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Sunday, November 11, 2007

Austin Bay on Why We Fight

This is great, but here's a sample:

Then I told him there was no choice. There are those bearing the burden — for example, him– and those who don’t. Unfortunately, with a few stellar, brave exceptions, only the US military has shown up for this war, and you’re one of those who’ve shown up and shown up again. But show me the alternative? You show me the alternative, given our circumstances, and we will do it. But consider our circumstances, our planetary circumstances. Afghanistan is a desperate, dusty hellhole with altitude, poverty, and little else. An Afghani expatriate –an LA millionaire in the engineering business who went back as a translator in 2005– told me that his “old country had been poor but beautiful until 1973. ‘73– that’s when the civil war started. Thirty years of war — the worst courtesy of the Russians and the Taliban– had savaged the place. You know, ash and dust. Now, once upon a time we could ignore those suffering in the planet’s hard corners. Oh, we could send them a few bucks and the Lefties could bitch about colonialism and capitalism but the hard corners were isolated. A threat to security? Only nuns and missionaries and you are your brothers keeper types thought so. Well guess what — the nuns were right. 9/11 changed that deceptive calculus. Distance? Colonel, there isn’t any distance. We learned that the destruction of New York and Washington started in the backwaters, of Afghanistan, of Somalia. Technology has done it. We can’t escape one another, for good and for bad. Jet transports, like the ones out on the runway at Bagram, put you on the other side of the globe in 14 hours. The internet doesn’t require description. East Asia shares diseases with Africa within days, if not hours. And special weapons? Nukes and nerve gas make every tribal war an international crisis. Goodbye Tokyo, Moscow, or Miami– because a sophisticated tribesman at war with his eternally despised neighbor decides that demolishing the global economy would make everyone pay attention to his neglected, forgotten grievance. Tyrannies keep breeding this insanity. The only solution is consensus, wealth-producing societies, where everyone gets a say and everyone has a buy-in. If it sounds like democracy then call it that. It’s sustainable stability, ever evolving sustainable stability when people police terrorists and don’t promote them. That’s a long struggle, and struggle may be a more apt word than war. But achieving it is so difficult. It takes more than military power, we know that. he politics and economics will be decisive, but as long as the thugs are willing to kill we must fight. Is there a substitute for courage? If there is, show it to me.

He looked at me, the dreadful nearness of it.

It’s on us, man, I continued. And I don’t like it. I didn’t like it during the Cold War. Remember 1983? The same creeps who’ve quit now, quit then. Reagan was a warmonger, going to start a nuclear war in Europe my responding to the Soviets deployment of theater nuclear missiles. The defeatists said the Cold War was our fault, we were the threat. Then the Berlin Wall cracked and that jackass calumny disappeared as Marxism’s Eastern European wreckage emerged in drab, polluted, horrifying, undeniable color.

This war follows the same arc, with the same defeatists adding new nouns to old verbs and adjectives. But it’s a war of liberty versus tyranny and they’re shilling for the tyrants.

It doesn’t matter if you and I don’t like it. We know the stakes. Here’s one of the ultimate “it doesn’t matter if you don’t like it” stories. I was in graduate school at Columbia in the early 80s. I took several German lit classes taught by the former department chairman, Mrs. Halpert. In several of the classes we had an auditor. He was an American millionaire who went by Fred and sometimes Fritz. In September 1939 when the Nazis invaded Poland he was 19 and in the Polish Army. Poland was defeated, beat to hell. Fritz (”I sometimes go by Fred”) slipped out of Poland via Hungary and made it to Great Britain. In Britain he joined the revived Polish army — the free Polish Army. In 1944 he returned to Europe in the Polish armored division armed by the British, serving in the division’s armored recon battalion. After the war ended he returned to Poland, but in 1948 left after the Communists took over. The man lost his country, twice, once to Hitler and the second time to Stalin. He took up permanent residence in the US and ended up making a lot of money– but he was still waiting, persevering in his own quiet, able way. He took German lit classes as a lark. Dr. Halpert let me and did so gladly. See, Dr. Halpert and her mother were German Jews — Berlin Jews– who escaped in 1940 on the last boat out. She also lost her country to Hitler, albeit in a different way. Fritz the Pole was a hero she understood — a man of her own generation who could audit her class anytime. I was 28 and in grad school after a four and a half year gig in the Army. Over a cup of tea in the West End Cafe, Fritz told me that I was the only student in the class who understood them both. he others? “Maybe some day they will understand,” Fritz said with a wink.

Now that’s a burden nobody wants but Fritz got, I told the fighter-pilot. I think about him and Dr Halpert every time I think we’ve got it tough. Beating Hitler took six years (39 to 45) and beating the Communists took another 34 (45 to 89). Was it worth it?


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