For those of you who don’t know, I am a high school English teacher. It is a job I really love. During one of my writing classes today there was a knock on my door. I yelled “Come on in!” at the knock and the door opened. In walked a marine in full dress. It took me a minute to recognize one of the class of 2005, just four months past graduation. He had just come home from basic training and stopped in to see some of his old teachers.  I gave him the congratulations he had earned on Paris Island. He was a good kid and I enjoyed having him in class. We spoke for a few minutes about where he was headed and what his plans were. It turns out he is headed to school to learn combat engineering. Amazing. I thought about reports he had written on skateboarding and helping him get ready for his global studies Regents exam. As we got past the usual “How have you been?” agenda items, the meeting became slightly awkward. It always does. In front of me was an adult and our roles had changed. Here was a young man probably headed to Iraq in the very near future, not one of my students. He had outgrown my classroom. That is what is supposed to happen.

Coincidence can be unnerving. We’ve lost 2000 men and women in Iraq as of yesterday and I cannot help wondering if this new marine will be one of the next thousand. I try to guard against sentimentality, but that can be difficult when thinking about death, especially of someone young. Especially if it is unnecessary. We have had a bit of a murder spree here in Rochester over the last few months. More than a handful of children have been gunned down this year. I have to wonder why we are sending this future combat engineer to the other side of the world.

This afternoon I went through some old e-mail and found one from my Uncle Jim. He and my dad went to high school with William Tucker, a writer for the New York Sun, and he had written me to ask if I had heard of him. I have been meaning to post about William Tucker for some time, and decided this would be an appropriate place. If you haven’t read Tucker, he is a conservative commentator who is most easily found on the internet via The American Spectator. As I began to read his work, it sounded like we agreed that the American presence in Iraq should end as soon as possible. In the spring of 2004, Tucker was calling for the United States to “pack up and leave.” He makes some persuasive arguments. Of course he also argued that Islam is inherently flawed due to its adherence to polygamy, which creates “a hard-core residue of unattached men who have little or no prospect of achieving a family life.” (I thought Syria or Iran would be the next invasion, but perhaps the “War on Terror” will take us to Fire Island or The Castro.) Tucker’s argument is that this creates a no win situation for the United States. I agree that we are in a no win in Iraq, but that is where our agreement ends.

To label the entire Muslim world as “medieval” is ludicrous. Arguing that polygamy creates a wife shortage across the Islamic world is not only crazy, it’s stupid. This idea carries some truth, of course, but it is in no way an absolute. Who says Arab men have to marry Arab women? We live in a small world where the Princess of Wales was dating Dodi Al Fayed. Come on, Bill. You have to do better than that. Sure, there are areas of the middle east that are dated, but have you been to Alabama? Of course, our own Western roots are dug deeply in an enlightened Catholic Church; that paragon of feminist propaganda. There is a lot more going on than polygamy, but like ideologs on both sides of the Hiel!, Tucker oversimplifies. He ignores colonialism as a root cause of the region’s problems and the fact that America has been playing political games in the region for decades over the Cold War and oil. But at least we still agree that the whole thing is a mistake.

Tucker makes some interesting points and he obviously isn’t afraid of making people angry. The problem with conservatives and liberals is that they get caught up in the role and sometime sound like salesmen rather than thinkers. Unfortunately, a young Marine may be on his way to Iraq in the near future, trusting this country’s leaders to use him wisely, rather than selling the rest of us a lame reason for his sacrifice.