Well, we're back from our trip east - five days
in Virginia celebrating the holiday, then down to West Palm Beach for a few days
about New Year's. Now home, at that most melancholy time of the year - I think
people tend to feel a bit hung-over right now. I know I do: The holidays are
over, and the work has not yet begun.
I imagine that somewhere in some
alternate reality plane, the MasterCard elves have taken the baton over from
Santa's crewe, and are totting up the season's excesses with grim satisfaction.
Soon their ledgers will be complete, and the nasty-gram will be winging its way
to our mailbox. We'll work 'til April to pay taxes, and then after that we can
work to pay for Christmas.
And it's
raining in San Diego.
Which it
shouldn't, of course, because we're paying for perfect weather over here. To
match our perfect lives. And who do you blame when the the weather doesn't meet
your expectations? Who can you sue?
This wasn't a holiday season like any I've ever
experienced. Personally I'm at something of a cross-roads, about which I may or
may not later post further. Nationally we had already grimly set our faces and
steeled ourselves to the task ahead in Iraq. The approaching elections will
create, for the first time ever in that most ancient of lands, a legitimate,
democratic government. And that is something that our adversaries cannot allow
to happen.
There are two pressures
being applied to the history vector in Iraq. From our vantage point we cannot
truly see exactly how it's all going to turn out, come 30 January. And so we
cannot know how it will all point back to this moment 10 or 20 years hence. The
anti-coalition forces (ACF), a noxious brew of former regime cut-throats and
Salafist jihadis, having despaired for the moment of inflicting sufficient pain
on the multinational forces (MNF) to cause them to leave, have turned their
attention to the local populace. They have been trying through their
intimidation campaign to replicate a shadow version of Saddam's reign of statist
terror intermixed with the Taliban's theo-political absolutism to force upon the
still-shocked masses a sheep-like passivity. It is a forced marriage, a marriage
of necessity, rather than convenience - an unholy union that would not last a
moment beyond their initial, tactical victory against the
MNF.
We on the other hand, have been
doing our best to kill the bad guys where we find them, playing whack-a-mole as
they raise their heads above their parapets and trying to roll-up the terror
cells preemptively. All this in order to make elections possible. So that
eventually we can go home. Because we know that until we can install a
legitimate government, selected by the people themselves, we will always have
difficulty nationalizing the issue of Iraqi freedom, turning it back over to the
Iraqi people themselves. And until the Iraqi people themselves are as intently
invested in their own future as we are, we will never be able to leave that
place, and bring our soldiers home.
So this is essentially must-win
territory for both the ACF and the MNF, which for me anyway, cast rather a pall
across the holiday celebrations. We looked past the holiday season cringing a
bit, waiting for the next blow. Because we knew it will get worse before it gets
better.
And that was all before Aceh.
Before we all learned what the word
"tsunami" meant. Before we greeted each passing day's headlines with
ever-increasing horror, the front pages screaming out yet another
incomprehensible multiple of lives lost, lives shattered. And for a moment or
two, the consequences of our merely human disputations paled in comparison - the
mere brawling of willful children in the playground against the appalling
devastation our island home can inflict in a instant of insensate muscle
stretching.
Nature coughed, and
140,000 of our fellow travelers were snatched away. All of this intruded upon
our perfect lives, and of course, there was no one to sue, no one to blame - for
most of us, anyway. A hundred years ago, this might have happened and we would
have been only dimly aware. But we are all neighbors now, time and technology
have cramped the vast earth into one city block. These are people just around
the corner that we haven't met.
Some
of the more perpetually aggrieved and poisoned grotesqueries in the chattering
classes, still in denial perhaps from their own catastrophe, found it somehow
appropriate to lay the blame at the President's feet. Oh, maybe not for the
earthquake itself, but for all that followed after. Because it became absolutely
clear that the Administration didn't
have a plan for a 9.0 earthquake in the
Andaman Sea, and all other
sequelae
which attach thereto. And for my own part, I'm left to wonder at the wiring of
folks who can face this sort of horror on the world stage and immediately
fashion it to a weapon with which to lash out at their domestic political
enemies. Can there be anything more
contemptible?
David Brooks had a
column up on New Year's Day, entitled "A Time to Mourn." Within were some truly thought
provoking excerpts:
Most
cultures have deep at their core a flood myth in which the great bulk of
humanity is destroyed and a few are left to repopulate and repurify the human
race. In most of these stories, God is meting out retribution, punishing those
who have strayed from his path. The flood starts a new history, which will be on
a higher plane than the
old.
Nowadays we find these
kinds of explanations repugnant. It is repugnant to imply that the people who
suffer from natural disasters somehow deserve their fate. And yet for all the
callousness of those tales, they did at least put human beings at the center of
history.
In those old flood
myths, things happened because human beings behaved in certain ways; their
morality was tied to their destiny. Stories of a wrathful God implied that at
least there was an active God, who had some plan for the human race. At the end
of the tribulations there would be
salvation.
But we in the West no
longer truly believe in an active God, or if we do, we tend not to believe in
Him as willing or capable of wreaking carnage on such a... a biblical scale. Our
preachers do not, as some others do, call for God to shake the ground beneath
the unbeliever's feet. But this is not a time for irony, as Brooks points out -
it is a time to mourn.
And to
act.
And we have been acting. Despite
accusation of "stinginess " from all the usual quarters, $350
million in government aid, as well as a tremendous outpouring of private donations are en route. (By the way, in
that [mercifully registration-free] LA
Times
link are a number of ways that you can add your voice to the chorus of
assistance.) And more than $12 million have been donated through Amazon.com at this
posting.
And of course the Navy is on
scene, in the form of the Abraham
Lincoln Strike Group. A carrier strike group
is not a particularly apt tool in this sort of campaign, but her helicopters
have managed to get aid to otherwise impassable areas. Soon to arrive is the
Bonne
HommeRichard
Strike Group, an expeditionary group with a great deal more capability in heavy
lift, not to mention heavy manpower, as well as the capability to operate ashore
in austere environments for extended
periods.
Her Marines had been
intended to join the fight in Iraq - to help establish security in the run-up to
elections. Which presents a rather interesting
conundrum.
Aceh, where the waters
wreaked their worst destruction, was home to the Free Aceh Movement, a
militantly fundamentalist Islamic rebellion in the much more moderately Islamic
archipelagic country. What if those Marines, rather than authoring destruction
on ACF in Iraq, instead brought kindness, life and mercy to
Indonesia?
It is an essential element
of human nature to seek out a way to turn misfortune into opportunity - perhaps
it was a twist on this characteristic which animated the contemptible set among
the political class to take a field trip in the bile vomitarium during the
immediate aftermath of the disaster.
If God still acted in the world the
way we thought Him to act in Old Testament times, could He have possibly offered
us a greater opportunity to reach out to our fellow human beings, in the spirit
of love for our neighbors? And even believing that this is no work of God's, but
rather the brutish results of a shudder from uncaring Nature, would we not be
better served so as to act as if we had been given this opportunity by divine
providence? As though this was a test a stern but loving God had imposed upon
his willful children? Is it so contemptible on the world stage to seek a way to
show that the War on Terror is not a war against Islam? To win hearts and minds,
if possible? To do the right thing, and also hope to profit from it?
Especially if that profit is
tendered in the currency of peace and goodwill to all mankind. Especially if the
weapon so fashioned was wielded to stop the
killing.
One could hope. One could
pray.
--------------
Update:
Via Power Line (of all places!) a link to the
Navy's official photo pages showing the relief effort
in
Indonesia.
--------------
Update
2: Irony Overload Warning - when the
Bonne Homme
Richard Strike Group arrives to conduct
humanitarian assistance for the Islamic residents of Aceh, it will arrive
without the assistance of a
sensitive soul , one Pablo Paredes. FC2 Paredes deserted publicly , and amongst much fanfare a
month ago. His ostensible reason for desertion? He couldn't be a part of the war
in Iraq... It was - too horrible for him.
Posted @
09:53 AM
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Posted in
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Sendit
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Credo
"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." - John Paul Jones
"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Ceasar and Cleopatra"
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friederich Nietzsche
