Had a moment the other day. I’ve commented before on scenes from movies that seem cliché, but are rooted in reality. Art, life, imitation. I reflect on that. A fresh group arrived to convoy me out to a meeting with the Governor. Supposedly these guys went through a transition phase with the outgoing unit; they are supposed to pick up as much ‘street’ experience as they can before the other unit leaves. After that you have to learn the hard way. These guys got lost in the Green Zone. An hour late and they finally roll up. A lieutenant jumps out and scurries over to me, salutes, and then goes back to grab his map from the vehicle. “Butterbar.” And in that moment of my contempt I became one of those guys; I looked at that brand new crew and wondered if they knew how to keep themselves out of trouble here; and if they got into trouble could they get out; and I joined that lineage of guys who pulls aside that lieutenant and puts his map right-side up and tells him what’s wrong with his crew and how to get them straightened out; and it is both an act of altruism and extreme selfishness at the same time; I neither want to get blown up here or watch any of them get blown up; and if we did get blown up it would be my fault not that lieutenant’s; because that is the rule; and all who follow the rule believe in a form of Lamarckian genetics, that it is possible to pass on acquired traits to the next generation, that tendencies toward survival are not innate, they are learned – or maybe everything is random and it doesn’t matter but it just makes you feel better to berate a subordinate before you go out of the wire. And I laughed at myself, but not because it was all that funny. I should have had a three-day stubble and a cigarette dangling out of my mouth to complete the picture.
We had a couple of congressional visitors stop by; Evan Bayr, Barack Obama and Harold Ford. Stopped in at the DFAC and grabbed lunch. Swapped tales with some constituents; they have these types of visits every couple of months-- Joe Biden was here before Christmas. I remember Harold Ford back at Penn. He was Class of ’92, and I think was senior class president or something when I was a sophomore. During the ’92 campaign Governor Bill Clinton made about a hundred stops in Philly; on one campus visit Ford made his introduction as ‘the next President of the United States…’. He hadn’t even won the primary yet- and frankly not many thought he would. My roommate Gideon thought so, though. Said he seemed like ‘presidential material.’ And so he was. That’s how I feel about Ford. He’ll be making a bid for the Senate this fall. We were able to chat a bit before he got tugged along to the next briefing. Spoke about the difficulty of getting info back to the American people about what it’s ‘really like’ and what progress we’re ‘really making’. I don’t know if the Embassy DFAC really shows you what it’s really like either, but I guess it’s a bit closer than watching it on Fox. It’s a real dilemma. It’s a thousand successes and a thousand failures; and it’s a road through hell and not all the paving is good intentions.
There are a couple of wars that are going on here. One is a flare-up of the centuries-old contest of Arab versus Persian for the domination of the Fertile Crescent. The other is between an al-Qaida inspired version of Islamic fascism seeking to overturn the existing order of the Muslim world, and the premiere global hegemon seeking to dominate a system of predictive stability. And then, in November, we’ll have mid-term elections.
