St. Paul Pioneer Press: Our ignorance may be our downfall
'For want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for want of a horse the rider was lost; being overtaken and slain by the enemy, all for want of care about a horseshoe nail.' The intention of a short exercise during the Nobel Peace Prize Forum last weekend at Augsburg College in Minneapolis was to use Osama bin Laden's "message to the American people, October 2004" to try to examine what makes him tick. The translation to English done by the Mideast news network al-Jazeera did get consideration. Mostly, though, the takeaway lesson was Ben Franklin's about the importance of a horseshoe nail. What we don't know, such as recent Mideast histories, can kill us. Lebanon, a vague abstraction to many last Saturday, has exploded this week on the center stage of security threats. ~ Even for those of us who process experience through an America-only lens, not to know about Lebanon is to overlook the loss of 241 Americans in a car-bomb attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut on Oct. 23, 1983, or the attacks on American civilians during Lebanon's civil war. Knowing what and why matters.
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