(no subject)

[aadler]

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Today, on my way downstate, I realized that it’s been four years since I’ve seen the leaves change in the Ozarks. In autumn of 2003 I was in Iraq; 2004, at Fort Bragg; in 2005, Afghanistan. It’s striking, memorable. I’ve just been elsewhere.

I had trouble yesterday loading Rosetta Stone onto the library computer; I’d used it before, but it’s been awhile, and they may have changed their system. I’ll try again on Monday, in hope that it was just a momentary glitch. Meanwhile, I’ve considered ordering Farsi directly from the company. It costs, but if I score high enough on the DLPT, the extra pay I would get from the Army for language proficiency would return the investment in a single month.

Open Cut — Political Pessimism

Sharpening and increasing my Farsi knowledge might be a good idea anyhow. It seems increasingly unlikely that Iran’s atomic ambitions can be stopped without decisive and extensive military action. Kim Jong Il’s North Korea and Saddam’s Iraq have already shown how ineffective sanctions are — be they NATO, EU or UN — against an outlaw regime, especially one that has its prestige tied to exactly the things such sanctions hope to prevent. I’ve served in two combat theaters already, and expected to return to one or both of them … but, unless something changes, another one is about to open up, and you can bet I’ll be called.

I worry about our country. There really is a global war going on right now, progressive democracy against Islamic fundamentalism, and I don’t know if we can win it. We’re powerful enough, but national will is a different matter entirely. I’ve heard it said, and I’m afraid it’s true: “We’re not a nation at war. We’re a nation at peace, with a military that’s at war.” Americans are accustomed to being safe and comfortable, and they want to stay that way. How do you convince people to pay the price to do what’s necessary, when they don’t want to believe it’s necessary?

We could lose. It may be happening already. The people who try to claim Iraq is another Vietnam are wrong about practically everything, but they may wind up being right in the way that matters most: Vietnam was lost because the American people, as a whole, lost the willingness to pay what it would cost to win.

The difference is that, this time, it won’t stop with one country.

Islamic fundamentalism is now the Islamic mainstream, and its goal is worldwide. This isn’t about Iraq. It isn’t about Afghanistan. It isn’t even really about Israel anymore. Islam used to own a sizeable chunk of the world, and Islamic identity has been dreaming for half a millennium of a return to those glory days. It just might be possible to pull it off now, and I’m afraid our enemies know it.

The people fighting us are willing to keep fighting forever. And we’re not. We’re strong enough, our military is effective enough, our political leadership (at least the current leadership) is determined enough … but our civilian population isn’t really convinced that it’s worth it. How much ground will we have to lose before they come to feel that it is?

The people of the Roman Empire never did come to believe it.

Rome fell.

Close Cut

I turned out another 600-odd words on “God Save the Queen” yesterday, and would have done more today if I hadn’t had to make the trip downstate. I’m about to get into the action part of the story, and anybody who knows me knows I love action. Once I’m able to get to it, I should speed through that, and it constitutes almost all of the original second chapter (only now it’ll be the third). That leaves tying everything together and wrapping it up, and I’m fairly decent at that, too.

It’s possible, if not likely, that I could finished before the end of the month. If so, I’ll only have “Queen’s Gambit” to handle during the time I’m also tackling NaNoWriMo.

Ready to go, and other things to speak of tomorrow.