Fear, and its close companion anger, is a powerful motivator – in direct competition with love.  Fear thrives on impulse; love plods, sustains, and never ever gives up.  Reason struggles for oxygen in the midst of both.

We are, unavoidably, in a fear moment, one that is familiar to me.  I have a confession to make.  After 9/11, after witnessing its Armageddon-like destruction right in my backyard, including the deaths of my husband’s team of co-workers, my fears persuaded me to believe the WMD propaganda that followed, and I supported the invasion of Iraq.  I, like so many others, acted out of fear.  And today, we are reaping the consequences of that disastrous decision.

With the invasion of Iraq, we poked a hornet’s nest, and now we’re all getting stung in the confused chaos that has followed. The inconvenient truth is, we helped create the Syria and Iraq we have today, and the ISIS we so fear in this moment (just as we helped create the Bin Laden who wreaked the last round of havoc). In that regard, we have a particular responsibility when it comes to the refugee crisis that is erupting before our eyes (but that’s a subject for another discussion).

So it is with the lessons of recent history in mind, that I recoil from reflexive, muscular solutions born out of fear and a thirst for revenge.  What to do will be hotly debated in the weeks ahead.  It is peak political season, so we can expect much of that debate will be, to use the technical term, hooey.  This situation strikes me as one of the most (possibly the most?) complex foreign policy and security challenges we’ve ever faced.  It is not a task for amateurs.  It will require every bit of expertise, fortitude, reasoned analysis and judgment our leaders can muster.  And in that vein, I for one am so very glad we have the president we have.  Many are upset that he didn’t, in his Turkey press conference, sate the national appetite for venom and victory through battle.  Yes, there is a certain satisfaction in hearing our leaders strike a strident tone in times like these, as when George W. hopped up on that smoldering pile to warn our enemies of revenge.  It feels damn good to hear that, in the moment.

But that embattled tone is nothing more than a fix, a short-term high in a struggle that is long, arduous, and complex. We can keep doing what we’ve been doing, responding to recurring moments of fear and anger with recurring deployments of troops and recurring rhetoric that temporarily soothes, like some kind of nightmarish Groundhog Day that becomes the new norm for a generation.  Or at some point, we can decide to go through withdrawal and seek to disrupt the vortex of destruction and hate that is self-perpetuating in the Middle East.  We can try a different approach that might outlast the hate, make room for peace and yes, perhaps even one day, love.  That’s a long term proposition.  I think that’s what the President is trying to do, and I support him.  I hope we and our media will do a better job during this debate than we did in the lead up to Iraq, to fairly evaluate the facts, listen to the real experts, and recognize and tolerate the nuances that complicate any potential solution (despite their annoying lack of entertainment value).

I close with the poem that came to mind as I watched Obama at his press conference in Turkey.  It encapsulates perfectly what I love, and what many on the other side so hate, about this president:

If—

By Rudyard Kipling

 

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

 

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

 

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

 

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!