Yorkville High Street
Today, I point you to some of the very oldest writing at Portico - it seems to date all the way back to 1999! It's a collection of three pieces. The first is about the unusual street on which I live - a subject that I'll be revisiting in a year or so when two new buildings continue the transformation of the neighborhood, from a German enclave to a destination shopping street. The second piece is about James de la Vega, an artist from Spanish Harlem who has been gracing the city's sidewalks with gracefully irreverent chalk drawings for years. It was written upon just having seen Mr de la Vega at work right outside my building. The third piece, I think, needs to be opened up and expanded; it's about what Howard Dietz, in the lyrics for the song "Paree," called "New York with its rush-rush-rush."
When these pieces were written, I had absolutely no idea of what I was doing on the Internet. Blogging was not even on my radar.
¶ In yesterday's Times, Terence J Daly, a "retired military intelligence officer and counterinsurgency specialist who served in Vietnam as a province-level adviser," expresses an idea that I've been chewing on for a while. If I've kept it to myself, it's because I haven't a shred of military experience. But it has come to seem to me that conventional armies are not the way to fight the war on terror. The Iraqi "insurgency" is not an army at all, but rather an uprising that rends the civil fabric. Military force, which is equally heedless of civil fabric, cannot possibly undertake its repair. Mr Daly is right, I believe, to propose a police model for our activities in Iraq. Mr Daly concludes,
Forcing the round peg of our military, which has no equal in speed, firepower, maneuver and shock action, into the square hole of international law enforcement and population control isn’t working. We need a peacekeeping force to complement our war-fighters, and we need to start building it now.
Step One would be the massive deployment of Arabic-speaking American agents. Now, I don't think it's very likely, either. Not in this misadventure; not with this Commander-in-Chief (who seems almost as innocent of military experience as I am). But next time. There's certain to be a next time.
