Today as any fan can tell you is the birthday of Rex Stout, and therefore of Nero Wolfe. I got through the tail end of my undergraduate experience in my late thirties, and the beginning of my seminary days thanks in good part to Mr Stout’s tales of Nero Wolfe, Archie and the gang in that brownstone in a timeless New York. Well, the clock worked for everyone but Nero, Archie and associates who from the depression into the nineteen sixties remained always the same.
The stories, all pretty much the same, only stopped being helpful, because I’d read ’em all…
Tonight, of course, the president is going to announce his decisions about our national involvement in Afghanistan. I wish him a Nero Wolfe moment, having gathered of all the relevant information and washed it through his intellect & imagination, coming up with the solution.
Sadly, as much as I admire the president’s intellect, I fear the just right solution isn’t in fact part of the reality we share.
I’m deeply worried. And I dread the speech.
As I’ve said repeatedly in various venues, I am not a pacifist. But I am also deeply wary of conflict, I am very wary of war. While I believe in self-defense, I am horrifically aware of unintended consequences, particularly those that flood after the decision to war, like blood pooling on the ground.
While I thought the attack on Iraq an unnecessary and almost certainly foolish endeavor misdirecting resources for uncertain reasons to uncertain ends, I thought the invasion of Afghanistan totally appropriate.
The people responsible for the attack on the Twin towers and the Pentagon were being sheltered in Afghanistan. And going after them was a good thing, a just thing. And if in the backwash it brought down the Taliban’s misogynist terror regime, that was just frosting on the cake.
As things happened I lamented the lack of resources that went into that war, serious engagement being put aside by the Bush regime in its confused obsession with the dictator Saddam Hussein.
Now a lot of water and blood has passed under the bridge.
We’re slowly extracting ourselves from Iraq, which sadly will likely fall into civil war at some point after our departure. It is hard to see what good is going to come out of our years, lives and fortune spent there. But at least its nearly over…
But now there’s Afghanistan. And I do believe we have a we broke it, we need to fix it, obligation there. Of some sort.
Against a backdrop of a barely organized country, with a corrupt central government, if one can even describe it as a central government, a country, sort of, that has been so eloquently described as the graveyard of empires.
And, of course, I’m hobbled by my Vietnam era upbringing. But, God, it has quagmire written all over it.
So worried.
So worried…
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In