{"id":1611,"date":"2007-11-13T05:20:48","date_gmt":"2007-11-13T10:20:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1611"},"modified":"2007-11-13T05:20:48","modified_gmt":"2007-11-13T10:20:48","slug":"a-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1611","title":{"rendered":"A Conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Austin Bay has a heart-to-heart<\/a>\u00a0with a fighter pilot in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

They have a lot of territory to cover together – you should read the whole thing.’<\/p>\n

The fighter pilot – a colonel whose son is a new Army officer, the second generation in his family to fight in the War on Terror – is tired.\u00a0 Bay sums it up:<\/p>\n

Now, once upon a time we could ignore those suffering in the planet\u2019s hard corners. Oh, we could send them a few bucks and the Lefties could bitch about colonialism and capitalism but the hard corners were isolated. A threat to security? Only nuns and missionaries and you are your brothers keeper types thought so. Well guess what \u2014 the nuns were right. 9\/11 changed that deceptive calculus. Distance? Colonel, there isn\u2019t any distance. We learned that the destruction of New York and Washington started in the backwaters, of Afghanistan, of Somalia. Technology has done it. We can\u2019t escape one another, for good and for bad. Jet transports, like the ones out on the runway at Bagram, put you on the other side of the globe in 14 hours. The internet doesn\u2019t require description. East Asia shares diseases with Africa within days, if not hours. And special weapons? Nukes and nerve gas make every tribal war an international crisis. Goodbye Tokyo, Moscow, or Miami\u2013 because a sophisticated tribesman at war with his eternally despised neighbor decides that demolishing the global economy would make everyone pay attention to his neglected, forgotten grievance. Tyrannies keep breeding this insanity…He looked at me, the dreadful nearness of it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s on us, man, I continued. And I don\u2019t like it. I didn\u2019t like it during the Cold War. Remember 1983? The same creeps who\u2019ve quit now, quit then. Reagan was a warmonger, going to start a nuclear war in Europe my responding to the Soviets deployment of theater nuclear missiles. The defeatists said the Cold War was our fault, we were the threat. Then the Berlin Wall cracked and that jackass calumny disappeared as Marxism\u2019s Eastern European wreckage emerged in drab, polluted, horrifying, undeniable color.<\/p>\n

This war follows the same arc, with the same defeatists adding new nouns to old verbs and adjectives. But it\u2019s a war of liberty versus tyranny and they\u2019re shilling for the tyrants.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Take it up with the Colonel.\u00a0 Both of them, really.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Austin Bay has a heart-to-heart\u00a0with a fighter pilot in Afghanistan. They have a lot of territory to cover together – you should read the whole thing.’ The fighter pilot – a colonel whose son is a new Army officer, the second generation in his family to fight in the War on Terror – is tired.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-war-on-terror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1611"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1611\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}