Charlottesville, I SIS and we

I've been on the street since the Charlottesville murder event. I'm traveling through the Arab world and Afghanistan, with U.S. Air Force Chief General David Goldfein; his civil chief, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson; and their helpers. We are currently at the giant Al Wade Air Force Base, where the entire American Air War is led against I SIS, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan.

With all the news coming from Charlottesville, I felt in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then I looked around here, and the connection with Charlottesville became clear. A look at our travel group and crew at the base is enough, and you understand immediately why we are the most powerful country in the world.

It's not because we have F-22s. And it's certainly not like we embrace white primacy. It's because we embrace pluralism.

I am a supremeist of plurality.

How could I not be? I look around me and I see the Chief of Air Force, who is of Jewish descent from Eastern Europe, who reports to a woman Air Force secretary who has been among the first women graduates at the Air Force Academy and whose top assistant is an African lieutenant colonel, woman. The commander of the base here in Qatar, who oversees the entire air war, is Armenian-born, and his principal deputy is from Lebanese descent.

At the control center, they introduce me to two Russian - speaking American soldiers, 10 to 12 times a day, who enter the <x0-line local phone <x0-x1> with Russian command mail in Syria, to ensure that Russian planes do not crash with ours. One of the soldiers was born in Russia, and the other left Kiev, Ukraine, just five years ago, in part, as he told me, because he dreamed of entering the US Air Force: “this is the location of the chances”.

Then we receive an announcement from the combat innovation team, which is drafting a new algorithm for dynamic targeting with colleagues at Silicon Valley. I ask their commander about their last name, Italy, and he explains to me: my father is from Cuba and my mother from Mexico” Intelligence information submitted by “Captain Yang”.

The reason America is the supreme power in this region is that the American Army can take all these different people and make them a fist. And the reason why we're stuck in this region and we can't get out, is that so many states and peoples here, they're fighting for their exclusive dreams of the primacy of Shiite primacy, Sunnit primacy, alavite superiority, Taliban supremacy, Turkey's primacy and the supremacy of Persia.

With some exceptions, they cannot produce power sharing with self-continence. This is why we continue to defeat their worst, and they continue to lose peace, because their best, can never share power as long as they build stable stability.

None of the American military here speaks of U.S. politics. But I do. As a citizen, I think they deserve a commander, who does not need three attempts to denounce violent white primacy. Pluralism is the real source of our strength, both inside and abroad.

It must be fed, elevated, and protected by enemies everywhere and always.

Now that I got this out of my chest, let's talk about strategy. We walked through the command center here, with its walls-sized screens, which receive data from satellites, drones, sensors, human intelligence, and air refueling deposits, and put them together in a series of strategic targets. Looking at the choreography of all this, it's scary and hypnotistic.

One of these days, you can see on those screens, and find a Syrian jet that prepares to drop bombs near US forces in Syria. The Syrian plane will be blown up by an American shooter, while two Russian aircraft see from a higher altitude and an F-22 will see the Russians watching American plane watching the Syrian plane.

Good news? I The SIS has been defeated in Iraq, and will most likely be defeated in Syria, by Americans, Kurds, Russians, Syrians, Iranians and paramilitary militants. Bad news? There is a possibility that I territory SIS to fall to Iranians.

Prevention requires that the Arab-Sunite world gather itself, but it is weaker and divided than ever. We can defeat the extremism of I The SIS, in our pluralistic war machine, but one thing we can't create is Sunni-shiit pluralism and power sharing to replace it. That's why we constantly come back, not to improve things, but to prevent bad people from becoming terrible.

I wish it was different, but it's not. So, should we keep trying? You can't visit one of these big American bases built after 9/11, see the commitment of young men and women in uniform, and the solidarity of the systems they built, and not ask: What if all this talent and energy and idealism and pluralism were implemented, not to keep up a tired Arab state system against Iran, but to regulate the worst neighborhoods of Baltimore, Chicago and Detroit?

We need a national conversation about this.

/ New York Times world.al