After great pain, a formal feeling comes-
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?The Feet, mechanical, go round –
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
– Emily Dickinson (#341)
YESTERDAY: I couldn’t watch the television. We’ve all seen enough. It was a very high tide here. The water kept coming and coming toward the wharf I live on until it lapped almost underneath. As the tide crested, three boys and a chocolate lab puppy played in the surf, tossing branches into the water and having the puppy fetch. On wharves to either side of me, Old Glory fluttered. And as the sky cleared, and the boys left, the beagle and I went for a walk on the beach and fetched a cup of tea from a nearby coffee-shop. I wanted a normal, quiet day. I wanted to live a piece of the normality that was so abruptly snatched from so many a year ago. I wanted quiet. Quiet before more dread of the future. It occurs to me that my somewhat insistent view that we need to fight back against the roots of this horror might be misconstrued as a love or passion for war. I hope not. In fact, I think some of the anger many of us felt a year ago is related to our hatred of war. I loved the innocence of America when I came here almost twenty years ago. The one strain of American isolationism I warmed to was the natural and so American desire to be left in peace on this continent, to start the world anew, to live as if the routine of war and threat and danger were forever dispelled by the vast oceans that surround this continent. I love the fact that Americans actively hate war, its trappings, its necessities. No lover of freedom loves war, which always limits freedom. But war was brought here – a vile, almost medieval religious war, fueled by hatred and resentment and paranoia and failure. Their campaign, alas, is not a metaphor. They are brutally opposed to such things. Even imagery is banned under their austere form of Islam. They read literally; they hate with divine dispensation. Our campaign against them and their sponsors and supporters in Baghad and Damascus and Ryadh and Tehran is not therefore a function of our love of war; but our determination to end it, and to liberate that part of the world from the despots and psychoses that now hold it back.
THE BEST 9/11 PIECE: Lileks always makes me feel less lonely.
SCHRODER’S GAMBLE: The German Chancellor has made clear that he opposes any military intervention to rid the world of Saddam’s threat of weapons of mass destruction. But re-reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s superb piece in the New Yorker earlier this year, a reader came upon this passage:
Saddam Hussein never gave up his hope of turning Iraq into a nuclear power. After the Osirak attack, he rebuilt, redoubled his efforts, and dispersed his facilities. Those who have followed Saddam’s progress believe that no single strike today would eradicate his nuclear program. I talked about this prospect last fall with August Hanning, the chief of the B.N.D., the German intelligence agency, in Berlin. We met in the new glass-and-steel Chancellery, overlooking the renovated Reichstag. German industry is well represented in the ranks of foreign companies that have aided Saddam’s nonconventional-weapons programs, and the German government has been publicly regretful. Hanning told me that his agency had taken the lead in exposing the companies that helped Iraq build a poison-gas factory at Samarra. The Germans also feel, for the most obvious reasons, a special responsibility to Israel’s security, and this, too, motivates their desire to expose Iraq’s weapons-of-mass-destruction programs. Hanning is tall, thin, and almost translucently white. He is sparing with words, but he does not equivocate. “It is our estimate that Iraq will have an atomic bomb in three years,” he said.
So the head of German intelligence believes Saddam will – not “might” but “will” – have a nuclear capacity in three years. And he also believes no single missile-strike will remove it. Why hasn’t anyone called Schroder on this?
THE PRO-WAR LEFT: Lest we forget it exists, here’s a passage from an email I just received:
I have always been a knee-jerk liberal, and passionate Democrat. (While George Bush and I were both at Yale, I canvassed New Haven working class neighborhoods for Eugene McCarthy.) But September 11 has made me a kind of War-On-Terror liberal, something like the old Cold War liberals I used to – mistakenly, I now see – disparage. Anyway, I am now completely behind the war against the Islamic fascists. And I think Sontag is a contemptible fool. Your perspicacious reader was exactly right to suggest the world has passed her by; I think this is a deep problem for many people just now.
Hope again.
The Dish 