He's Back!

Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska writes: "there will be no victory or defeat for the United States in Iraq. These terms do not reflect the reality of what is going to happen there. The future of Iraq was always going to be determined by the Iraqis - not the Americans. Iraq is not a prize to be won or lost."

The hardest thing for we Americans to cope with is uncertainty, the gray matter.

There likely never has been a realistic possibility of an American victory or defeat in Iraq because the realities of the history and current situation in the country do not compute on an American screen. Iraq is less a single nation than the U.S. was in 1860 when we had to face dividing or fighting a war. In what is still the bloodiest war in our history - of course we count the casualties on both sides as ours - we chose to stay a single nation. But travel to New Orleans, Dallas, Augusta, Maine, San Francisco, Dubuque, Key West, Albuquerque and then lets talk about one nation.

Now, multiply that diversity many times and add in tribal animosities that go back to biblical times (we slaughtered the tribes in this continent that might have had such differences) and you can imagine the chances of uniting Iraq with any amount of force.

How could we have gotten ourselves into this quagmire?

Easily. We still see ourselves not only as man's last best hope, the city on the hill, but with the coming to power of the neo-cons, came to believe we could use our unparalleled military might to impose our will and our ways on any nation we chose.

The despair among us now that we know how wrong we have been, is palpable. Because we have no idea what to do, or what we want to achieve.

I don't know any more than anyone else, but it seems simply inescapable that we are now down to a single, nasty choice: how to get out.

We read of the need to leave with honor. Seems to me our honor is so besmirched now, there is none to salvage in that devastated country.

I hope we can do a beter job of leaving than we did from Viet Nam, because we left behind there countless who had tied their fortunes to us who had to face the consequences with no help from us.

It may be that in a few decades we will go into restaurants in Michigan and Minnesota, and hardware stores in New Jersey, and find them run by Iraqis who fled with us as we finally abandoned our hopeless mission. And maybe an American president will go on a trade mission to Baghdad as Bush did to Ho Chi Minh City last week.

Dueling pieces on the op-ed page of today's NY Times address the issue of whether media coverage of events in Iraq have distorted the reality and unnecessarily turned American opinion against our continuing efforts there.

Nicolas Kistof points out that journalists who were vilified by administration officials as cowards who hid in Baghdad's Green Zone rather than venture further into the country and only repeated what other journalists reported, have turned out to be more accurate in their reporting than has the administration's claims to pending victory.

In another piece the writers look back to the Tet offensive in Viet Nam and the dragging of American soldiers' boides through the streets of Mogadishu in Somalia as examples of events the media represented as American defeats when they were in fact part of American military success. They claim the same thing has been happening in Iraq.

Now it is beyond question that we here at home are dependent on reporters to tell us what is going on. And there can be no doubt that one's point of view plays a part in how one sees things.

But there is a fundamental difference between our Iraq adventure and Viet Nam and Somalia. In Viet Nam the issue was whether we had the ability to keep North Viet Nam from taking over the south. Never mind that the country had been united before the end of WWII. It seems to be true that Tet was a military defeat for our foe, if counting the dead and the holding of territory are the measures.

But from the start, the guerillas of both north and south understood that they would never prevail militarily over the United States. They were prepared to take a lifetime, and suffer incredible casualties to undermine our confidence that we could have our way in their country by force.

Tet was a victory fo the Viet Cong and North Viet Nam because it finally sobered us, from the President to the ordinary voter, to see the lengths to which the enemy would go to oppose us. It was a political victory that led to a military victory because our willingness to prevail was not unlimited.

In Somalia, seeing American dead dragged through the streets did what it was intended to do, so upset and dishearten American voters that they turned against our effort there.

Even though the congress no longer seems able or willing to perform its constitutional duty to debate and declare war rather than have the president start wars at his discretion, the American people still can influence congress and the president.

In Iraq, once Saddam was unseated, we had no clear objective. And now that it has descended into the sectarian slaughter we were warned it likely would, the American voter does not wish to sacrifice more of our young people to a thankless and purposeless war.

Salon, the online magazine, has been featuring news of Alan Wallace, a former Buddhist monk who is as fascinated as I am by the issues of whether pure science can explain all phenomena, or whether there may be dimensions which cannot be fully investigated by the scientific method. Specifically, is the mind and consciousness purely the product of physical properties of the brain, or is that too reductionist a way to proceed on the question?

Wallace's book, "Contemplative Science" suggests the latter. Salon has an interview - titled "Buddha on the Brain" - with Wallace in which he describes why he believes the Buddhist tradition has much to teach the scientific and materialistic west. I find his thinking compelling, though I am not surprised at some of the responses that trash him as unwilling to acknowledge that hard science is a complete way to go on this matter.

Strikes me that the willingness to remain open to dimensions that western science cannot address is important, not only because it may provide a way to approach reality that is unavailable to hard science, but because it also is a stance towards the other, the foreigner, the stranger that could provide ways for seemingly incompatible cultures to respect each other.

I am struck by the tone of the responses that trash Wallace for being misty-eyed and mystical.

The Dalai Lama has said that if science demonstrates the reality of something that contradicts what he has come to believe, he will change his belief. I find few western scientists who will subscribe to the same promise.

Surely the so-called clash of civilizations that some have called the conflict between the west and the Islamic world is fueled in part by the sense Islam has of our contempt for their construct of reality. We scorn their business about martyrs being met by virgins after death, but we refuse to look deeper into what such a notion is built on.

Isn't it arrogant and even perhaps ignorant to assume our way of constructing reality holds the final word? Can we not imagine a day when the scientific method will be regarded as a creature of a particular cutlture and historical moment that has been superceded by new understandings and knowledge?

Labels: New mind

Five years ago I took my French repeater carriage clock (a repeater has a button on top which, when pushed, strikes the nearest hour) to Son Ling, a Cambodian watch repairman because it was doing weird things.

Son Ling came to this country after escaping his country by boat and has established a strong business in this beach community in California.

I had bought the clock from a parishioner - always a risky transaction - who was an amateur clock person - riskier still - for what seemed to me then to be a lot of money.

I love clocks even though I haven't the foggiest idea how they work. I have several that don't work. But this one I particularly like and was determined to have it fixed.

When Son (he apprenticed under Gerhard, a well established German here in La Jolla and when Gerhard retired, Son hung out his own shingle that says "Gerhard & Son") looked at my watch, he clucked and swore and shook his head and then told me he doubted it could be fixed because someone - my former parishioner - had screwed it up so badly. But because he took a liking to me (he told me he decided I was the real item when he saw my wrist watch was a modest Timex, not like the Rolex another clergyman/customer wore), he told me he would give it a try.

He has now had the clock for five years, been to Switzerland twice to upgrade his skills, made several parts for the clock - some of which broke after running for a few days - and sent pieces to various shops around the world.

When I went in to check a couple of weeks ago, Son told me the clock is running and he has it at his house. He asked me to let him keep it a couple more weeks to make sure it would keep going.

Tuesday morning I am going to stop in and see. I am mixed about whether I hope it is fixed or not. My periodic visits have become as much a part of my routine as my daily stop for my mocha.

And I figure if Son charges me by the hour I will have to sign over my long term health insurance policy to him.

Labels: French Repeater

This Thanksgiving my wife and I went to an island in the Pacific northwest to visit our son and daughter-in-law and her family who have a house that has been in their family for many years.

You reach this island by a small Boston Whaler from a larger island.

Many things will stay with me about our four days there.

The first is a family that actually meets all the things about family we all say we want and admire, but I'm not sure I have ever actually known such a family. Their devotion to each other is palpable. That they were willing to take in a couple of aliens - our son has been granted special membership by marriage - was quite something.

Another is the awesome beauty of that part of the country. It is quite like Maine without the hordes of people who have perhaps too easy access from the Boston area. There were a lot of people there, and it certainly is a popular tourist destination, but it has not - yet - have the sort of Disneyland feeling Maine can have between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

That it was cold and rainy - there was snow on the high places on some of the islands as we took the ferry back to the mainland - only made it seem more exciting and authentic.

And that we knew we were flying back to southern California also probably increased our appreciation.

Reading tee shirts and hats from all over the country and the world still seems like something out of a dream. I guess I was too old by the time jet travel became commonplace to incorporate it into my world as ho hum.

Like families that actually work like families every politician claims to represent.

Labels: Northwest

When I first read that someone was going to publish a book by OJ Simpson titled "If I Did It" I assumed it had to be a bad joke.

Some forensic people said that when someone who has commited a crime wants to confess without incriminating himself - something OJ needn't worry about thanks to Johnnie Cochran and Double Jeapordy - they often will do it in this form. A supposed hypothetical recreation of the crime.

One columnist thanked Judy Reagan, the publisher, for getting OJ to confess.

But most of the rest were incredulous.

So we have Ruper Murdoch to thank for putting the squelch to this.

When the news was first hot I had dinner at my neighbor's, who was from Sweden. He looked down the table and asked all of us - all American citizens except for him - how many thought OJ was guilty. All but one of us raised our hands.

"I am shocked," he said, in partial feined disbelief, maybe making fun of one of our institutions much of the world finds weird, "I thought you were innocent in this country until proven guilty."

We all shuffled our feet beneath the table and admitted that he had trumped us. (He was the captain of the Swedish Bridge Team).

So the question remains; having seen where it can lead, do we still think the presumption of innocence is a good idea? OJ is playing golf while his wife and her lover are dead.

It is a risk I am willing to live with. I would rather have a murderer go free than have an innocent person be jailed. I think it is the awkward hallmark of American justice and life.

And I do thank Murdock - an Englishman for whom I have never had much use - for sparing us having our noses rubbed in this quirk.

Today Charlie Rangel, the incoming Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee said he was going to introduce a bill that would require all males to sign up for a military draft on their 18th birthday. Before getting to the pros and cons, two queries:

I thought we had opened the armed forces to women. So why wouldn't a draft include women?

I believe 18 year old men are required now to sign up for the draft on their 18th birthday, even though there is no draft in actual force at present.

Now, as to the merits...

Rangel, who has been opposed to our Iraq adventure says the reason he wants to do this is to sober up American presidents about going off and starting wars. He believes that there would be a huge and much more militant movement against this war if all your Americans faced the possibility of having to fight in it.

And there is the increasing uneasiness about a professional miliatry in a nation that has long believed military service was an obligation of citizenship. I think national service of some sort is a good idea; I'm not sure we should try to make a soldier out of every young American.

Where I think Rangel is on target is believing we must do something drastic to change the political dynamic since Korea, in which an American president can virtually start and run a war without congress ever exercising its constitutional responsibility of declaring war.

One can appreciate that, in this world of push-button warfare, there must be some way for a president to respond quickly. But congress declared war on Japan and Germany on December 12, 1941, the day after Peral Harbor was attacked. The public confidence in congress is at an all time low, but that is in part because it has had its hands tied by the growing power of the presidency.

Start drafting kids from congressional districts all over the country and you'll see members of congress begin to act.

In the November 16 issue of Rolling Stone there is an article about Lowell Wood, as scientist who is suggesting that we need to do some scary manipulating of earth's atmosphere if we are to avoid the global catastrophe that now seems to some as inevitable.

He is known among some scientists as Dr. Evil, both because he is a protege of Edwrad Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb who served as the model for Dr. Strangelove, and because he has resurrected the controversy about whether human interference with nature has already proved so bad for the earth that any suggestion of doing more is insane.

His answer is that we are already embraked on the most problematic test our kind has ever perpetrated on the planet: civilization.

His idea is, he says, simple and realtively inexpensive. It is based onthe idea, well-prove by atmospheric scientists, that volcano eruptions alter the climate for months by loading the skies with tiny particles that act as mini-reflectors, shading out sunlight and cooling the earth. Why not, he suggests, apply the same principles to saving the Arctic?

I have an instinctive aversion to our screwing around with nature. But he's right about civilization, and I have wondered - or maybe more than wondered - if we may have gone beyond the point of being able to reverse the damage we have done. And it seems clear that the political solutions - persuading nations, especially our nation - to sacrifice economic growth so we can slow down global warming, is just not going to happen.

One person has compared it to doing chemotherapy for cancer. I have long said I would be loathe to do chemotherapy if I were diagnosed with cancer, but that's hypothetical. And the death of covilization is a of a tad more consequence than my death.

So, since several scientists have said they think it might be worth a try, perhaps it is.

Someone help me to understand what I am missing.

Today President Bush is in Viet Nam, the first American president to go there. He is there to talk trade with Asian nations. Think of it, when Bush was flying for the Texas National Guard so as to keep from having to fight in that war (I, too, was excused because of being first a graduate student, then ordained), John McCain, who is going to try to succeed him in the White House, was held prisoner for five years in the very city where Bush is today.

When a reporter asked him if he saw any similarities between the war and Iraq, he said the lesson he has learned from Viet Nam is not to quit.

We did quit, finally, after more than 50,000 Americans and untold Vietnamese died. And soon after, North Viet Nam overwhelmed our former allies in South Viet Nam and unified the country in what we had fought to prevent.

Today they are becoming one of our major Asian trading partners.

Did our president mean that, had we stayed the course there rather than quit, that the people with whom he is meeting and making trade deals there today would not be in power, and others, more to our liking, would be?

If so, isn't that an unimaginable insult to his hosts? And if not, then what did he mean?

If there is any useful lesson to be learned about our Iraq adventure from our Viet Nam experience - and I doubt they are analagous - it would seem to be that once the ideological excesses that led to war (the domino theory, China's dominance, the Red menace) have cooled and time has softened the wounds of war, we will once again return to the business of doing business.

I know the man gets rattled, but surely there was something in what he said I missed?

I just heard an interview with Charlie Rangel, the congressman from Harlem, successor to the legendary Adam Clayton Powell, and upcoming chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, arguably the most power postion in the congress.

I hadn't realized how much I have missed the fun of the showboats who used to be in these high places. Rangel toyed with the interviewer as if it were a game, which it clearly was to the congressman. Trying to trick him into a corner about whether he would try to raise taxes, the reporter asked him if there was any one of Bush's infamous tax cuts that he would want to preserve.

Charlie left a long pause and then said, "Now I thought you were going to be one of the few reporters who was going to act responsibly and not play games. So I'm just going back to your previous questions before you turned silly."

Who knows whether the self-rightous tone set by the solemn conservative Republicans - as if they were writing the regs for life in eternity - can be changed quickly?

But I take it as a good sign that the Republicans let Trent Lott back into their leadership club. You may remember that he lost his post as Senate Majority leader after praising the near-dead perennial senator from South Carolina, Strom Thurmond, a little too effusively on one of his many birthdays. For anyone to pretend that Lott doesn't have deep roots in the pre-civil rights south is silly. And Lott is fun. Outrageous and wrong on almost every important issue. But fun. And so long as the people of Mississippi continue to elect him, I say give him his voice.

And I'll just bet Charlie Rangel and Trent Lott do just fine together.

In large part I do think the huge win for Democrats in the election (huge in turnover, yet only a tiny difference in the percentage of votes won by Democrats) was largely a negative vote on our Iraq adventure. But if I am at all representative - and I suspect I am not - even those who feel most strongly about the war and our need to change course, have no clear picture of what that new course ought to look like. I am among those who loudly opposed our invasion as it was shaping up. But then I am just a few strokes short of being a pacifist. I was opposed to the first Gulf War, and yet I can't think what would have been a more creative response to Saddam's invasion of Kuwait.

Maybe just letting him hang himself with the whole rest of the Arab world?

But now that we have created a whole new chaos in that country and region - one that bears our unique fingerprints - what moral obligation do we have to what is going to come in their future?

Maybe first we need to stem our hubris in thinking we have the power and the smarts to decide and then make happen the future of another nation. Whatever we do is going to be as full of unintended consequences as this misadventure has already been. I confess that it is the daily deaths of our young men that chiefly motivates my sense of urgency about disengaging. What must it be like for Iraq which has now lost a bigger proportion of their people than we lost in our Civil War, the highest losses we have suffered in any war?

We walked away from Viet Nam because there was no other choice. The immediate result was the realization of our worst fears; the North Vietnamese walked into Saigon and took over the country. But the embarrasing part was that the rationale behind our determination to stay the course - that if S. Viet Nam fell, it would signal the rest of the world, our allies and our foes alike, that we were weak, and the dominoes would fall all over the world.

Well, we know the outcome. As I write this our chauvinistic president is in Viet Nam working on a trade agreement. (Albeit without the support of his own supproters in congress.)

Iraq is not Viet Nam. In fact the problems are quite the reverse. Just as we lent to the split in Viet Nam after WWII, the west tried to forge disparate tribal groups into a single nation in Iraq. So what seems likely is that when we finally give up trying to impose our will there, the different groups will at least split up, if not wage war against each other. And the surrounding countries - also fearful that their hostile minorities will create chaos - will struggle to fill the power vacuum we leave.

Hard as it is, we now know we cannot rule the world, no matter how extraordinary our military might. (And we have been humbled even in that regard). We are going to have to accept Iran, Syria, not to mention N. Korea, as legitimate players in the world with legitimate interests that will require us to pare our own interests.

And we will have to make of China a major ally.

The world it is a changing.

I have been locked out of this blog - likely by my own tech ineptness - since a number of life-changing events. Did I mention that I smashed my red Ford pickup against an oak tree on a back road in Vermont?

Thanks to the fast and good work of a young orthopaedic surgeon at Brattleboro Memorial Hospital - she actually passed the acident on the way to the hospital - i didn't lose my right hand as it looked as if I might at first. It's still stiff and sore more tha 4 months later, but it's working. I can tie my shoes, swim in the ocean, ride a road bike and zip my own fly.

And now the country has undergone its own major crushing of the status quo. Or is it that the country urns for something that feels at least remotely like that we all remember as the status quo? When presidents consulted congress and had a sense of proportion when making policy about the rest of the world.

I look forward to conversations through this medium and engaging you.