23 October 2003

Parallel Lines

He who loses, wins the race,

And parallel lines meet in space.

-- John Boyd, "Last Starship from Earth"

On Oct. 23, 1983, a suicide truck loaded with six tons of explosives crashed through a barrier and detonated at the four-story headquarters of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit at Beirut International Airport in Lebanon. 241 U.S. Marines and sailors were killed. There was a near-simultaneous attack on positions occupied by French Foreign Legion paratroopers. 58 died there, and it could have been worse for them. The French sacrifice was largely obscured by the awful images of the rows and rows of dead Americans in parallel lines on the tarmac waiting for transportation home.

Something to think about these days, in the time of our alienation from our old Allies.

The British and Italians who had joined in the Coalition to save Lebanon were unscathed, but everyone folded and we all left Lebanon abruptly thereafter, though we retained an active interest in the camps in the Bekaa Valley, accessible through a winding road up to the highlands above Beirut. I came to know that road well, and the path to the camps where the terrorists trained when we had responsibility for strike operations in the Eastern Med, because of that interest, though I never walked or rode it. We should have done something right then, a statement about terrorism, but we did not appear to know what we were doing.

Or perhaps, better said, none of the grownups took the time to explain what we were going to do. For us in the big machine, the process had to keep grinding along. As a nation we were asked to believe impossible things to account for each development on the road to 9-11.

Something happened in our policy world after the Barracks went skyward. Remember the context. The Soviets were mired in their adventure in Afghanistan. The Mullahs were triumphant in Iran. The revolutions in El Salvador were in full flower and the prognosis did not seem good. We withdrew from direct military action and entered into the twilight world, using proxies to carry on the struggle against Communism. Arming the Mujahadeen against the Russians. Then, in the moment of our collective triumph, we walked away from the whole enterprise. We did not listen to what they said about the Russians, and we did not believe what they said about us.

We even had our moments of optimism. On this day in 1998, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat signed a land-for-peace agreement at the White House. They had talked at the conference center at Wye River, Md. They have excellent pastries at the Plantation in the morning if you are ever called to mediate an insoluble international conundrum.

Three years after that, on this same day, they found traces of Anthrax in the mail-sorting equipment at the Base that handles the remote administrative activities of the White House. We still have not figured that one out, though the conventional wisdom is that it was a domestic terrorist, and thus not part of a larger problem.

Just last year, one year ago today, the Chechin terrorists seized a crowded Moscow theater. They held hundreds hostage until the Russian Army flooded the place with some gas they still won't talk about and took them down. Unfortunately they killed dozens of the hostages, too, but appeared to take the casualties as part of the cost of doing business. The Russians did not pull out of Chechnya. I still recall what the Russians did when the Lebanese terrorists went after one of the KGB principals in Beirut.

In the rules of engagement in the shadow world of the clandestine Services, the major opponents consider each other off limits to direct action. Everyone has families, after all, and short of open warfare there is a certain live-and-let-live approach to business. They did not pull out. Instead, the Russians went active and personal. No cruise missiles. They went to he homes of those who had threatened them and took actions that inspired fear in the erstwhile Jihadists. They used action as message, not trusting it to words.

The key to this approach is that you have to know who your opponents are. And we don't. We seem to live in a Never-land where you can hand Stinger missiles to Osama bin Laden and then act surprised when he uses them, or something larger, on you. Sometimes words mean exactly what they sound like.

I blame the Deconstructionist Movement, the academic theory that maintained that words only meant things in the context that they were understood. Which is to say that nothing meant anything in particular except through the lens of your cultural or gender context. Not even yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater was safe from this interpretation. Whose fire? Was it set by an oppressor or a victim? How should we process this information, and on what cultural basis? I wondered what the Moscow theatergoers thought in those last moment of consciousness. Would it have mattered to the Chechins if someone yelled?

This curious notion insidiously invaded our educational institutions in the 1990s, was useful in the great Clinton Morality Wars, and became common wisdom. The concept in no small part got us in the fix we are in.

I think words do mean something. The word this week- if I may be permitted to use the word from my cultural context of word-as-news- there is going to be an Inspector General investigation on the words uttered by Lieutenant General William G. Boykin. He is a decorated Special Operations solider whose career goes back to the DESERT ONE debacle and every shadow operation since then. Reporters began to follow him when someone whispered that the General went to prayer breakfasts and made remarks. The remarks were loaded with forbidden messages. The General claimed that we were engaged in a religious war. That the enemy in the war on terrorism was Satan. And, horrors, that God had put President Bush in the White House. The reporters even claimed that he had called a Somali warlord an idol-worshipper.

We know that Islam does not embrace the worship of idols, and in fact, the reaction to such conduct is what brought the revelation to Mohammed. But holy warriors on either side are rarely bothered by such detail. And on the whole, I am pleased that one of the warriors on my side knows who to fight.

The Pentagon released a statement from Boykin apologizing to those who were offended and saying the three-star general did not mean to insult Islam. Boykin is the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. I imagine he will get fired in a couple days because he had the bad judgment to say that Muslims who call for the death of Americans on religious grounds are more numerous than a few al Qaida operatives. That we have got a very real and very large problem. And we cannot even begin to say what we confront, for fear that we will offend those who would murder us.

Remember the poem. There are a lot of people in this world who believe the first shall be last. But I remember math class. The definition of parallel lines is that they never meet.

But that would require words to mean things. And for someone to listen.