Sunday Sermon: Shifting World-Views

The first moment where I started to wonder was in 6th or 7th grade social studies. We had a textbook about “geography” which included some geopolitics; a picture on one page of Uncle Sam sitting in a circle with characteristic (even stereotypical) kids of various ethnicities. It wasn’t quite as bad as that the kid from Africa had a bone through his nose – not quite. The caption read “Americans want to be friends with everyone.” And when the page was turned, the picture was of a Red Army soldier in WWII uniform, with a ppsh tommygun held at port arms, “The Soviets want to rule the world.”

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What Happened to Kurdistan?

It sounds like the Kurds have been out-maneuvered by the Iraqi regime; then left twisting in the wind by their American backers. Iraqi Abrams M-1 tanks (which are basically invincible against the light vehicles the Kurds have) were the convincing argument – the Iraqis inter-penetrated Kurdish positions in the Kirkuk area, essentially a peaceful “overrun” maneuver – and the Kurds realized that if they offered resistance, they’d be slaughtered.

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It’s Hard to Know But I Have Suspicions

When you’ve got over half a trillion dollars at stake, people will do or say pretty much anything. So it gets hard to figure out what’s going on when you read headlines in the form of “X is an ongoing disaster” alongside of “great cost-savings achieved via X” for any given X. It’s hard to be both a tremendous success and an ongoing disaster. I am, naturally, referring to the latest news about the F-35 program.

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The Myth of Self-Defense

Strategy is the process of imagining possible futures and how they come about, then “pruning” back the lines of causality to try to infer what actions will get you there. It’s an active process that stresses a person’s creativity and analytic skills. The hardest part, I believe, is coming up with (and eliminating) endless hypotheticals of everything that could go wrong right now for any given now. This, however, is the essence of strategy.

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