Cyber Hate: Wrongs With No Faces

My computer picked up a virus even though I have anti-virus protection. I took it to our local techie to clean it up. Some of today’s powerful viruses, she said, can make it through normal anti-virus software.

One who wishes to cause harm can now perpetuate wrong against nameless, faceless victims in record numbers. Was the person who caused the infection to my computer angry at a wrong done to him or her? Were they in rebellion against society or the government? Simply a hacker who does these things for the fun of it? Safe to say that they did not know me, had never met me.

The damage to my computer data was minimal and quickly repaired. But people’s lives can be threatened if power outages happen in more serious circumstances: to electric grids or hospitals.

The news is full of the new combat, cyberwar. Enemies fight through the ether, striving to destroy vital networks.

Perhaps in a society where we increasingly communicate through devices instead of face-to-face, such developments are inevitable. Human nuances and vulnerabilities are filtered out.

What can alleviate our detachment from others? We need more than ever the small face-to-face groups. Families, faith nurturing, and communities are as essential to survival, surely, as the digital grids we depend on.

What Do I Have If I Am All That I Have?

A monster storm in the Midwest takes lives, including those of babies and children, and destroys multitudes of homes. A neighbor’s house burns and she loses all her possessions. A report in The Seattle Times outlines the fault lines for earthquakes in our region. Refugees in various parts of the world carry a few pitiful belongings as they leave homes and vocations, fearing for their lives.

It becomes less of a cliche now to talk of the impermanence of things. Where, then, is the non-thing center we hold to?

Impossible to know how those of us still blessed with sufficient physical possessions will react if we become those people we now examine through the news and social media. With varying shades of sympathy we pause. We may shed tears or even contribute to the Red Cross before heading off to find out about the Arias murder trial or the latest political hype.

But what’s left if we lose all except our lives? Will we bemoan the loss of our wide screen television if our loved ones are taken? If loved ones are, thankfully, accounted for, we might then concern ourselves with finding a secure place to eat, wash, find a bathroom, and sleep.

If those basic needs are met and family safe, what remains from former lives? What is the center that remains?

I don’t know, of course. I can only speculate. Perhaps it’s coincidence, but I’ve been reading The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was a Christian pastor who was hung by the Nazis in 1945 for his opposition to Nazism. His discussion about giving up all one possesses for the one “pearl of great price” begins to penetrate.

How Many American Bodies?

How many American bodies had he sent home in the course of his career? Neal Hudson had not kept count, but he figured it must be close to fifty.

Dept of State So begins my novel, Distant Thunder, the story of Neal Hudson, a U.S. Foreign Service professional. Distant Thunder, like several of my books, deals with a Foreign Service officer, the official name for a U.S. diplomat. Most Americans have no idea our government has a Foreign Service. Thus, I often create a scene in my novels in which the officer has to explain what he or she does.

On rare visits to the States, strangers he’d meet in a hotel or a car rental would ask what he did for a living. He’d fumble around trying to explain. “I’m a consular officer.”

Raised eyebrows. “Oh?”

“A Foreign Service officer.”

“In the military, you mean?”

No, Neal says, and explains about overseas Americans and how Foreign Service officers notify loved ones when an American citizen dies overseas. They see that bodies are sent home. They visit imprisoned Americans and American children living with non-American parents. They perform more mundane tasks, acting as a notary in foreign countries and renewing passports.

Neal serves as a consular officer. Other specialities include political, economic, administrative, and security, to name a few.

Like professionals everywhere—firefighters, police officers, the military, nurses—Foreign Service officers are proud of their service and can never fully explain it to the uninitiated. The interweaving of tragedy, comedy, and an occasional happy ending with a touch of the exotic provides infinite plots for story telling.

Algeria Haunting

My assignment in 1993 to the U.S. embassy in Algiers, Algeria, lasted only about three months. During that brief period, I served as notetaker on an official trip to the western part of the former French colony in North Africa.

We traveled through rounded brown hills that reminded me of the wheat growing region of Washington State’s Palouse. However, an occasional abandoned farmhouse scarred the landscape, left from the bitter civil war between Algeria and France from 1954 to 1962.

Thousands on both sides lost their lives. Torture was common. After the French defeat, the French settlers in Algeria, some of whose families had been there for more than a century, left and wandered France like the exiled Acadians of Longfellow’s poem, “Evangeline” They were called Pieds-Noirs, “black-feet,” a sometimes derisive term that denoted their farming background.

Our official trip in 1993 was shortened when we learned of a terrorist incident in Algiers. Though we did not know it then, the incident foreshadowed a second reign of terror, this time by insurgents against the native Algerian government. An election which threatened to put an Islamist party into power had been cancelled by the government.

A few weeks after our official trip, our embassy evacuated many of the staff, as the insurgency increased, making travel difficult. I left Algeria and never returned.

Some Christian monks who had remained in Algeria were murdered by extremists in 1996. The French movie “Of Gods and Men” is a fictionalized account of the tragedy. The Algerian farmers who were there for so long were mostly Catholic, of course, though the monks served their mainly Muslim neighbors.

I remembered our passage through a village on our long-ago trip. I noticed a building which could only have been a church at one time but wasn’t anymore. I wondered when the last Christian service was held there. Who attended? Where did they go?

Middle East Connectors

In a recent speech, William J. Burns, Deputy Secretary for the U.S. State Department, said: “The Middle East is a place where pessimists seldom lack for either company or validation, where skeptics hardly ever seem wrong. It is a place where American policymakers often learn humility the hard way.”

As Burns pointed out, the recent revolutions in that part of the world have unloosed ancient hatreds and ethnic conflicts, most tragically evident in Syria.

Should we wash our hands of the Middle East and turn our backs on it as we become less dependent on it for our energy supplies?

No, Burns said. The region “has a nasty way of reminding us of its relevance.” Much of the global economy still depends on its large reserves of oil. Extremism, once released from there, cannot be forced back into the bottle. Syria has chemical weapons, and Iran threatens to produce nuclear ones. Three major religions of the world worship at its sacred places.

Burns says we are far better off “working persistently to help shape events, rather than wait for them to be shaped for us.”

What can ordinary Americans do? Connect with the reconcilers. Dr. Lloyd Johnson, a Christian, has established dialogs with several individuals and groups in Israel/Palestine. Other groups, religious and secular, seek reconciliation between the different parties.

Develop respect and empathy for the diverse Middle East peoples, even those with whom you don’t agree. They are mothers, fathers, sons, daughters. They have fears and dreams. Some spew hatred, but others, in all the ethnic groups, work courageously for reconciliation. Connect with them.

Planning a Trip to the United States? What Governments Advise Their Citizens When Traveling to the U.S.

The U.S. government web site travel.state.gov issues warnings and advisories for U.S. citizens for countries all over the world. Information about riots, terrorism, natural disasters, coups, and generally nasty conditions in foreign countries that might impact American citizens are sent out for all to read.

What about travel advisories from other countries for their citizens who plan temporary stays in the United States?

What announcements from foreign governments might the recent Boston Marathon bombings cause, for example? I found this official advice from the United Kingdom for British citizens traveling in the U.S.:

There is a general threat from terrorism. Attacks could be indiscriminate, including in places frequented by foreigners. You should monitor media reports and remain vigilant at all times.

On 15 April 2013 two explosions took place close to the finishing line of the Boston marathon, killing 3 people and injuring over 200.”

I continued to mull over the way other countries might see the U.S. How would Japanese parents, for example, feel about sending their children to study in an American university following mass shootings on a college campus?

How about images of U.S. citizens toting guns at a city council meeting or walking down the street so armed (with proper gun permit, of course)? Might that affect foreign tourists’ desire to visit here?

We sometimes are unaware of how much money foreign tourists and students spend in this country. International visitors to the U.S. spent 14.4 billion dollars in March, 2013, according to numbers issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce. The student tuition from international students alone is a boon to colleges and universities facing domestic cutbacks.

After all, foreigners do have choices. They can vacation and study in, say, Canada, Australia, or the United Kingdom. These countries are democracies with attractions, upscale tourist facilities, and good schools, plus less of a reputation for violence.

Frightened By Knowledge

The people who killed the young U.S. diplomat, Anne Smedinghoff, in Afghanistan in April, are afraid of knowledge. Smedinghoff, a public diplomacy officer with the U.S. embassy in Kabul, was killed by a terrorist bomb. She and her colleagues were delivering books to a school in the war torn country.

Let’s be honest. Knowledge can change us. We take a risk when we choose to learn and explore new ideas.

However, such exploration also can give us more appreciation for solid beliefs taught us by our parents and communities. Certainly, my sojourn in a country with beliefs quite different from those I had grown up with gave me a better understanding of its culture. I can never see its people as mere stereotypes. I am aware, too, of the common humanity that we share. At the same time, my own faith was strengthened. Seeing other belief systems caused me to think more deeply about my own, to test it, and to grow in it.

New knowledge can be challenging, but without it, we stagnate. True faith sends us out in confidence. We may incorporate new beliefs. We may reject them. We may modify our ideas. But only a timid faith refuses the opportunity to grow.

State Department Honors Its Own, Killed While Serving in a Year of Tragic Losses

The C Street entrance to the U.S. State Department is the one with the flags—the flags of those nations with whom the United States has diplomatic relations. It’s the place you see on television when news reporters cover stories about U.S. diplomatic response to foreign crises and conflicts, usually with the flags in the background.

What is not usually shown are the rows of names engraved on the walls of the C Street lobby. These are the names of U.S. State Department personnel who have died in the line of duty: 236 since 1780. Each year on Foreign Service Day, the names of those recently recognized for giving their lives in service to their country are added to the rows. This year has been a year of especially tragic loss. Eight names will be added on May 3.

Four were killed in the terrorist attack on the American mission in Benghazi, Libya. Another was a young woman killed by an explosion in Afghanistan while she was traveling to visit a school and deliver books.

The majority of the State Department’s Foreign Service personnel will not be attending. They will be serving their country as usual in places far removed from the C Street lobby: London, U.K; Moscow, Russia; conflict-ridden Kabul in Afghanistan and Baghdad in Iraq; Sana’a, Yemen; Islamabad, Pakistan; Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia; Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; genocide-haunted Kigali, Rwanda; and 200 plus other U.S. missions around the world.

Syrian Quagmire

Has the Syrian government under Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons? We study the evidence while experts tell us, no matter the use or not, that the Syrian problem has no good solutions.

Terrible crimes against even children cry out to us, but we fear a Vietnam/Iraq outcome. On the other hand, if we don’t help at all or only minimally, we fear that Syria will become an al-Qaeda bastion with chemical weapons.

Recent history is not optimistic. Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the blood and treasure we spent in those countries, are not our bosom buddies. Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya overthrew despotic, corrupt regimes but are at risk of replacing them with narrow Islamist ones.

Secular regimes have a bad reputation in the Middle East because most of them were/are despotic and corrupt. Islamist regimes may yield to the same temptations (witness Egypt), but when given a chance to vote in free elections, citizens seem willing to give them a try in a backlash against the secular ones.

We supported some of those secular regimes. Our decisions in helping Syrians begins with the sober assessment that our influence is limited by our past actions. Some reaping of what we have sown is inevitable.

Perhaps the best we can hope for is an Islamist regime that recognizes basic human rights. We can certainly increase our aid to the daily increasing number of refugees in Turkey and Jordan. From now on, better that we base foreign policy decisions on the common good rather than narrow, selfish goals that come back to haunt us.

Terrorism: Violence Used to Control Others

“Terrorism is violence used in order to create fear, but it is aimed at creating fear in order that the fear, in turn, will lead somebody else—not the terrorist—to embark on some quite different program of action that will accomplish whatever it is that the terrorist really desires.” So wrote David Fromkin back in 1975 in Foreign Affairs.

The terrorist desires to anger the enemy, so that the enemy acts unwisely in the emotion of the moment. The anger may be justified, but the actions may not be.

Some have suggested that our budget-busting military responses to the 9/ll terrorist attacks played into our enemies’ hands, leading us to near bankruptcy. They suggest that more terrorists were created by our actions than have been killed in military campaigns. The longer-term goal of tracking funding for terrorism may have proved more effective. This longer-term process, however, garners fewer headlines than military responses.

Be angry and sin not, the Christian apostle Paul advised, surely knowing how difficult that advice is to carry out. Injustice or the deliberate taking of innocent lives, as happened at the Boston Marathon, should anger us and encourage us to right such wrongs. The trick is to avoid “eye for an eye” retribution but rather to act “for the good of all.”

Striking for the opponent’s eye often is tempting and may accomplish short term goals. Working for the common good takes longer but wins more long term battles. Retaining the moral high ground requires discipline and patience.

Remembering Attacks on the U.S. Embassy Thirty Years Ago in Lebanon

Beirut 1983 On April 18, 1983, fifty-two employees died when a terrorist drove an explosive-laden truck into the U.S. embassy in Beirut, Lebanon. These included Americans and Lebanese. Other innocent civilians were killed as they visited the embassy or walked by on a beautiful spring day. More than one-hundred employees were injured.

Seventeen months later, a van drove up at high speed to a new embassy annex in Beirut and detonated explosives. Twelve people were killed and 63 injured.

Beirut Barracks Between those attacks, terrorists blew up a U.S. Marine Corps barracks near the Beirut airport, killing 221 Marines and other servicemen.

Three of the dead in the first bombing had ties to the U.S. embassy in Tunis, Tunisia, where I was assigned for three years. Two were a couple who had studied at the Arabic language school in Tunis before their assignment to Beirut. One was a Tunisian employee of the embassy in Tunis on a temporary assignment to Beirut.

Beirut memorial in Tunis Their names were carved on a small memorial at the Tunis embassy.When terrorists attacked that embassy last year, the memorial was vandalized. This year it was rededicated on the anniversary of the Beirut attack in which they died thirty years before. When I worked in Tunis, I passed it every day, a reminder of the sacrifice of ordinary people.

Both embassies endure, still staffed by ordinary Americans, Lebanese, and Tunisians hoping for peace in the Middle East.

Look For The Helpers

In this era, one person with grievances, real or perceived, can wreck the lives of countless others.

But one person can help, comfort, and bring goodness, too, even out of tragedy.

The words of Fred Rogers, of the old TV children’s program, “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” are being tweeted and retweeted thousands of times following the tragedy in Boston. You may have read them, but they bear repeating:

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”

The words are from a book Fred Rogers wrote that was published a year before he died, intended to help parents guide their children through tragedy.

Indeed, the helpers in this tragedy, from emergency responders to hospital personnel to ordinary people who offered aid, far outnumber the perpetrators of this evil. It will take much good to overcome the evil that afflicted the men, women, and children killed, injured, and grieved by the incident in Boston, but the helpers are there.

Fred Rogers died in 2003. But his words outlive him, as good often does.

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” (John 1:5, NRSV)

Religious Communities: Players on the World Stage

“The success of American diplomacy in the next decade will be measured in no small part by its ability to connect with the hundreds of millions of people throughout the world whose identity is defined by religion.”

—From “Engaging Religious Communities Abroad: A New Imperative for U.S. Foreign Policy,” The Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

The United States was a multi-cultural society from its beginning. The first Jewish congregation is dated to the colonial period, in Rhode Island, in the mid 1600’s.

Maryland was founded as a colony for Catholics, while many of the New England settlements were begun by Reformed Protestants. Baptists headed to the freedom of Rhode Island. Some of the country’s founding fathers were deists and even agnostics. Later, atheists and Muslims, Hindus and Orthodox Christians and countless others joined the religious mix.

Our ancestors left behind the world of established religions, countries whose identities were bound up in a particular religion, places where one might be persecuted for different beliefs. They left behind the wars of religion which so devastated Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Eventually, Middle Eastern immigrants left countries where Crusaders had fought Turks and other Islamist believers, as well as Jews.

We began a nation where the First Amendment to our constitution allowed for a religious freedom unknown in the old countries.

The countries they left are still there, and many of them consider religion a part of their national identity. Rightfully, we urge them to protect minorities. However, we should refrain from a feeling of superiority. Critics suggest our tolerance risks becoming antagonism toward any religion. Tolerance differs from denigration. If we denigrate religion, we will have a hard time working in a world where the majority find comfort and guidance from it.

Peace With Justice in the Holy Land

Dr. Lloyd Johnson has a passionate interest in peace with justice in the Holy Land. He is the guest writer today to introduce his novel, “Living Stones,” which touches on this theme and will be available this summer. He writes:

“Ann Gaylia O’Barr, published author of five books and with experience in the Middle East, invited me to write as a guest. I’m honored since we share a common interest in the Holy Land today.

“Living Stones” being published by Koehler, a fiction imprint of Morgan James Publishers of New York, will be available in June as an e-book, and paperback in September 2013. Briefly it’s the story of a beautiful graduate student Ashley Wells who is the victim of a jihadist bombing and is abducted in Jerusalem. She falls in love with a Christian Palestinian and is torn by her Zionist beliefs and her new desire to help the Palestinian cause

She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nearly killed in Seattle during a jihadist bombing, Ashley recognizes the synagogue bomber and is later stalked by a hired Muslim hit man in Israel. There she visits the home of Najid, the Christian Palestinian scholar she had left behind at the University of Washington. She falls in love with him, putting her at odds with her Zionist pro-Israeli convictions.

On the run, Ashley sees the beautiful rock churches and shrines. But the living stones, the people of the Holy Land intrigue her. She meets Jews and Palestinians, Rabbis for and against Israeli settlement expansion. Gentle Palestinians like Najid’s family, and those in the West Bank suffering under military occupation. Both Muslims and Christians living peacefully together.

Najid and Ashley find the bomber in Seattle despite the FBI dragnet put out to arrest him. Living Stones is the story of an American woman coming to terms with the truth of the Middle East, and the lies she had been fed. Will she survive the forces that threaten to tear her apart?

Visiting Israel/Palestine twice in past years, and living in Bethlehem this past summer, our hearts broke with the stories of ordinary people suffering the lack of freedom under Israeli military occupation. For 46 years. Imprisonment of kids for long periods, walls separating Palestinians from each other, even from their own farms. Home demolitions, land evictions. Israeli settlers continuing to displace local residents of family land dating back decades. A historic and on-going national effort to cleanse Palestine of Arab citizens. It’s the idea that one ethnic group has the exclusive right to the Holy Land. The “others” must go.

Many Jewish groups of conscience actively oppose the Israeli government’s Zionist ambitions. E.g., http://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/ This cruelty does not represent Judaism’s welcoming the strangers as Abraham did, nor the Good Samaritan teachings of Jesus about loving even our enemies, and doing to others as we would have them do to us.

That wall of separation larger and longer than the Berlin wall promotes the same apartheid we finally shed in the American South, and condemned in South Africa. But now our American tax dollars enable it by funding this injustice. Is this what we in the U.S. really want to do?

Our Christian Palestinian brothers and sisters realize most of us Americans know little of their suffering under military occupation as second-class citizens. Although many excellent books currently available tell their stories, they are non-fiction accounts, often overlooked by all but the most interested readers. (However, “Lemon Tree” by Sandy Tolan has become popular in America, a true story. And Jimmy Carter’s “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.”)

Fiction appeals to many. Who doesn’t like a good story with lots of adventure and a bit of romance? So I am offering “Living Stones” as a story that will entertain, but also inform and leave readers questioning what they have always believed. It may become another voice for peace with justice in the Holy Land. At least I hope so.”

www.lloydjohnson.org

http://www.koehlerbooks.com/books/living-stones/

Scribblings From Exile

After fourteen years as a U.S. Foreign Service officer, I returned to the United States and to writing as my chief occupation. OakTara published five of my novels, and I created a blog with the tag, “Scribblings from Exile.” The theme of the first novel, Singing in Babylon, originated in the prophet Jeremiah’s exhortation from God to Jewish exiles to “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile.”

As a Foreign Service officer, I was assigned to several countries where Christian believers were a tiny minority. After returning to the United States, I realized I am as much in exile in my native country as I was in those alien cultures. Christians are part of a “subversive” minority, the theologian, Walter Brueggemann, has said, a subversive problem in the consumer-oriented West.

At Christian writers conferences, editors and agents told me that American Christians were not interested in books with global settings. At a conference about a year ago, I asked a question in one of the seminars about my interests. At the close of the seminar, a man followed me down the hall and we talked.

We found our ideas compatible, although we work in different spheres. My blogs cover a broad landscape, anything that touches on Christians in exile from the mainstream, with a special emphasis on the Middle East. Dr. Lloyd Johnson’s concern is Israel/Palestine and a desire that justice be done there. We are committed Christians. We both hope American Christians will better understand the rest of the world, including that spot of the planet we call the Holy Land.

Dr. Johnson, a surgeon, has traveled widely, including trips to the Holy Land, and has written a novel to be released this year. I’m delighted to give him space to introduce his book, in this site’s next blog, because he is both knowledgeable and passionate in his writing. His enthusiasm has given me new hope that other Christian exiles will join with us in studying these issues.

Thoughts After A Whidbey Island Landslide

Thousands of feet of earth tore away from a bluff just before Easter on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, where my husband and I live. Whidbey Island, with 168 square miles of land, is one of the larger islands in the continental U.S., so most of Whidbey remains intact, and no one was seriously injured in the slide, though one home, so far, has been destroyed. Other homes sit precariously in danger of future sliding and have basically lost their monetary value.

In fact, all of us, whether we live on unstable soil or not, are never far from losing all that we have in some freak “black swan” event. Tornadoes, meteorites, prolonged droughts, or massive flooding are possible almost anywhere. Recessions can reduce the life savings of ordinary, hardworking citizens and threaten investment in homes.

Such possibilities are sobering when we consider how much time and money many of us have spent in obtaining material possessions.

Should we then become wandering hermits? If God so leads, but Jesus, whom I follow as a Christian, talked of the love of material possessions as the problem, not the possessions themselves. He himself accepted invitations to a good meal, even a banquet, when he had the opportunity. However, it was the community which was important, not the trappings.

Best to avoid major debt or excessive yearning after things, but enjoyment from honest toil, is not forbidden. One of our lifelong tasks is to find the balance between enjoying our material blessings and using them to advance the larger community, including the vulnerable and the have-nots. One way or another, we will lose our physical possessions, if not at the present time, then when we leave this life. They are on loan to us, and I believe we will one day be called to account as to how we used the loan.

Easter Meditation: Christians Grounded in Two-Thousand Years of History

The course of Christianity has been marked by pulsations of advance, retreat, and advance.

–Kenneth Scott Latourette, Volume I, Christianity in a Revolutionary Age

Christianity is a faith that is solidly grounded in history.

–Robert L. Thomas and Stanley N. Gundry, preface to The NIV Harmony of the Gospels

That history includes periods we’d like to forget but can’t because of their lingering influence. Reasons for the Crusades of the Middle Ages were as much economic as religious, a desire for new lands and wealth. We inherit fallout from the Crusades to this day in many of the conflicts in the Middle East.

Colonizations in the Americas evidenced the same split personality. Jamestown vied with Plymouth. Our country inherits this conflict, careening back and forth, stressing economics at one time and community in another.

Some Christians lived more closely to what Jesus taught than others. While Crusaders marched, religious orders treated the ill and destitute in Europe. As the industrial age dawned in the 1700’s, with its disregard for the vulnerable, Christians began schools for children of the poor. They fought against slavery and inhumane working conditions and crowded prisons.

Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it, so the saying goes. Sudden change burst on the world stage—terrorist attacks or revolutions in Arab nations. Others creep in more slowly—social changes due to increased numbers of women in the work force or new methods of birth control. In either case, knowledge of history gives us a better ability to develop reasoned and compassionate responses to such changes.

We Are In For It

“We have got to understand that all our lives the danger, the uncertainty, the need for alertness, for effort, for discipline will be upon us. This is new to us. It will be hard for us. But we are in for it and the only question is whether we shall know it soon enough.”

A former head of the U.S. State Department, Dean Acheson, made this statement on June 4, 1946. Spoken over six decades ago, the words remain relevant.

The United States had just emerged victorious from World War II as the world’s remaining “superpower.” (Sound familiar?) Understandable that the country wanted to rest and enjoy prosperity. Yet the Cold War confrontations with the Soviet Union were just beginning. For over forty years, we inhabited a MAD world (Mutual Assured Destruction).

We made mistakes, but responsible (if not always perfect) leaders kept us from detonating the nuclear war we feared. When the communist world collapsed, the United States was, once again, the world’s remaining superpower. We were, however, respected more for our inclusive government, for allowing dissent, for our burgeoning middle class, for our ability to engage in civil discussion, for a democracy that worked for its citizens.

We talked of a peace dividend, but within the decade, attacks from radicals left us little time to enjoy “peace.” Challenges come from Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, and North Korea, to name a few.

How well will we carry out this round? Do we even realize what the contest is about? Can we manage without unwise resort to power politics? Or can we discipline ourselves as a people and choose the moral high ground, those characteristics that once made us the envy of the world?

Behind the Scenes When a VIP Travels Abroad

President Obama is scheduled to return home today from his trip to the Middle East. The schedule for his trip fits on one sheet of paper. Behind the scenes, complex planning bolsters each phase, as American embassy and consulate staffs direct every detail.

I was never in on a visit from a trip by the U.S. president when I worked at U.S. diplomatic posts overseas, but I remember one by the United States First Lady and several by the Secretary of State. Embassy officers planned official meetings, visits to tourism sites, and gifts to be given. “Control” officers were assigned each major player to guide their every move. You didn’t want an official lost while trying to find the way to a restroom. Security, drivers, and routes had to be plotted in the minutest detail, not to mention interpreters for different languages.

Some of the preparation for a high-level visit made its way into my novel Searching for Home, the story of Hannah and Patrick’s journey toward a deeper relationship while a part of embassy communities. Patrick, a political officer in charge of the visit of a high level visitor, bemoans the visitor’s choice of the time to visit, during a local holiday.

“That’s the way it usually is. They come on our holidays, not theirs.”

Hannah, his new wife, recently arrived to embassy life, asks what’s involved.

“We have to arrange meetings. Photo ops. Every minute, all the logistics, even the drivers have to be plotted like a movie spectacular. Prepare briefings about everybody she’ll meet. Do up talking points. Write up her speeches. . . . We’re thinking about a trip to one of the tourist hotels on the edge of the Sahara. Maybe take her to Kairouan to look at the rugs they weave there.”

Despite the work, high level visits allow face-to-face meetings in local space that can lead to better understanding between nations. The “kitchen” debate between President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev at the American National Exhibition in Moscow in July 1959 remains a classic to this day.

“The shrewd Khrushchev came away from his personal duel of words with Nixon persuaded that the advocate of capitalism was not just tough-minded but strong-willed,” wrote William Safire in The New York Times.

Iraq, Ten Years Out, and Almost Forty for Vietnam

The late Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas wrote a book in 1966 called The Arrogance of Power. Fulbright was the longtime chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He was respected for his knowledge of foreign relations and was strongly anti-Communist. However, he spoke out against America’s growing involvement in Southeast Asia that eventually led to the Vietnamese conflict.

He did not fear, he said, that the United States would seek to dominate in the manner of a Hitler or a Napoleon. He feared rather that we would drift into commitments that were beyond our capacity to honor. We should, he suggested, confine ourselves to doing only those things that truly matter to us.

Like another senator known for his foreign policy expertise, Richard Lugar of Indiana, Fulbright was eventually defeated in his party’s primary. Politicians risk losing their constituency when they emphasize global concerns. “All politics is local,” U.S. Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill once said.

Are we concerned only for our, admittedly important, domestic concerns?

Perhaps we would never have committed so much blood and treasure to Viet Nam, now a byword for a failed U.S. foreign policy, if we, the people, took more time to understand the rest of the world. And what about Iraq, ten years out? Was it worth it?

Ann Gaylia O'Barr

Culture and World Events from a Christian Perspective