Austin Bay on the War on Terror
Instapundit points us to a terrificly- (sometimes poetically-) written cover story by Austin Bay in today’s Weekly Standard. In it, he describes his personal experiences in Iraq, his conversations with Iraqi military officers, and his reflections on the overall war on terror. Read the whole thing; it’s great.
Here are some snippets to whet your appetite:
THE AFGHAN FARMER at Three Markets–Sayh Dukon in the local dialect–showed me how he killed the yellow-bellied viper. He flicked his wrist, cutting the air with his hand-held scythe, his smile vacillating between amused relief and grim satisfaction. [...]
“Jdhooshi” is a nom de guerre, but seems to fit the spry, gray-bearded 69-year-old Afghan. Actually, I should call him an Angeleno. For three decades Jdhooshi lived in Los Angeles. But after 9/11, when the war on terror came to Afghanistan, he knew he had to get involved. “This is a chance to change this place, my country, my first country,” he told me. “It has suffered so much. Thirty years of war has left it with nothing. Now we, America, we are giving Afghanistan a chance. I knew I could help by working as a translator. For the military. The people, they now have hope, they know some things can be different.” [...]
HAS DICK CHENEY ever seen a snake die? Hitting a sidewinder on a Wyoming highway doesn’t count. Snake death at close-range is a writhing, dangerous agony as the damned and bleeding thing lunges at your eyes, your hand, your knife, the boot its first strike failed to penetrate. Wipe the sweat from your face, glance at the nervous man behind you, swipe the tall-grass with the back of your blade, swat a bothersome gnat–take your eye off the enemy and in that instant the coiled, dying devil lands a fang. You killed it, but in its last throes it got you. [...]
When will the media figure this out: Al Qaeda and its cohorts are strategic information powers and little else. “The terrorists have yet to win an engagement above the platoon level,” Gen. Abizaid said as we flew from Qatar to Iraq. I mean, a C-17 is loud, but the man said it with exacting clarity. Terrorist bombs are made for TV, and terrorist beheadings are made for the Internet. Here’s a radical thought, politically incorrect, incorrect in terms of TV ratings but still strategically correct and correct in terms of defending liberal values: Winning the global war against Islamist terror ultimately means curbing the terrorists’ strategic combat power, and that means ending the media magnification of their bombs. [...]
I remember Bishop Desmond Tutu’s visit in 1984 to my church on New York City’s Upper West Side. Bishop Tutu had been there for a month, using our church as a base for his forays to the U.N. and elsewhere. At tea time after church he had the usual klatch around him, but this morning’s subject was economic aid to Africa. I said that corruption was a huge problem and he agreed. I told him I thought the churches did a better job of delivering effective development aid because they avoided corrupt governments. Tutu confirmed that with a nod, and took another sip of tea. “The best way is if we can directly link people, you know, in the U.S., in the West, to individuals in developing nations.”
“So how do you do it?” Bishop Tutu asked. “How do you do it?”
Read the whole thing, if you haven’t already.
