Looking for the easy out of a long warA 1970s TV commercial featured a harried housewife who, when confronted with a sink full of dishes, cried out, “Calgon, take me away!” In ancient Greece, playwrights tied off convoluted scripts with a similarly satisfying plot twist known as the Deus ex machina, or literally, “god from a machine.” Want a tidy ending? The “god” lowered from the rafters announced one.
Many would-be grand strategists now struggle mightily to provide America with a quick exit from this long war against the global jihadist movement. The Cold War taught us that dedicated foes take decades to defeat, and yet Americans just naturally want to come home.
Read on at KnoxNews.
Read on at Scripps Howard.
Early Column Sightings:
+ The Press of Atlantic City
+ Capitol Hill Blue, where the comments are hateful
Comments (3)
And MetroDailyWest in MA.
Posted by Tom Barnett | February 18, 2007 9:25 AM
Guess I bumped into the peak oil types again at Capitol Blue. They do get mad when you argue otherwise. I am especially curious at how CERA gets vilified by this crowd. For years and years, Yergin and CERA are considered the cream of the industry crop, but now, because they debunk peak oil, they are evil and incompetent and bought off by big oil.
Lesson: don't mess with people's gods.
But one criticism is correct: I was sloppy to use the word "sources"( after non-oil) when I followed up with a list of technologies that included fuel cells. I was trying to do too much with too few words there and should have used the word "technologies" instead.
But no, I don't worry the PO'd types. The column was never directed at them in the first place, but those who might come under their sway. For them, CERA sounds just fine.
Posted by Tom Barnett | February 18, 2007 9:38 AM
The comments on Capitol Hill Blue are quite revealing about where we are in the national dialogue. Apparently a majority of people in this country believe that there is a choice between war and peace. It's like the Bugs Bunny cartoons when Bugs is falling off a cliff in a phone booth then at the last second steps out for a safe landing as the phone booth
explodes.
But, this is Halliburton's war right? Or as Lydon prefers, one of the last Oil Wars. I consider AO Scott's review of Syriana in the NYT as a personal watershed; it marked a moment in time when I thought, maybe hollywood history is preferable to britannica. Syriana might have mattered if it was made in1999.
Shall we have our cafe au lait and our smokes and just forget about it all: get out of there; they don't want us there; it's our fault anyway; isn't it all just so obvious?
What happens when, as John Burns suggested to Hugh this past week, 3700 are killed in a night in a place like Adhamiya? What will be the Sunni response to something like that? What will be Al Qaeda's response (who have been--of course--drawn to this nation
by our presence)? Sitting between two chairs isn't comfortable or fun.
Posted by JRRICHARD | February 18, 2007 1:38 PM