Blog during wartime

From the bulkhead window seat of an Airbus 319:
There’s a hell of a lot of America down there. I am always surprised by how imaginary the mountains appear. Shadows in light & dark brown with shocks of white at the top, impossibly detailed, even individual trees visible from 5 miles in the air, wisps of mist here and there distorting the view. Or, here, monstrous fluffy white clouds casting shadows below. The extent of the clouds is knowable only from above; below, you can only guess. The mountains run as far as the eye can see, even from way up here. The valleys are filled with snow, looking like powdered sugar that fills in the folds of a tablecloth. Those who first crossed these must have wondered if the mountains would ever end, if they hadn’t truly entered the land of the frost giants.
Just passed two other planes, one going the other way, the other a big bomber running right toward us, which is always unnerving. Seems as if there’s enough ‘up here’ up here that we needn’t see anyone else at all, but I know it doesn’t work that way.
People once walked across all this. And consumed 9 pounds of meat a day, while there was meat. No wonder the horses were skittish.
My allergies whacked me upside the head on this brief trip. On the way to the airport I noticed copious goldenrod, normally a July/August menace (with its quieter partner ragweed), and now I know what hit me.
There’s a war on, or didn’t you know? Nonstop coverage on CNN and everywhere else. Can’t even look at most of my usual blog reading. The arguments are over, we’re in it, and I can’t stand to read another word of self-righteous bleating from either side. There was an article on Salon earlier in the week that well-described my feelings on this- that this is something that has to be done, but that the Administration didn’t bother to make the case for the liberation of Iraq. I remember years of articles lamenting the horrible conditions for women in Afghanistan, demanding (and rightly so) that there should be some sort of intervention – but not sanctions, of course, because those only hurt the powerless, and nothing that infringes sovereignty even if it’s illegitimate. And then we went in and did something, and many of the same voices criticized that we didn’t fix it all overnight. And in the Iraq situation, there’s the call for endless diplomacy (11 years not being enough) and the naive belief that you can reason with madmen. It’s tragic that Vietnam casts such a long shadow over our foreign policy history, because what we’re seeing here is 1930s appeasement, a hope that if we give them what they want they’ll leave us alone. Read what the Muslim extremists are writing- this isn’t about our support for Israel and it’s not about their hatred of their love for Britney Spears CDs and Coke. This is a reactionary movement to restore the world to an imagined time of glory. Where those sentiments pop up here, they’re recognized for what they are, but there’s a dangerous tendency in liberal thought (and I don’t use that term derogatorily) to view the exotic as somehow more legitimate than the familiar, which leads to the fallacy that everything can be resolved if we just understood everyone else better. We should, but it’s important not to forget what we knew as children: some people are just evil.
Yes, some of our actions now will come back to bite us in the future. As they did in Afghanistan. As they did in Iraq. Despite our wishes, situations change. The Soviet Union and Iran leave the equation. People living among us save the money they make driving cabs and making pizza, and they funnel it back through ostensibly religious organizations to make into bombs to kill us. I don’t see a need to discuss the legitimacy of their desire to kill me as opposed to my desire not to be killed. In 10 years other things will have changed that will affect how all this turns out. Perhaps Islam will be swept by a movement that seeks to bring their societies forward.
Here’s a thing to keep in mind: attempts to return to a glorious past have not, historically speaking, worked out to the benefit of mankind.