"Words need bullets to back them up. But bullets need words behind them too." [UPDATED]

How counterterrorism coordinates with "counternarrative" to crack al Qaeda.  Parts of a brilliant and informative series at The Belmont Club.  Don't miss the comments, they're of the same caliber.

Which reminds me, there are 140 comments on the rare Iraq post at Althouse.  Go to any of these posts and you'll hear mostly guys, mostly seriously talking over what is to be done.  I've said before, in regard to a debate a year and a half ago about invading Iran (!), that my reaction to this is atavistic:

a primitive and stupid girl-child's horror at eavesdropping on the excited, alarmist deliberations of the men oiling their guns in the lighted kitchen, men getting ready to protect us at such appalling cost, insisting they're forestalling far greater cost. And maybe they are.

It's as vivid as a memory from another lifetime, or maybe just from a YA novel I read when I was twelve -- I can smell the gun oil.  Funny though, maybe because it's not about a hypothetical war but an ongoing one, this time I reacted differently.  This time it makes me feel comforted.  This is what the men are supposed to be doing -- seriously considering how best to protect all of us -- and they know it.

(By the way, I hate that that weirdly foreign-sounding locution "the homeland" is now accepted and used without comment or consciousness by TV reporters.  I was with whoever said it sounded like a translation from Nazi-era German when it first came up.  Die Heimat.  But then, I'm sounding awfully Kinder Küche Kirche myself, aren't I?  I feel as if I should "get thee to a firing range" to counteract my sad suspicion that feminism is a luxury confined to very sheltered times and places.  And I'm a black belt.)

UPDATE:  Callimachus at Done With Mirrors explains why we need the word "homeland," even though "[m]any lefties think that word smacks of Hitlerism."  (C'mon, Cal, you're a word guy. I shouldn't have to tell you that you don't have to be a lefty to think "homeland" sounds translated and creepy.  Can anybody think of a better concise term for "the territorial U.S." as distinct from ""the U.S. as represented by soldiers, interests, property, and citizens abroad"? ...Oh well.  At least it isn't "The Motherland" or "The Fatherland.")

Comments

[ThinkItThroughNow...]

Honest responses? This is a pititful work:

This time it makes me feel comforted. This is what the men are supposed to be doing -- seriously considering how best to protect all of us -- and they know it.

Honest maybe, but I feel sad for you and your situation. I wonder if Condi Rice should be thinking of resigning...

Perhaps you also do a disservice to the women serving. Maybe it isn't a gender thing, maybe it's a religion or ethnicity thing. Some men are better protectors is all, if we're generalizing... right.

Finally, maybe you should ya know, READ that thread that makes you feel so comforted in your pretty head that the men folk are "oiling their guns" ready to protect us. It won't boost your confidence much, I predict, and if it does, I pity you deeper.

Fear is no time to turn against other women, amba. Women military leaders, women fighters. The men-folk who have no experience serving don't seem to be doing such a great job leading; you want to abandon thinking responsibility to men now because you are afraid? Science has taught you that genetically they're just better at these things?

It's just pitiful, like all those New Yorkers running yesterday from a blown sewer pipe. Understandable sure. Pitiful, definitely.

[ThinkItThroughNow...]

Did you delete the line about feminism needing to take a back seat at times like this -- or was that in another post? Smelled like fear to me

[amba]

You can be very literal-minded, TITN. Very unsubtle. Can we say tone-deaf? It should be clear to anyone who doesn't have a tin ear that I am not exactly approving of my own feelings. I honestly reported having them. I was a kid in the darkest '50s, probably reading some young-adult novel about frontier times or whatever.

I also think it doesn't take "science" to tell us that protection is the brighter side of what men are built for.

It is also only realistic, not ideal, to say that the equality we enjoy is a protected privilege. When civilization breaks down (now talking about the darker side of what men are built for, and how some will not hesitate to use it), women had better know how to fight and shoot, not just talk, if they want to protect themselves rather than need protection. That's why I talked about going to a firing range.

Idealism is very nice and good, but it had better also face some realities if it doesn't want to be wiped out the first time things get rough.

[wj]

Of course, in some sense that's what all of civilization is: a protected priviledge that keeps the weak (regardless of gender) from having to live in fear of or under the heel of the strong. Fortunately, the species seems to have quite a few strong individuals who reflexively defend the weak without exploiting them. Not an over-supply, but enough that we have been able to slowly build up a corps of strong individuals who do so from training/education/acculturation/etc. to complement those who come by it naturally. Which, in turn, means we have been able to move away from sort of anarchistic tribalism that afflicts so much of the Middle East and Africa today.

Not that we are away free and clear. One has only to watch the tribalism of the current administration to realize how fragile our hold still is. (It's a tribalism of wealth, rather than simply family. But the same "grab everything for My People and to hell with everyone else" view would not be out of place in the meanest central African kleptocracy. Just the definition of My People is different.)

[Callimachus]

Well, "patria" would be shorter, and would convey the right image to our European friends, but it's Latin and it's literally "fatherland," so that would creep people out, too. Joyce, Shaw, and H.G. Wells all used "patria" as an English word, but it failed to stick.

"Homeland," FWIW, is not new; it's attested as far back as 1670.

I understand the suspicion of the word; it bothered me, too, at the start. I was reacting to some specific posts I had read (Taylor Marsh, I think, being one) complaining about it. I had assumed most of the rest of us had thought it over, failed to find a better word, and got on with it.

[amba]

I suppose we have. What bothered me afresh was hearing some young women news reporter repeat it mindlessly, as if it's now become embedded in the language without any thought. Do Americans routinely talk this way? was kind of my feeling.

Ironically, it would be a good word -- no flies on "home" or "land" -- if not for the associations. Maybe if we really gave some thought to what it literally meant, and then went back to using it routinely, it would feel better. Maybe the embarrassment is that . . . we're so relatively new and light on this soil, we've never thought of ourselves as having the kind of atavistic tribal attachment to it Europeans do. We've always been so mobile, moving from city to city, going west, lighting out for the territories. Maybe it's time to acknowledge that we DO have that kind of blood passion for our home land, and that's good. It means we've really taken root. (What about "home land" instead of "homeland"? I don't know what I'm looking for -- consciousness?)