Complicated We Stand

The quiet words of the wise are more to be heeded

than the shouting of a ruler among fools.

-Ecclesiastes 9:17

Last night I was listening to BBC radio on the way home from a Presbytery meeting and I heard an extended interview with former NATO chief Admiral James Stavridis.  As I usually am, I was impressed with the rather calm, clear eyed perspective of a person who has dealt with war and terrorism and violence on rather more concrete terms than those of us who think they understand war on the basis of playing Call of Duty.  He was talking about ISIS/ISIL/Da'esh (Here's the deal with the different names) and how they are rather different from Al Quaida or Hamas, and about how our strategies for dealing with them need to reflect the different nature of what they are.

As you might expect from a former NATO chief, he is an advocate of cooperation between nation states in dealing with Da'esh.  He notes that, in fact, there is a rather unprecedented level of agreement between the United States, Europe and even Iran about the fact that these villains need to be taken down.  In the half an hour or so that I was listening, he described an almost impossible scenario where the United States, the European Union, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Iraqi security forces, Kurdish Peshmerga, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and various other Middle Eastern nations would all cooperate to bring down this band of lunatics.

As I am also, the interviewer was somewhat incredulous that this sort of cooperation might take place.  But Stavridis insisted that all those groups have a fairly well established self interest in seeing Da'esh ended and stability restored to Syria and Iraq. Once the common enemy is gone, however, things get decidedly less crystalline.  The US teaming up with Russia seems like a movie sequel to the cold war, where former enemies get together to fight a common foe, but there is still the rather sticky matter of the Ukraine, which is not just going to go away.  If we buddy up the Russians, are we tacitly abandoning Ukraine to Uncle Vlad's neighborhood?  And of course there's the Sunni/Shia enmity, how do we convince Sunni Muslims around the world that inviting Shiite Iran into our little brute squad to take out an essentially Sunni group like Da'esh isn't going to result in a tilt of the old persecution see-saw.  I mean, most Sunni are pretty strongly disavowing any notion that Da'esh is their people, but they still don't particularly care for the Shia, that goes back a really long way.  You've got religious considerations, geopolitical considerations, cultural considerations and in light of all that Stavridis made what is perhaps the understatement of the year: "The world is a complicated place."

He talked about the short game: destroy Da'esh, all of them, the black flag, machine gun toting dudes in the desert, the presence online, the loose networks throughout the middle east and Europe by which they continue to "expand their influence" even as their actual territory remains "contained" as President Obama keeps saying.

Then he mentioned the long game, which involves a rather more difficult task of doing all of this in a way that does not resemble playing Whack-a-Mole (you know that boardwalk game where you try to hit all the plastic moles that pop out of different holes with a big padded mallet).  Our history with fighting terror groups is that, as soon as we get one, more pop up, and the success of our own violence tends to lead to the very conditions that make for fertile recruiting grounds among those who are tired of poverty and war.

I have my suspicions that even the short game won't exactly be a walk in the park, but I have to admit the picture he painted was appealing.  As for the long game, I was just sort of glad to hear an actual authority type person admit that it was really the big problem.  I also appreciated the fact that he didn't just say, "it's complicated," and walk away in frustration, he actually had ideas about what to do, other than ignore it and hope it will away.  He didn't make it sound simple or easy, but there seemed to be a way around the terror and a way, no matter how uphill it may be, to find our way through this seemingly intractable mess.

The barriers to cooperation were perhaps the most disappointing aspect of all of this: how hard it is for us to just get our heads together to combat something as obviously evil as Da'esh.  The constant rhetoric of fear and bigotry that is just flying in all directions right now.  It sort of reminds me of that ominous line in The Lord of the Rings: "on that day the strength of men failed."  Honestly, I'm ready to grab for whatever hope I can.  These days I guess quiet words of the wise can be hard to come by, here are some:

These times we know much evil, little good

to steady us in faith

and comfort us when our losses press

hard on us, and we choose,

in panic or despair or both,

to keep what we will lose.

For we are fallen like the trees, our peace

broken, and so we must

love where we cannot trust,

trust where we cannot know,

and must await the wayward coming grace

that joins the living and dead,

taking us where we would not go -

into the boundless dark.

when what was made has been unmade

The Maker comes to His work.

-Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir