Bryan Strawser

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On Being Silent

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My good friend Kerri has often asked me to debate more often – that I’m too unwilling to not argue – and she’s right. I am tired of arguing with those who simply won’t see the illogic beliefs that they hold.

I am exceptionally passionate about gun control – I refuse to back down from this issue and belief that I’ve held for nearly twenty years – and I still won’t change my position. And I’m also just as sick and tired of arguing about it.

But an article in yesterday’s National Review Online, although written on another subject, by Victor Davis Hanson made me rethink my position:

More challenging still, our own military — as we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan — is so skillful, so adept in accomplishing its mission that it can defeat the enemy abroad with the appearance — I emphasize again the appearance — of so far not incurring costs of the magnitude we saw in World War II, Korea, or Vietnam. But it would be a terrible mistake, in this age of our greatest affluence and leisure, to trust in such a misconception, to turn our attention inward precisely when the best citizens of our nation are fighting so well and so long and hard in such difficult places in Afghanistan and Iraq.

We must support them with all the material and spiritual aid we can muster. We must think of them daily, hourly and hold them in our prayers. We must make the needed sacrifices here at home to ensure that the unpleasant and often deadly task we have entrusted to them can be accomplished with every full measure of our love and support.

What would such sacrifice and responsibilities entail? All Americans with pride and confidence must confront in spirit and speech those who would caricature and misrepresent our struggle — that it is unnecessary, that it is wrong, that it is against Islam rather than the distorters of Islam. Yes, Americans must take on this new apparent phenomenon of anti-Americanism, learn about it, and then refute it with all their being, explaining that it is the United States who preserves the peace, whether that be in the Persian Gulf, the Korean Sea, or on the Mediterranean.

We seek no tribute, no colonies, no blackmail for ensuring that the seas are open and nations are free to pursue their own destinies without fear of attack by their neighbors. Whether it is stationing troops in the Balkans or in Japan, or providing billions of dollars in help for the victims of AIDS, or being a loyal and militarily powerful ally to Europe and a friend to large nations like Russia and India or protectors of the smaller like South Korea, the United States is a proven force for good in this world. And so the world depends on us to defeat those who would bring it back from the present horizons of modernism, global prosperity, and new friendships to the rule of the jungle of the Dark Ages.

I’ve grown tired of debating the anti-war forces – here and abroad – in the blogosphere – and in the real world. I was about ready to stop arguing about it.

But I’m not going to.. there’s too much at stake in the marketplace of ideas on this issue. I won’t back down – I can’t.

Not when there are men and women prepared to do violence on my behalf so that I can sleep safe and secure in my bed at night.

Victor Davis Hanson: Between War and Peace

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I wasn’t planning on starting any books this morning that involved any deep thinking as I fly from Boston to St. Croix via San Juan on American Airlines, but I was caught by the cover of this week’s Sports Illustrated, about Pat Tillman’s journey from Athlete to Soldier.

So I pulled out Victor Davis Hanson’s new collection of essays, Between War and Peace

And damn, he’s caught me again, and I don’t want to put it down. But I have to – so that my mind can work through his thoughts and its impact on my own. Here are some snippets from the first three essays in this collection, all written from 9/11/2002 through 1/3/2003 and focused on The War Against Terror.

Introduction

I had thought that the pessimism that presaged defeat in Afghanistan – the mountains, remember, were too high, the weather too cold, the religious calendar too foreboding, the factions too numerous, the Taliban too ferocious, and the country itself the graveyard of the British and Russian armies – might have been dispelled by the miraculous victory over the Taliban in a matter of six weeks at a cost of a handful of American lives. BUt it was not to be, as the renewed display of gloom during 2003-3 would prove.

[…]

As I wrote on July 4th, 2003, we are again told – after one of the most remarkable military victories in American history – that we are in perpetual crisis: no firm evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as yet uncovered; no word about the ultimate fate of Saddam Hussein; and constant sniping and assassination of American troops in postwar Iraq with dears now reaching well over one hundred. Yet we forget that occupation is never easy – consider the mess of restoring order to territories of the former Japanese empire in 1946 – and our task is made difficult both by the sheer rapidity of a victory designed to shock rather than kill a large number of Baathist troops and the unlikely task of implanting consensual government in a region where democracy has no history.

[…]

Much of my own sense of things, of course, grew out of lifelong residency on a small farm in the San Joaquin Valley of California and my own training as a classicist and military historian who teaches Latin and Greek to mostly minority students at California State University, Fresno. The two worlds are not as antithetical as they might seem. The Greeks, after all, were a rural people, and the literature of a Homer or Thucydides often reveals a tragic view of the human condition often shared by contemporary agrarians who through the daily experience of battling nature to obtain a living – and now so often failing – agree that there are certain constraints on us all across time and space, given that the physical world remains unforgiving and the nature of man himself stays constant

The Wages of September 11th: There is no going back

The more the world knows of al Qaeda and bin Laden, the more it has found them both vile and yet banal – and is so confident and eager to eradicate them and all they stand for. It is one thing to kill innocents, quite another to take on the armed might of an aroused United States. Easily dodging a solo cruise missile in the vastness of Afghanistan may make good theater and bring about braggadocio; dealing with grim American and British commandos who have come seven thousand miles for your head prompts abject flight and an occasional cheap infomercial on the run. And the ultimate consequence of the attacks of September 11 will not merely be the destruction of al Qaeda but also the complete repudiation of the Taliban, the Iranian mullocracy, the plague of the Pakistani madrasahs, and any other would-be fundamentalist paradise on earth.

[…]

Indeed, as the months progressed, the problems inherent in “the European way” became all too apparent: pretenious utopian manifestos in lieu of military resoluteness, abstract moralizing to excuse dereliction of concrete ethical responsibility, and constant American ankle-biting even as Europe lives in a make-believe Shire while we keep back the forces of Mordor from its picturesque borders, with only a few brave Frodos and Bilbos tagging along. Nothing has proved more sobering to Americans than the skepticism of these blinkered European hobbits after September 11.

[…]

Real concern for the sanctity of life may hinge on employing, rather than rejecting, force, inasmuch as our troops are as deadly and protected abroad as our women, children, aged, and civilians are impotent and vulnerable at home. It seems to me a more moral gamble to send hundreds of pilots into harm’s way than allow a madman to further his plots to blow up or infect thousands in high-rises.

Al Qaedism: From Criminality to Politics in the Blink of an Eye

By the same token, it is very American for zealots to shout displeasure at their government, but their slurs that the President of the United states, the Vice President, and the Secretary of Defense are the “true axis of evil” rather than Stalinist North Korea, fascist Iraq, or theocratic Iran have consequences in the future that we cannot predict in the present. And we should be concerned that an apparent Iraqi national, recently returned with permission from Saddam Hussein’s regime, leads Americans in chants about their amoral war. We should cringe, too, when the former attorney general, Ramsey Clark, compares an American administration to Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Gestapo. There are ripples from such hate and we are seeing how insidiously they can lap into crazy minds.

In other words, we have a moral responsibility to oppose such extremism, and yes, subversion. Such hateful anti-American language can lend a sense of legitimacy and encouragement to a John Muhammad, a mixed-up teenage John Lee Malvo, or an angry anti-Semite Hesham Mohamed Modayet at the Los Angeles airport, and so elevate their pathologies into something apparently “meaningful,” or perhaps even enrage them to at last act.

It’s Not the Money, Stupid! War Apparently Must be Anything Other Than Good v. Evil

It has only been a little more than a year since September 11 and already therapeutic voices are back, suggesting that we are somehow culpable for our own calamity because we did not give away enough money to the Middle East. Not long ago the well-meaning and sincere Senator Murray of Washington contrasted the purported civic philanthropy of Osama bin Laden with the supposed failure of the United States to help those impoverished in the Middle East. She was apparently perplexed over why so many Islamic countries hate us – and perhaps thinks that instead of warring with Iraq we should spend the projected billions in war costs on more foreign aid to convince the Arab masses to like us rather than him.

[…]

Sadly, prosperous Westerners never seem to learn of the folly of honoring appeasement of naivete – the awarding of Nobel Peace Prizes to the likes of a Le Duc Tho and Yasser Arafat, as if global praise might make them statesmen rather than murderers, to a Kim Dae Jung, as if his demonstrable kindness would pacify rather than embolden North Korea, or to ex-president Carter, as if his well-meaning parleys with tyrants could bring peace. As chief executive emeritus, his saintliness now plays well; but we forget in the rough and tumble of his presidency that Mr. Carter’s brag that he had no “inordinate fear of communism” was followed by the brutal Russian invasion of Afghanistan, that sending Ramsey Clark to apologize to the Iranians did not win the release of the American hostages in 1980, and that UN Ambassador Andrew Young’s praise of Cuban troops in Africa and his clenched-fist, Black Power salutes to African leaders did not stop Communist intervention and bloodletting abroad.

The United States cannot lose the struggle on the battlefield, as we did not lose the Vietnam conflict in the strict military sense either. But we most surely can fail in this war if our citizens and leaders reach for their checkbooks as the fundamentalists reach for their guns – or convince themselves that our enemies fight because of something we, rather than they, did.

Hanson always provokes my thought process in ways that I had not considered before. Off to think deeply as we fly over the deep blue of the Atlantic Ocean on the way to San Juan and St. Croix…

The Blank Notepad

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A blank piece of paper – a blank notepad – is like an invitation to create something.. and right away.

Yesterday, I picked up a shiny new legal pad of yellow paper at one of my stores. With this blank notepad in front of me for just the afternoon, I managed to scratch out agendas for three upcoming meetings that I am sponsoring, planned out a major project’s timeline that is due in mid-May, and updated a significant amount of personal planning.

All of this while sitting in a meeting and individual recaps – and managing to fully participate in those discussions while completing the tasks above. Mind you, there was a bit of downtime in between these recaps and the other events.

Sitting down this morning at a Starbucks cafe with wireless internet access, I find that I filled more than thirty pages of this notepad with scribble – which I’m rapidly turning into MS Word documents and e-mails.

Ahh, the smell of productivity.

The Next Generation

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Many times, I have talked with like-minded friends about how they came to their beliefs about living in the United States – about freedom – about our responsibilities as citizens – and so on. It is through these processes that our understanding of freedom – and it’s cost – is passed from generation to generation.

There have been times in the past few years when I have wondered and feared about the next generation of Americans – if they will understand and value freedom the same way that my family and I do. Will they remember why this nation came to be? Will they understand what it means to stand in the Lincoln Memorial and read the Gettysburg Address? Will they remember why we went to Europe to fight in World War I and II?

Will they remember why we have sent men (and now women) off to fight in foreign lands?

Will they remember that freedom is not free?

This week, at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, a letter and a note left there in memory of those that gave their lives reminded me that the next generation hasn’t forgotten what it means to be a citizen of the United States.




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Freedom is Not Free

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I will write much more about this trip later as I have time – but only fitting that my group took the time to visit Arlington National Cemetary today to pay our respects to those that gave their life so that my family and I can live in freedom.

Much more to come.

Intertwining Roads

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I�ve always viewed life as a serious of intertwining roads, crossing back and forth with each other � sometimes as overpasses, sometimes as intersections, and sometimes as high speed on ramps.

The choices that we make in life force us to take exits, detours, and paths that lead to dead end streets. Eventually, we wind our way back and continue down the road that we have chosen. Sometimes we find ourselves back upon familiar territory � facing decisions that we have made before. And sometimes we make different decisions.

A woman I once dated would speak at times of parallel universes � that somewhere out there, all of her choices had split things into different worlds. One world where you made the other choice and lived on � another world, the present, where you lived on with the choice that you had made. At times, your dreams or other moments would give you a glimpse into that world that never was � all because of a choice that you had made.

A chance thought a few days ago led me to play some music and my mind wandered off into one of those moments where I saw my past in a different way � life had come across one of those intertwined roads that leads you back to a intersection that you had seen once before � this time, I took the other path, and saw a future/past that is quite different than what I live today. Some discussions followed with others from my distant past and that made things all the more vivid.

One of my favorite authors is Richard Bach � he posed a question once in one of his books:


I died to become the person that I am today.

Was it worth it?

I firmly believe that the choices I have made in my life that have led me to where I am today � to the person that I am today � were the choices that I was intended to take.

Don�t get me wrong, I�m incredibly happy with who I am and my station in life. I have few regrets.

But I�ll always wonder if it was worth it.