Source is The McGill Report, via e-mail...
Grand Marais, MN — On the shores of Emerald Lake in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, 60 miles north of Grand Marais along the Gunflint Trail, I sat around a campfire with my two best buddies of four decades, eating batter-fried walleye and sipping grape Gatorade. We talked about the war in Iraq.
| He's going to do the contrast thing — a fairly creaky literary device that juxtaposes two unrelated situations to the detriment of one or the other... |
It was strange to be imagining that hot, dusty, and wounded Arab land, still so shrouded in violence and grief, while we sat safely in the quiet depths of pristine Minnesota nature.
| But there could be people sitting in yurts in Mongolia who're thinking casually about Iraq, too. Someone at this very moment could be standing in a Berlin department store, eying a Siemens toaster, and thinking about the contrast with Iraq. For that matter, why limit oneself temporally? At some point someone stood in a house in a prosperous, (relatively) civilized Baghdad around 1100 A.D. and wondered if his descendants would have it as good as he. And in Baghdad today someone is standing near a rubble pile and wondering if his descendants will have a better life than today's Baghdadis. |
The call of loons filled the air with mournful echoes. Was the war in Iraq a good idea or bad idea? We all agreed that things aren't going especially well in post-war Iraq, but on balance, did we think it a good thing the United States had ousted Saddam from power?
| It'd be nice to hear real loons instead of the ones who periodically throng the streets, but I'll leave that to the literarily inclined. Good thing, bad thing or orange — none of these apply to the war in Iraq. It was or wasn't good, bad or orange — but it was necessary. It's a battle in the War on Terror, which is a war for the preservation of our civilization. Iraq represented a weak point in the Arab structure in the Middle East. If we hadn't gone to war in Iraq it would have been necessary to attack somewhere else — to put the West on the offensive against the Islamists. Afghansitan sheltered al-Qaeda, gave al-Qaeda aid and comfort, but al-Qaeda is an Arab phenomenon, not a Pashtun phenomenon. It was necessary to carry the war to the Arab world to get into the internals of the Terror Machine. Syria would have done as well. Jordan's not a target. Soddy Arabia is the ultimate objective, but occupying Mecca and Medina would have raised horrific political complications. Egypt and points west are peripheral, as is Yemen, and the Gulf States are fledgling civilized countries. |
My friend Chris, a neurologist at the University of Minnesota, said Americans don't have enough information about what's going on in Iraq to make a good decision about leaving or staying. The media just isn't giving us enough information, he said, and the reports they do offer often aren't the truth, only sensationalism packaged to sell like entertainment.
| I agree with Chris. The military obviously isn't releasing a lot of information, especially on the enemy — body counts, points of origin, ratios of foreign killers to domestic Baathists, for instance. There are a lot of political agendas being pushed and not an awful lot of reporters just letting their readers know what life is like in Iraq. There's not an awful lot of flavor to the fare being served up... |
Still, Chris said, it's clear enough that we've gotten ourselves into a quagmire in Iraq, so pulling out is by far the most sensible thing.
| Chris sound like he reads the Boston Globe. If you realize your information is bad, can you justify running away? |
The sun slowly fell and the western sky burned a deep, glowing pink at the horizon.
"Maudette! The sun fell!"
"Dammit, Horace! I told you to put a new hook up there! The old one just wore out!" |
A black crow flapped and cawed. Mosquitoes buzzed. My friend Rick, a Rochester lawyer, fired back. "Chris, you are expecting the media to give you all the information you need to make a decision. But we'll never have all the information we want.
| Much of our information we get only in outline, and you have to pay close attention to tell what's politix and what's fact. Keeping track of the enemy's order of battle becomes a full-time job, and making sense of isolated engagements with no idea of the overall campaign is confusing. He's right. There's no such thing as perfect information... |
"We need to make decisions before that.
| Most decisions are made based on imperfect data... |
"I find myself looking inward and asking 'How would I feel if I were an average Iraqi person? In that case, how would I feel? What would I want?'"
| And there's the mistake. We spend almost as much time looking inward as we do sitting in the national bathroom, exploring our sexuality. I don't care how you feel! You don't care how I feel! What really, truly, actually counts in today's touchy-feely, "I'm okay, you're okay" world is not how people feel, it's what they do. If Rick's a lawyer, nobody cares whether he feels benevolent, whether he's a first-class greedhead, or if he's bilious. They care that he can settle their tax bill with the IRS for 30 cents on the dollar. If he can't do that because his lady love left him for another woman, they'll find another lawyer who can. Nobody cares that Chris the Doctor feels really, really sad because his puppy got run over by a bus. They expect Chris the Doctor to administer five stitches to the wound little Chucky got on his forehead playing football with the brats down the street. Likewise, I could care less how Masood Azhar feels. What I care about is the fact that he heads a jihadi organization that's been responsible for killing thousands — literally thousands — of people, each of whom had his or her own feelings, including the little babies in the number. |
The bottom line for Rick is that Iraqis now have a freedom to make their own future that they didn't have before. They no longer fear execution of their entire families on the basis of mere rumors that they didn't like Saddam. "If I were an Iraqi, I'd be overjoyed that Saddam was gone," Rick said. "I'd feel that as bad as things might be now, I had new opportunities."
| So would I, insofar as my feelings on the subject matter, which is zilch. But Iraqi prosperity and security are a side benefit of deposing dictators and killing terrorists. |
A fish jumped in the lake, making a loud "plop!" and leaving only ripples by the time we looked. The sweet scent of fried fish mixed with sharp piney smells in the air. As for myself, I believe in Rick's simple formula, to "look within." We can't learn every language in the world, and each one of us, realistically, can't travel to many places to search out the truth. Surely the Boundary Waters wilderness teaches the wisdom of Rick's path.
| No, it doesn't. It sounds like a nice place to go on vacation, except for the mosquitos. But even though I agree with Rick's conclusion, I don't agree with Rick's path. There's a place for looking inward, and that place can be vacation. There's also a place for looking outward, at the rest of the world. There's a place for assessing threats and estimating the capabilities and intentions of adversaries. There's a place for taking action once the situation's been assessed. There's a place for goodness and mercy and there's a place for ruthlessness and even cruelty. All that means there's a place for judgment and reason, both objective and subjective. |
Loons and bald eagles, not Fox and CNN, are the authorities in our wilderness. Our imaginations must do the distant travel. The three of us joked throughout the trip about "being in the now."
| I think they're nattering in touchy-feelyspeak, but I'm not sure. I don't speak the current psychobabble dialect... |
For six days our eyes saw calm wilderness lakes, rugged rocks and perfect nature, while inside we saw Baghdad. We heard and saw the fireworks of shock and awe. We saw children lying in hospital beds.
| Don't forget the children being released from jail. Don't forget the mass graves. Don't forget the 100 percent vote in favor of Sammy. Don't forget the UN headquarters being car bombed. Don't forget Uday and Qusay, dead in a shootout, stuffed and mounted. Don't forget the people trying to pull down the ubiquitous statues of Sammy. Don't forget the Silkworm missile that Sammy's troops fired at the mall in Kuwait. Don't forget the intricacies of the power struggle among the Shias. And don't forget for a moment the endless cries of "jihad!"... |
What I want to ask is what lessons the treasure of our northern wilderness, a treasure of the entire world, might hold for the peace of the entire world? What responsibility, if any, do we have to seek and to share those lessons? "Harmony of knowledge, will, and feeling toward the earth is wisdom, for it has to do with living at peace with other forms of life," wrote the Minnesota conservationist and writer, Sigurd F. Olson, after one wilderness trip. "Since the beginning of civilization, harmony with nature has been almost disregarded, though it has been recognized by a few great minds as the only solution to the problem of finding peace and contentment."
| Harmony with nature is good. Harmony with nature is enjoyable. It has nothing to do with international politix, UN resolutions, the movement of men and materiel to depose dictators and international conspiracies. September 11th, 2001, was a beautiful day for us on the east coast. The temperature was in the low 70s, the sky was clear and almost cloudless. It's possible that Barbara Olsen felt like taking the day off and going fishing instead of getting on a plane that someone else slammed into the Pentagon. They didn't care that it was a beautiful day to go fishing. |
On the first day of our trip, a giant snapping turtle, floating like an astronaut in two feet of crystalline water, poked his nose above the waterline to peer a few moments at the three of us. A wise old soul, we decided. The persistence of our violent inner visions of war shocked us. All through the trip the loons cried their strange rising whoops and declining sighs, their calls that pierce the heart so directly and so hauntingly, their laughing shrieks and grieving cries of perfect nature.
| I suppose it's a good thing that the awareness of war remains with us even when we go on vacation to what sounds like a lovely place. But I don't think we learned anything on vacation. I hope we caught lots of fish. |
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