Yesterday I got my car back. It was in the shop again, for four days, because it gave up the ghost in front of a coffee shop. Again. The first time it didn’t start, my ’99 navy Volvo was parked in front of a Starbucks. That was about a month ago. This time it was a Greenberry’s holding the blue baron captive; the local watering hole is the spot for town and gown to meet. The day my car was sprung, the day the mechanic told me to stay away from coffee shops and next time he’d bring a lighter so the old girl could go out in a blaze of glory, yesterday the humidity broke and it was an absolutely glorious day. I opened the sunroof along with the windows, and I felt like a teenager again, free – cocooned in my semi-safe, might stop at any moment jalopy.
Don’t ask me how I could jump from this seriously demented tale of a car and a coffee shop to the war in Afghanistan, but I’m going to try. I was listening to an ex-Marine, journalist speak at The Miller Center. This is their mission – “The Miller Center is a nonpartisan institute that seeks to expand understanding of the presidency, policy, and political history, providing critical insights for the nation’s governance challenges.” One of the most wonderful things about this town, is that these lectures are free to the public.
Matt Pottinger was working for the Wall Street Journal when he joined the Marines in 2005. He talked about how, contrary to what we might think, people who have had military experience of their own, are less likely to recommend going to war. But that when they do, they go all out. People who have not had any military experience, are more likely to want war….and then they want to go to war incrementally. Like hey, let’s order a no-fly zone, or a blockade. The guys with combat experience will go to war to win it! And we now have more legislators in DC without military experience than at any other time in history.
So here are my early morning thoughts. Can we actually win a war on terrorism? Isn’t it like saying we can win a war on drugs, or on crime? In my mind, I’d like to believe that the elite Seal and special ops troops, those 30 brave Americans shot down this past weekend, did not die in vain. If we truly want to make life better for the Afghan people, if we want to help nurture a free and open society, an alternative to the Taliban’s rule of law, we had better learn their language and their customs; we had better build wells and hospitals and schools.
“In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved.” ~Franklin D. Roosevelt
MountainMornings 
I can’t tie in the car and Afghanistan, but if Congress would implement another ‘cash for clunkers” program, I can see you first in line.
I know, the analogy is shaky. But think driving an old Volvo around, like ours, instead of being covered in a burka watching Taliban thugs drive their pick-ups around waving guns….but it was more an essay about freedom, I think. A very hard concept to export.