long past the time of Franco-American or British- American rivalry in Africa, so U.S. programs such as ACRI, ACOTA and AFRICOM need to be closely inte- grated with parallel European efforts if they are to be useful. The absorp- tive capacity of African continental and regional organizations, and African states, is severely strained by our insistence that they deal bilateral- ly with separate U.S. programs and initiatives. Second, a main goal of the African Union and African political and mili- tary leaders is the establishment of an African Standby Force by 2010. This may take somewhat longer, but plan- ning is well advanced. The ASF will consist of five region- al brigades under the overall com- mand of the African Union, and will be expected to deploy, perhaps in coordination with U.N. peacekeeping forces, to restore order and end the violence in the event of a regional or internal conflict. AFRICOM should be structured to support this African-led effort, not only to deal bilaterally with favored countries. Such support would help greatly to reduce the suspicion and reservations prevalent today on the continent about our objectives. Most importantly, it would con- tribute substantially to our stated goal of giving African political and military leaders the capacity to manage and resolve their conflicts more effectively than has been the case to date. John L. Hirsch Ambassador, retired International Peace Institute New York, N.Y. J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 7 L E T T E R S u