(Edward Hopper)Watching TV, the various Americans touted as wise men can be seen testifying before Congress, at the Brookings Institution, on Jim Lehrer's New Hour, I feel, momentarily transported back to the city of my birth and longtime home, but things look so different from the land where I have immigrated, New Hampshire.
From up here, where so many are simply trying to figure out how to pay the mortgage, pay their taxes (such as they have taxes in New Hampshire) and send their kids to school or, more often up here, send their kids out into the work world, the whole issue of Afghanistan and Iraq looks different.
There are two perspectives up here: 1/ How does this war effort affect me personally? 2/ If it doesn't affect me personally, what makes sense for the country in these overseas efforts?
About half of the people I meet every day consider the military efforts from the point of view of employment. It affects them because the military is often one of the most viable options for employment for their kids, after high school. They mix that in with a little talk of "Patriotism" but the parents are looking at potentially losing their kids forever and so they get past the patriotism stuff pretty quickly. One attraction of the military is it's a reasonably secure job without much prospect of getting laid off and it does remove the worry about supporting your kid financially. When you've got five or more kids and you are making a living at the Portsmouth boatyard, that can be a pretty attractive prospect.
If your kids are not likely to need that option, then you tend to think in more general, almost academic terms, with the intellectual remove of the academic. Not that this means you think originally. Many of my fellow townsmen fall back into patterns of thought acquired during their youth--America should not "Cut and Run." America should "honor its obligations," or countries like Iran will disrespect us and make more trouble for us down the line.
That "Disrespect" argument is actually pretty interesting. It's a motivating force for all sorts of crazy actions you see in inner city culture. You can read about it in the novels of the inner city by George Pelecanos (Washington, DC) or you can see it in The Wire (Baltimore.) Presumably these writers base their depictions on what they actually knew about the culture of the inner city, where a fourteen year old boy is shot to death because he "Disrespected" someone with a gun, for the grave offense of making a disparaging comment about the shooter's sneakers.
How much more sophisticated, restrained and smart are those who argue the USA cannot withdraw from Afghanistan because Iran or Somali or Yemen or North Korea will see that and conclude we are too cowardly to defend ourselves? We got to shoot that Afghanie because if we countenance disrespect, we open ourselves to loss of fear from our enemies.
Watching Paul Pillar, the Georgetown professor, former CIA analyst, answer this argument, calmly, is quite amazing. He says, actually, that's not what happens in the world beyond our shores: If we withdraw from Afghanistan that doesn't guarantee a chain reaction of testing attacks from our enemies. Just as Russia's antagonists in countries it had under its thumb did not immediately rise up and attack Russia when it withdrew from Afghanistan, we are unlikely to face any emboldened enemies. Others watching a big power withdraw simply conclude Afghanistan didn't mean enough to America for America to bother with it.
Our enemies are at least that sophisticated.
We got out Somalia and the entire continent of Africa did not rise up to test us.
We got out of Viet Nam and all the dominoes of South East Asia did not fall.
As for allowing safe havens, Pillar calmly pointed out the 9/11 attackers did not have safe havens in Afghanistan or Somalia or Yemen. Their save havens were in apartments in Germany and hotel rooms in Florida and Portland, Maine.
Pillar notes quietly Al Qaeda does not need geography, it does not need a land base or an aircraft carrier. All it needs is the internet. It needs a credit card, a cell phone or maybe a boat or a ton of fertilizer, or a stolen nuclear bomb. But safe havens, forts, flags, factories to stitch together uniforms, not so much.
But nobody in those Congressional hearings seemed to hear Professor. He didn't have any punchy or memorable lines to quote. His lines were all understatement and unemotional reason. Sitting next to him in the hearing room were much more colorful advocates of bringing the fight to Al Qaeda, of "Fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them in the streets over here," of not falling into the weak kneed posture of submissiveness, of "Cut and Run" policies.
Even at the Brookings Institution, where he sat on panel with a Congresswoman and a couple of Brookings Institution gurus who also worked for some high power sounding institutes of policy analysis or centers for strategic studies or something equally grand sounding, Pillar was politely given time to say his piece and ignored.
He was ignored in Washington, but I heard him up here in New Hampshire.
Trouble is, I'm not sure how many other people in New Hampshire, or elsewhere across our continental sized nation, were tuned in.
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