20 February 2003

A Matter of Degree

It is 36 degrees this morning. It did not slide back down into the twenties last night, and that is a good thing. That would have frozen the melt-water in slick sheets in between the ruts and the commute would have been a thrill. As it is, the banks continue to line the roadway imposingly, but they have not turned into adamant channels of destruction. At five-thirty, BBC murmuring in the background, the sound of steel against asphalt penetrated my fifth-floor sanctum and I looked down from the balcony to see a phalanx of yellow Arlington County trucks moving down the verge, the vanguard of the rush hour, turning one line paths into two. They will not complete the job, and the eager Virginians I'm sure will discover some surprises as they drive too-fast to their places of governance and commerce. Already the traffic is snarled behind them, from Glebe Road back to Seven Corners.

The scraping and banging sounded like the noise I heard in a Korean night once, standing in a darkened Pyongyang. Perhaps it is better said an unlit night, since they never turned the lights on. And there was no snow to move that night, so the sound was ominous rather than filled with the hope of a rapid commute. Godspeed to the plows, and Godspeed to the Virginians on this first morning back to work after the blizzard. Had there only been a few degrees difference in temperature there would have been another disaster on the morning roadways.

The Office of Personnel Management homepage is blunt, telling us to get our little fannies into the office ON TIME, no more shilly-shallying around, get back to the business of governing. Whether the neighborhoods are plowed out or not. Which they aren't, but the melt should take care of that by the end of the day. It is just a matter of degrees in how fast it melts. Too fast by a few degrees and the runs and drains will course down into the placid Potomac, frozen yesterday, but capable of swirling over its banks and sweeping the banks before it. They say 100 billion tons of water was locked up in the snow, and if it all melts swiftly it will come down the Chesapeake divide and inundate us. It is a matter of degree, and would be a major inconvenience.

There is inconvenience aplenty in the wide world. There are dueling pairs of political allies. The President and the Prime Minister are crafting a second UN Resolution which will permit military action in Iraq. In graceful opposition is the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Cardinal of Catholic Britain who have issued an unprecedented joint pastoral letter calling for continued peace. If that is what we have now. The Germans have produced the first conviction of a 9-11 terror suspect. The Frankfurter Allegmeine trumpets: "Triumphgefühle sind nach dem Urteil gegen den Marokkaner Motassadeq fehl am Platze. Gleichwohl ist die bisherige rechtliche Aufarbeitung der Anschläge vom 11. September in Deutschland ein Erfolg für den Rechtsstaat."

My German is too rusty to read more than the gist of it, but I note that the Moroccan expatriate did not carry a box-cutter or a Kalishnikov assault rifle. He was a money guy, one of the cutouts on the anonymous route of funds leading from your wallet through the gas pump to the pockets of Mohammed Atta.

Aviation is not having a good day. An Ilyushin aircraft operated by the Iranian military went down in the hills of the eastern desert, killing 302 members of the Revolutionary Guard. They say weather was a factor, just like it is here. Just a little further east a Pakistani Air Force airplane went missing. It was carrying their Air Chief and a small entourage. There is no word as to cause, but air mishap is a traditional means to adjust the promotion zone there, and it is also popular to blame the Indians for any embarrassing mishap. And near Inchon, on the divided Korean Peninsula, where Doug McArthur brought the troops ashore despite the six-foot tides, the North Koreans challenged the Military Demarcation Line with a fighter jet for the first time in a couple of decades.

The last time this happened was shortly after I decamped the Republic in the early Eighties, relieved as hell to have escaped what seemed to be an imminent invasion. That time a Ilyshun twin-engine bomber came south of the border and made a few passes over the city, flying close to the Blue House before returning north unscathed. It caused great embarrassment and inconvenience to all concerned with air defense matters. This time, the fighter came ashore briefly north of Inchon before wagging its wings and scooting back feet-wet to safety.

It is a ticklish area in that part of the country. The sea frontiers were never specified in the Armistice agreement, and the common understanding was worked out by ship-borne machine guns over the years. In the East Sea, which neither Korea acknowledges as being named for Japan, they call it the "Military Demarcation Line- Extended." A line drawn straight from the 36th Parallel over deep water. It is harder in the West, where the line of troops did not follow the line of latitude, and the Yellow Sea is shallow. The sea-frontier there is called the Maritime Demarcation Line. It weaves and jinks west from the mainland around fortified islands. It is messy, and the fisherman who ply the waters for commerce are a convenient cover for other activities. That is why the South Korean Special Forces have responsibility for the defense of that sector. Steely-eyed troops to deal with a steely-eyed threat.

I don't know why they did it, except to note that the North announced an intent to abrogate the Armistice a couple days ago, and these incursions are carefully considered. This is a matter of state policy, not a hothead in the DMZ shouting unpleasant things about the Great Leader that provokes a fire-fight. The North is telling us something, poking at America to ensure that the Gulf does not provide an exclusive focus. The fighter came ashore just south of the 36th parallel, the difference of only a few miles between a training flight and an act of defiance.

Just a matter of degrees.