Books and Exploration

I'm finishing The Tipping Point right now, and then I'm moving on to Humboldt's Cosmos, by Gerard Helferich, which I'm quite excited to read. I stumbled upon Humboldt while doing research on William Dampier, in the spring of last year. He is an explorer who, by all impressions, is one of the more important and influential ever, but does not get nearly the creedence he deserves. My theory is because he didn't sail anywhere.

In primary school, or at least my experience with it, was that exploration was a small portion of history - ie, get past it to move on to the more important stuff. The explorers we learned about (other than Lewis and Clark) were Columbus, Cook, Hudson, de Champlain - guys who found out the limits of the new continent and sailed. Humboldt and Dampier, whose most valuable contributions to exploration were based on their voyages on land, get overlooked.

I have a rendezvous with death

A New War With Echoes of Old Sorrow – Alan Cowell

My favorite War Poem is Alan Seeger’s Rendezvous With Death, which is kind of like saying your favorite Beatles song is Hey Jude. The first time I ever heard it read gave me chills; reading it myself later did nothing to banish them.

The poets of World War I left for a war planned to be over by Christmas; those who managed to survive in the trenches were quickly disillusioned. It was another war of ‘fight them there so you don’t have to here’ – or at the least protect the free from the Huns. The same motto is repeated today, but its not the same concept. As the America nation-state grows up…there is nobody who is fighting us conventionally in the next 15 years, meaning true nation-state war is not top priority. I just finished an article I had saved from a few years back, Learning About Counterinsurgency by Lt. General Sir John Kiszely, which discussed the relative educational empowerment of those junior officers, to be able to fight an insurgency which decries the warrior ethos because the soldier can’t hate his or her enemy.

It’s almost a full circle. The JOs and civilians bear a lot of the brunt, but they are also learning more through their own experience and through the study of theory and history. Leaves me to wonder about how educated JOs are compared to civil society.

South America and Antarctica

This is two years old, but utterly fascinating:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4928010.stm

Think of it! Antarctica, lush and green, with forests and all sorts of different life. And while moving to a more southern latitude certainly had a role, it is now believed the ocean currents are what froze the continent.

But wait - almost more interesting: the Pacific and Atlantic oceans were not joined in the south before this. I do not know when Laurasia split and the Arctic Ocean was formed...but only 41 million years ago? Even if that is twice as long as was once thought, its still not that long. Pangaea was 250 million years ago.

That is old.

Iraq into the Core?

It certainly provides a construct for how to think of the world. One of the many annoying things about the current Presidential election is the lack of strategic vision. America's role in the world really is not enunciated; foreign policy is about Iraq, Iran, and restoring America's image. That's it. Where is the creativity, the vision, the goals America must achieve (Obama: on the off chance you read the former, THIS IS YOUR BREAD AND BUTTER). It is annoying beyond all hell.

Why so? Because nothing is black and white. It is not a matter of stay in Iraq vs. leave Iraq; it is a matter of the relationship between the United States and Iraq, but not the traditional sovereign state relationship. How do events in Iraq influence events in the United States? More importantly, how does Iraq fit into the construct we have of the world? The answer seems to be that it does not fit what is familiar and recognizable. The world of the 1990's - for all the small conflict that erupted - was remarkably recognizable when viewed through the lens of chaos. That was the context; more than that, it was an excuse. Chaos is hard to fix, so why try?

Iraq today is chaos, but a different kind. I was lied to about the war. The reasons for going to war were bogus and the fact that more people have not lost jobs in the administration is reprehensible. But do we not have the opportunity, if fundamental aspects of the American approach to Iraq are altered, to remake the country as a better place? I would argue we have an obligation to do so, based on three levels: first, we broke it. It is civics. Second, we owe the massive number of civilians who have died something - a better land, perhaps? Finally, and most importantly: because we are America. For all our actions that are screwed up and counterproductive, our moral obligation is to help others. We can rebuild the country and make it better. It will take time, patience, and capital, as well as a number of harsh lessons. But if we view it as an opportunity, the grandest opportunity to right what we have done wrong the past five years, and take advantage of it? That is the American Dream.

Aside: McCain was born in 1936. That is the first FDR Administration. Wow.

MUST. WRITE. DAILY. I feel it is the only way I can start to accumulate what I know and make connections with it.

What happens...

...when organizations focus on aid needs rather than aid supply, and are willing to be flexible:

http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=10610398&fsrc=RSS

I hope it continues.

It went here.

Two things of note:

One, the title of this needs to be changed. ASAP.

Two, presidential candidates are, for the most part, awful. There is no coherence. Many of them have detailed plans for health care, the economy, and Iraq (obviously Iraq is all that matters in foreign policy). But nobody seems to connect anything. There is occasionally depth of knowledge, but there is no breadth. Nobody seems to be able to articulate a coherent policy, one that puts everything together beyond citing the American dream.

Take foreign policy. In regards to Iraq, the choice seems to be between staying or leaving. But to what end? For what purpose? What is the projection of American strategy that governs whichever option is chosen? There is no connection between goals and actions. Because goals are not stated.