Greetings from a land of bent and broken things.

Some of you may have noticed I didn't post my own thoughts on yesterday's elections. My reason is simple: it wasn't my day. I watched through tearing eyes. Yes, this old trooper shed a few tears of joy at what had happened. Like the amazing fall of the Berlin wall, the peaceful "revolutions" that freed Eastern Europe, this was another great victory in my lifetime, and one I felt a little bit involved in. This wasn't George Bush's victory, this wasn't America's victory, this certainly wasn't my victory, this was a victory for the people of Iraq and those who love freedom everywhere. I was an observer, a very close observer, but an observer nonetheless.

I liked what I saw.

Now note the header above. The work has just begun. I see bent and broken, scarred and ruined things here every day. Many were damaged years ago. 1991? 2003? In between? After? It's often hard to tell. Many will be fixed in time, others are beyond repair. Now substitute the word "people" for "things" in the preceding and read it again. Meet a group of Iraqi people and one will tell you how grateful he is that we have given him freedom. He will tell you he lived in fear for his life every day under Saddam. His joy is real, and fundamental, and obvious. Then the next will tell you he lost his entire family in the invasion. He's glad Saddam's gone, but he's paid a price that few would be willing to pay were they given the option.

What would you say to him? "Sorry about that. But cheer up, old boy! Other than that you must admit this freedom thing is pretty great, eh?" No - there's nothing that can be said. He may or may not hate the United States, he may blame Saddam for what happened, but here is a man with the rest of his life before him, and he'll live each day without his family.

The greater good, of course, is served. Many Americans died in this endeavor too; such things temper the celebration. I think Iraqi blogger Alaa offers the right perspective:

My condolences to the Great American people for the tragic recent losses of soldiers. The blood of Iraqis and Americans is being shed on the soil of Mesopotamia; a baptism with blood. A baptism of a lasting friendship and alliance, for many years to come, through thick and thin, we shall never forget the brave soldiers fallen while defending our freedom and future.

I'd add our Coalition allies to that sentiment too.

So amidst the triumph, I saw yesterday as a Memorial Day, of a sort, for those many who fell to make it possible. Some might try and use those deaths for their own ends, or to justify their belief that we should never have walked this path. Such people don't believe in heroes. They can't even comprehend this simple fact; no one is more opposed to war than the soldier. He knows the cost and has seen the carnage. But as I wrote at the top of the sidebar long ago: The Mudville Gazette is the on-line voice of an American warrior, who prefers to see peaceful change render force of arms unnecessary. Until that day he stands fast with those who struggle for freedom, strike for reason, and pray for a better tomorrow.

Today we re-build broken things. Grab a hammer or get out of the way.

I've pondered the larger issues much these past few days. We certainly opened ourselves up to criticism in invading Iraq. After all, regardless of our reason it's certainly easy for those who'd prefer to live in a world without war to condemn our actions. A world without war is certainly desirable, but at this point in history it seems at best a distant utopia. Perhaps some day that time will come, but I'm skeptical, at best, of mankind's potential to rise above such activity in the foreseeable future. I think that's one of the lines that separate many "anti-war" types from those who are more pragmatic about the issue. Those who are familiar with the 80-20 rule (20% of the people cause 80% of the problems) will understand what I'm about to say. I'm certain that though 80% of the population of the world wants to go about their daily business in peace, the other 20% are determined to have it otherwise. Much of the problem with the "anti-war" crowd is they fail to realize that many of their "allies" are actually part of the 20%, while most of us involved in the current War on Terror are actually in the 80% with them. But another version of the 80-20 rule explains this too: 20% of the people do 80% of the work. Thus a small fraction of the real anti war crowd is busy doing the very best they can to try and establish a future world where peace actually has a chance.

In my spare time here I've been reading Neal Stephenson's brilliant epic

(On a recommendation by Glenn Reynolds - thanks Glenn.) Cruising along through the novel yesterday I reached this passage, a conversation between two individuals whose identities I'll leave out for this discussion (hence no spoilers will be found below. Read without fear.) In one of those somewhat rare moments when what I'm reading unexpectedly addresses something I've had on my mind, it conveyed perfectly what I'd been trying to put into words for some time. (And note that this book was published a couple of years before 9/11.)

One character explains to another why he wears a medallion bearing a likeness of the Greek goddess Athena:

"So anyway, you probably learned in elementary school that Athena wears a helmet, carries a shield called Aegis, and is the goddess of war and wisdom, as well as crafts - such as the aforementioned weaving. Kind of an odd combination, to say the least! Especially since Ares was supposed to be the god of war and Hestia the goddess of home economics - why the redundancy? But a lot's been screwed up in translation. See, the kind of wisdom that we associate with old farts like yours truly, and which I'm trying to impart to you here, was called dike by the Greeks. That's not what Athena was the goddess of! She was the goddess of metis, which means cunning or craftiness, and which you'll recall was the name of her mother in one version of the story... So now the connection to crafts becomes obvious - crafts are just the practical application of metis."

"I associate the word 'crafts' with making crappy belts and ashtrays in summer camp."

"It's all bad translation. The word that we use today, to mean the same thing, is really technology."

"Okay. Now we're getting somewhere."

"Instead of calling Athena the goddess of war, wisdom and macrame, then, we should say war and technology. And here again we have the problem of an overlap with the jurisdiction of Ares, who's supposed to be the god of war. And let's just say that Ares is a complete asshole. His personal aides are Fear and Terror and sometimes Strife. He is constantly at odds with Athena even though - maybe because - they are nominally the god and goddess of the same thing - war. Heracles, who is one of Athena's human proteges, physically wounds Ares on two occasions, and even strips him of his weapons at one point! You see, the fascinating thing about Ares is that he's completely incompetent... And so it seems to me that Ares really was a god of war as such an entity would be recognized by people who were involved in wars all the time, and had a really clear idea of just how stupid and ugly wars are.

"Whereas Athena is famous for being the backer of Odysseus, who, let's not forget, is the guy who comes up with the idea for the Trojan Horse. Athena guides both Odysseus and Heracles through their struggles, and although both of these guys are excellent fighters, they win most of their battles through cunning or (less pejoratively) metis. And although both of them engage in violence pretty freely (Odysseus likes to call himself 'sacker of cities') it's clear that they are being held up in opposition to the kind of mindless, raging violence associated with Ares and his offspring - Heracles even personally rids the world of a few of Ares psychopathic sons. I mean the records aren't totally clear - it's not like you can go to the Thebes County Courthouse and look up the death certificates on these guys - but it appears that Heracles, backed up by Athena all the way, personally murders at least half of the Hannibal Lecterish offspring of Ares.

"So insofar as Athena is a goddess of war, what really do we mean by that? Note that her most famous weapon is not her sword but her shield Aegis, and Aegis has a gorgon's head on it, so that anyone who attacks her is in serious danger of being turned to stone. She's always described as being calm and majestic, neither of which adjectives anyone ever applied to Ares."

"I don't know, ___. Defensive versus offensive war, maybe?"

"The distinction is overrated... Now in many other mythologies you can find gods that have parallels with Athena. The Norse had Loki. Loki was an inventor-god, but psychologically he had more in common with Ares; he was not only the god of technology but the god of evil too, the closest thing they had to the Devil. Native American has tricksters -creatures full of cunning - like Coyote and Raven in their mythologies, but they didn't have technology yet, and so they hadn't coupled the Trickster with Crafts to generate the hybrid Technologist-god."

..."So, you want me to believe that these gods - which aren't really gods, but it's a nice concise word - all share certain things in common precisely because the external reality that generated them is consistent and universal across cultures."

"That is right, and in the case of the Trickster gods the pattern is that cunning people tend to attain power that un-cunning people don't. And all cultures are fascinated by this. Some of them, like many Native Americans, basically admire it, but never couple it with technological development. Others, like the Norse, hate it and identify it with the Devil."

"Hence the strange love-hate relationship that Americans have with hackers."

"That's right."

"Hackers are always complaining that journalists cast them as bad guys. But you think that this ambivalence is deeper-seated."

"In some cultures. The Vikings - to judge from their mythology - would instinctively hate hackers. But something different happened with the Greeks. The Greeks liked their geeks. That's how we got Athena."

"I'll buy that - but where does the war-goddess thing come in?"

"Let's face it, Randy, we've all known guys like Ares. The pattern of human behavior that caused the internal mental representation of Ares to appear in the minds of the ancient Greeks is very much alive today, in the form of terrorists, serial killers, riots, pogroms, and aggressive tinhorn dictators who turn out to be military incompetents. And yet for all their stupidity and incompetence, people like that can conquer and control large chunks of the world if they are not resisted. . . . Who is going to fight them off, Randy?

"I'm afraid you're going to say we are."

"Sometimes it might be other Ares-worshippers, as when Iran and Iraq went to war and no one cared who won. But if Ares-worshippers aren't going to end up running the whole world, somebody needs to do violence to them. This isn't very nice, but it's a fact: civilization requires an Aegis. And the only way to fight the bastards off in the end is through intelligence. Cunning. Metis

"Tactical cunning, like Odysseus and the Trojan horse, or - "

"Both that, and technological cunning. From time to time there is a battle that is out-and-out won by new technology - like longbows at Crecy. For most of history those battles happen only every few centuries - you have the chariot, the compound bow, gunpowder, ironclad ships, and so on. But something happens around , say, the time that the Monitor, which the Northerners believe to be the only ironclad warship on earth, just happens to run into the Merrimack, of which the Southerners believe exactly the same thing, and they pound the hell out of each other for hours and hours. That's as good a point as any to identify as the moment when a spectacular rise in military technology takes off - it's the elbow in the exponential curve. Now it takes the world's essentially conservative military establishments a few decades to really comprehend what has happened, but by the time we're in the thick of the Second World War, it's accepted by everyone who doesn't have his head completely up his ass that the war's going to be won by whichever side has the best technology. So on the German side alone we've got rockets, jet aircraft, nerve gas, wire-guided missiles. And on the Allied side we've got three vast efforts that put basically every top-level hacker, nerd, and geek to work; the code-breaking thing, which as you know gave rise to the digital computer; the Manhattan Project, which gave us nuclear weapons; and the Radiation Lab, which gave us the modern electronics industry. Do you know why we won the Second World War?"

"I think you just told me."

"Because we built better stuff than the Germans?"

"Isn't that what you just said?"

"But why did we build better stuff?

"I guess I'm not competent to answer. I haven't studied that period well enough."

Well, the short answer is that we won because the Germans worshipped Ares and we worshipped Athena."
<...>
"Ares always reemerges from the chaos. It will never go away. Athenian civilization defends itself from the forces of Ares with metis, or technology. Technology is built on science... science flourishes where art and free speech flourish."

"Sounds teleological. Free countries get better science, hence superior military power, hence get to defend their freedoms. You're proclaiming a sort of Manifest Destiny here."

"Well, someone's got to do it."

"Aren't we beyond that sort of thing now?"

"I know you're just saying that to infuriate me. Sometimes Ares gets chained up in a barrel for a few years, but he never goes away. The next time he emerges the conflict is going to revolve around bio-, micro-, and nanotechnology. Who's going to win?"

Who indeed? Take this simple test in your home country: Complain endlessly about the fact that you don't have free speech. If no one shoots you or locks you in jail, you have free speech. If people call you an idiot, they have free speech too.

And your nation is probably Athenian, and you can complain about it to your heart's content.