Where Do We Go From Here?

Where do we stand? It’s the last day of Trinity (the Christian season that begins in June with Pentecost Sunday, celebrating specifically the coming of the Holy Spirit); tomorrow begins the season of Advent—looking forward to Christmas. Macys feels that the Christmas shopping season has begun well; “Black Friday” will last two days this season.
Do your patriotic duty—spend! (Didn’t George W. Bush say that?) England has begun a Parliamentary inquiry into how British troops somehow wound up in Iraq back in 2003. Tony Blair, who got England there, is not likely ever going to be head of the European Union.
House foreclosures are expected to rise well into next year—but prices are stabilizing and some newly built homes are beginning to sell. Warren Buffet thinks Ben Bernanke at the Fed deserves an “A”, but Congress is mumbling about clipping the agency’s wings.
The agency has been independent of both Congress and the President since its founding in 1913, but Congress feels it is at least a bit at fault for last year’s financial debacle and wants to be able to stick its own thumb in the pie. Bernanke says, “Please, no”.
Next Tuesday, the first of December, Obama promises to give us some firm numbers about how many more troops he will airlift into landlocked Afghanistan. It costs a million dollars to keep one man there for one year. Everything, from his toilet paper to his bullets and fuel, has to come in by air transport. That’s expensive.
Every time a look at a map of Afghanistan, I still get a nervous feeling. I look at maps ever since I wrote a high school impassioned letter to the five star diplomat who was pretty much in charge during the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Why, I demanded to know, had we done nothing to help the Hungarians against the Soviets?!?
He wrote a nice letter back. It boiled down to, “Look at a map”. I got one out. There was absolutely no feasible way we could have assisted them without walking over somebody else’s property—and probably starting World War III right there.
That’s why we didn’t help. We couldn’t. Now look at Afghanistan. The long western border is with Iran. Not likely any American supplies are going through there. The eastern border is with Pakistan. Are you willing to guarantee me there will still be a remotely friendly Pakistani government in power a year or two or three from now? That would cut off that route.
To the north lie two former Soviet republics, now nominally independent. We fly much of our stuff through there. What if the political winds shift there—perhaps a little Russian pressure or, since they are Muslim states, some radical pressure.
It isn’t fantasy to think these reverses could occur. In that part of the globe we are pretty much at the farthest reach of our influence. If our avenues got shut down, the boys in Afghanistan would face a similar situation to that of the boys on Bataan in 1942.
They could surrender or we could send a few hundred thousand more troops and try to blast our way through nuclear armed Pakistan. We’d have to draft and train them first.
Health Care Reform looks like it’s about shut down for this calendar year. I just don’t see them reconciling the two bills between now and Christmas Vacation. Next year is an election year, and that brings a whole new set of political calculations. Then, the year after, comes a whole new Congress with possibly different priorities. Ah well … .
Promises, promises, promises—all through the election season. Then comes reality. I don’t really know where we can or will go from here, but I can tell you where we are right now—smack dab in the middle of the world as it really is.
Machiavelli wrote: There are two ways to deal with the world—as though it were as it ought to be or as though it were as it really is. Those who choose to deal with the world as though it were as it ought to be do so to their own destruction.
Christ would not have argued with that.