The Foreign Service Journal, September 2003

a career officer, George F. Kennan, incidentally. Democracy has spread throughout Latin America too, thanks in no small measure to Foreign Service personnel who kept the beacon burning in our missions in Pinochet’s Chile, the Sandinistas’ Nicaragua, El Salvador amid the death squads, and Argentina under the generals. In time, as a peace settlement is worked out between the Palestinians and the Israelis and the democrati- cization of Iraq and the rest of the Middle East proceeds, diplomacy’s star will surely rise again. When peace is the desired outcome, it always has. As to Galbraith’s assertion that the Foreign Service lacks “guts,” it is worth recalling that during the time he was in Paris, the U.S. embassy in Beirut was truck- bombed twice and U.S. diplomats were assassinated at several other posts by other means. So many Foreign Service employees died in the line of duty that AFSA had to add extra panels for the first time to its memorial plaque in the State Department lobby. Since then, all too many other Foreign Service members have given their lives for their country, as when Osama bin Laden’s followers blew up our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and attacked our personnel in Pakistan last year. Far from showing a lack of guts, State has rebuilt and reopened those posts. How could it be, Mr. Gingrich, that these men and women are engaged in a “deliberate and sys- tematic effort to undermine the president’s policies” when they are so willing to give their lives to pro- mote and defend those policies? Perhaps, like their fellow profes- sionals in the military, they should be given equal recognition for their patriotism. ■ S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 3 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 67