Dangerous Times

I set out this morning to write a different column.

I was going to do a bit about the Hillary health issue and make a point about the dereliction of duty by the media in failing to cover the issue until they couldn’t ignore it any longer.

Then I had an exchange with a friend who is an aid worker in Sudan. She’s worried about security of foreign workers and local friends.

It seems armed men in uniforms occasionally go out seize women take them back to quarters and rape them. Including a few foreign aid workers. So far the women have been released afterwards.

My friend and I belong to a loose group of people interested in personal security issues and wanted some feedback. She was concerned about resisting, that it might escalate the situation fatally.

My first thought was, at this point the problem has gone beyond how not to get raped to how not to get dead.

My second was that I had nothing to offer her by way of advice. She’s there and I’m not.

Except for one thing I learned from Steven Vincent, a journalist who was murdered in Basra, Iraq 11 years ago.

I didn’t know Vincent well, but we exchanged a handful of emails over the course of a few months, the latest the weekend he was abducted and murdered. Some time later in Washington I met an Iraqi lady who knew him, and had begged him to live in her house rather than in the community.

I admired Vincent a lot, because he went on his own dime to make up his own mind. Unfortunately it got him killed.

The conclusion I reached, which I passed on to my friend, was that when you go to live in these appalling countries you get to love the people who are trying to live their lives as best they can.

To the point you forget they have a lot more experience surviving there than you do. Which can make to hesitate when you really ought to cut and run.

She thanked me, and mentioned a Serb security man had also warned her that she trusted her driver and some local co-workers way too much.

Maybe it’s not so far from what I set out to write.

The common thread that runs through a lot of our discourse these days seems to be the assumption that reality is optional.

News people that should have been following up on a story ignored it, hoping it would go away. They ignored it because they didn’t want it to be true. Until they were forced to acknowledge Hillary had a problem.

Another example.

I know a fair number of people with opinions about foreign affairs. People who have never lived outside the United States and appear to assume the rest of the world is like us.

It is not.

We are the outliers, a people so rich and secure, and so ignorant of history that we can maintain the happy illusion that the world will never intrude on our fat happy lives so long as we extend the hand of friendship to all.

The consequence of this is that when things go south we start looking for what we did wrong to offend our should-be friends.

Another example. We have two presidential candidates who have assured us they can deal with Vladimir Putin as a friend.

Perhaps they should have listened to Putin’s reply to a similarly clueless German reporter who asked if they could be friends.

“I am not your friend,” Putin replied. “I am president of Russia.”

Putin basically repeated what British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston said. “Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests.”

I’ve been told often that this archaic idea of mine, that the world should be approached with armed wariness is what’s wrong with the world. That lack of a benevolent and trusting attitude to all peoples is what causes conflict.

Putin and I think they’re idiots.

This entry was posted in Op-eds, Politics. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *