We needed to talk, to spend some time alone and in a fairly quiet, undisturbed location so we could discuss a mutual friend who had gotten into some very serious trouble. We needed to find out where we each were on the issue, about our respective mutual states; we needed to compare notes and remember details covering several years of time; we needed to talk about what had to happen next. And given our schedules, we needed to eat. Which is fortunate, because it was time for me to write another restaurant review.

It was Lizzie’s birthday. Well, two days before, but close enough. We’re close enough friends, Lizzie and me, but we don’t travel or live in the same social circuit. I’d never be at her birthday party. (Though actually she came to mine…which was only the second birthday party I’d ever had in my life, now that I think about it. But that’s another story.) Anyway, I said, “I want to take you someplace nice because it is your birthday,” and we went to one of my favorite places, Azia.

We’d been there before, and there is a reason this fact is rather strange when I contemplate it. A few years ago, Amanda and I went to dinner with Lizzie and the very same mutual friend I mention above. That fact was not on my mind when I proposed Azia (not consciously, anyway). What was on my mind was the char. We’ll get to that. That dinner, or more exactly our memory of it, would become part of this night’s conversation, because we both struggled to remember exactly why we four got together for dinner that night to begin with and where in the course of our various relationships we all were. Were we all friends like we are now? Or were we just getting to know our mutual friend? Was it a get acquainted dinner or a good-bye dinner? Eventually we figured out that it was a good-bye dinner. Which when I look back at it is rather sad. I’ll get to that too.

Azia is a fusion Asian joint once described as “Sacred Asian art meets James Bond Chic,” owned by Thom Pham. Thom opened this Eat Street restaurant a few years back on the local Corner of Restaurant Death. A sequence of restaurants had previously opened and closed at the corner of Nicollet and 26th, across from the Black Forest. Despite the poor luck earlier establishments had suffered, Azia ended up having great success.

We showed up early in the evening, and the place was pretty empty. I thought about telling the maître d’ that we’d like a quiet corner, that we didn’t want to be disturbed, that we were here to talk privately and eat a simple dinner. But since she was already steering us towards the ideal quiet corner, I kept my mouth shut and accepted the out-of-the-way booth. That made what happened next a little funny.

I should say that the service at Azia is usually super-excellent and sometimes not, but when it is not, it is never, ever bad. It is just sometimes a little quirky. This is a big place in a nomadic market, so while there is always a core group of servers, there is a certain amount of variation around the edges. Tonight’s server was a woman I had not seen before, who clearly knew the menu and demonstrated her experience quite nicely with the char. I’ll get to that in a moment.

But her style was not what we were looking for. From the moment we were seated, Lizzie and I engaged in our vitally important conversation. We had a mutual friend who had suddenly found himself in very very deep trouble with the law, and we had just heard about it. I knew he and Lizzie knew each other, but I did not know how well. I did not know if this was going to be a rough blow, a bewildering moment, or a case of serious annoyance for her. And I don’t think Lizzie could have known that for me either. So we needed to assess our states of mind and heart in relation to this important matter. And while we engaged in this opening round of discussion, I’m pretty sure the waitress came by four or five times to see whether we needed anything.

“Okay, we’d better make one decision, don’t you think? Do you want wine? What kind, how much? Okay, may I suggest the Faustino Rioja?”

Now we were ready. Our waitress came back and we ordered the wine. She checked both of our IDs and it was brought to us. I was grinning about having my ID checked when she walked away, and so was Lizzie.

“I think it was my sweater.”

We both laughed at the prospect that my simple black Woolrich sweater (purchased, by the way, in 1988, so the sweater itself was almost old enough to have a cocktail) would make me look decades younger, and then we returned to our conversation.

By this time we had firmly established the details and found much agreement about the basics of all the relationships. Both of us thought well of our friend, and we were very saddened by the current situation. He was going to go to prison for a long time, there was no way around that. And while we knew that it could have been worse, we still wanted it to be better than it was.

But that was not enough. We had to do more than order the wine because we were now on visit nine from our server. Now, you have to understand that we did not find this annoying. She was not being annoying. She was just being very, very helpful, and perhaps a bit lonely, because we were the only table seated at her station. Also, since I’m one of his oldest customers, Thom sometimes gives the secret hand signal to his staff to be extra nice. I think this night Thom may have had a fly buzzing around his head and accidentally gave the secret hand signal five or six times. So we made an important decision.

Pot stickers. Lizzie said pot stickers, and I asked her whether the details mattered, and she said no. So when our server came by, I ordered them pork and sautéed. These are the best pot stickers in town bar none, by the way.

Which reminds me. For one year, not long after Azia opened, I lived three or four blocks to the north of Azia, and almost every week, Julia and I would have lunch here. That was just after I had broken up with my sig-oth, who also lived a few blocks away but to the south. She (I’ll call her Georgia) had said to me “Hey, if you ever go eat at Azia or anywhere else in the neighborhood, let me know so we can avoid the embarrassment of running into each other. Especially if you’re with a girl or something.”

So the first time we were heading over to Azia, Julia (then about 9 years old) and I, I mentioned this to Julia and said, “Here, take my cell phone and call Georgia and tell her we’re eating at Azia. Don’t worry, she won’t answer the phone; just leave a message. We have this prearranged.”

So Julia speed dials Georgia and blurts out, and I was not expecting this, “We are going to Azia. You must not go there. Repeat. We are going to Azia,” like she was calling in an airstrike. So ever since then, whenever I went to Azia with a girl (Julia) I gave her the phone and she made the call.

Anyhow, I mention this only because of the pot stickers. Julia and I had pot stickers for lunch every week, and if we were hungry, we’d split an order of the Bow Tie Pasta, which can be ordered with any of several different “proteins” (as we seem to refer to animal tissue or tofu these days), which is perfect for two people to share.

To continue: Lizzie and I now moved on in our conversation to the more philosophical issues of why our friend would have done what he did. I wanted to know Lizzie’s personal feeling about this sort of thing. Our friend was going to prison for over political activities that would clearly be labeled by any court in the land, or any FBI agent, as terroristic. I hate that word, terroristic. But many people would take such an individual and write them off entirely because anybody who engages in any violent activities that can be labeled as terroristic equals Osama bin Laden, and there are no exceptions. I myself believe that life is more complex than that, and people are more complex than that. So does Lizzie. It turns out that we both feel that our mutual friend should very much not have done what he did, but that did not make us not care about him as a person, or love him less as our friend.

But that was not enough. It would never be enough to merely order pot stickers. Things were getting dicey. Visit fourteen was imminent, and I felt we had to do something about it. Now again, I say we were not annoyed. Our waitress was just trying to do a good job. We understand these things. Lizzie herself has been a server, and in fact for much of the time I’ve known her, she’s had at least a part time job in a restaurant. I’ve done that kind of work too, but not nearly as much and a very long time ago. Suffice it to say that we were far more amused, even endeared, than annoyed. But we had to act, so we did.

We consulted the menu, or should I say Lizzie consulted the menu (I have it in my head pretty much), and she was interested in the char the server had mentioned. So I urged us on in that direction. Lizzie also liked the looks of the Hot and Spicy Lemongrass Grilled with Field Vegetables. She wanted it with Tofu. She likes Tofu. This is a person I love and admire and think very highly of. So I overlooked the Tofu thing and agreed that this would be good. It turns out that Thom makes tofu taste good somehow. Who knew it was even possible?

With the pot stickers delivered and consumed, we made our order on the next pass of the server. Just then Lizzie excused herself to visit the ladies’. By the way, when you eat at Azia, the men’s is on the left, ladies’ on the right. It is hard to tell, so now you know and won’t be confused.

While Lizzie was gone, the server came by and folded her napkin for her.

The next step in our conversation was remembering details. For reasons I will not elaborate on here, I needed to have a pretty good picture of what everyone was doing, where, and when over the last six or seven years. It was helpful to speak with Lizzie about this. I became pretty certain that I knew each of them before they knew each other and learned how they initially became acquainted. I was very interested to hear that Lizzie had had dinner with our friend and his parents. In reconstructing events, I remembered that I was supposed to have dinner with him and his parents one day, and they called it off a the last minute. This was the same parental trip, so I guess I was jilted in favor of Lizzie Well, I can’t say that I blame them. I’d rather have dinner with Lizzie than myself too.

So the char came, and this is a big deal. The server is required to fillet the fish right there at the table. There are servers as Azia who do this in seconds, and it is brilliant to watch. Our server did not do it quickly, but she did it very skillfully. Everybody takes off the head and tail first.

“Do you want the head?”

“Of course. Best part, really.”

So she does not put the head in the discard pile. Other servers slice the top half off the fish clean off, then take out the bones, then fold the top half back on. Instead, our server opened the fish like the hood of a car and pulled the bone out. Interesting, and well done. Then the fish gets chopped sagittally into chunks.

At this point, most servers are done. They check whether you want anything else, and move off. Not our server! No. She placed some char on Lizzie’s plate. Then joined that with the excellent Wok fried veggies that come with the char, and applied the absolutely incredible to die for glaze. Then she opened the bamboo box that the Lemongrass was in and served some of that to Lizzie, opened the bottom of the bamboo steamer and gave her some rice. Then she gave me some rice, some lemongrass, some wok veggies, and my piece of char, thus reversing the order and making the mirror image of the two plates, on each side of the table, work perfectly. For the next several minutes, we ate and ate and ate. Lizzie quite literally dived into her food, she was clearly starving. That was fun to watch for a while, then I ate the eyeballs out of the fish head and started into my plate.

The rest of the meal, the rest of the conversation, was more mundane. We talked about other matters, we heaped more food on our plates, we got the check, we were introduced to a second server who had just come on duty, just in case we needed him, and as always, Thom came by to see if all was well. And we said, of course it was.

One of the nicer meals I’ve had. It turns out that the char and the lemongrass is a perfect combination. One of the saddest evenings I’ve had. It is not pleasant to contemplate a decade in prison for a person you care for. But all my time with Lizzie is good. I’m lucky to have her as a friend, and I bothered to tell her so that night.

Azia is on Eat Street in South Minneapolis. It is also the home of the Caterpillar Lounge and the Anemoni Sushi and Oyster Bar. Here is the web site.

Mike is right about the Iraq War. It is all about oil, and lots of it. Early estimates indicated that there were at least 118 billion barrels of oil in known reserves under the Iraqi soil. That is about half of what is in Saudi Arabia and about four times the reserves of the U.S. (which varies depending upon how we count the reserves in the Gulf of Mexico). More oil is being discovered in Iraq than previously known. Before the Iraq War started, there were around 1,600 oil wells in Iraq producing about 1.1 million barrels a day. Texas produced about the same about of oil (1.1 million barrels a day) but had over 157,000 oil wells pumping it out of the ground. The numbers have changed slightly, but the picture is the same.

War for Oil

If you recall all those burning oil wells after the first Gulf War in Kuwait, you will understand that many of those burning wells were gushing oil and gas. That’s why they continued to burn. This illustrates how many of the wells in that region are under pressure and how petroleum flows to the surface with no need of pumps. Iraqi oil fields are some of the least expensive places on the planet to extract oil. Oil there is shallower and easier to drill for than many of our current U.S. wells. It is often pressurized, with lots of oil per well, as you can see by doing the math comparing the Texas and Iraq wells. By the way, those Gulf of Mexico oil wells can be as deep as five miles down and super expensive. Wells in Iraq can be as low as a few thousand feet with easy drilling.

Before Bush Jr. invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein had contracts worth billions of dollars with Russian (Zarubezhneft Oil and Lukoil Corporation), Chinese (China National Petroleum Corporation) and French firms (Total Fina Elf Oil and GAZ DE FRANCE) to extract and process Iraqi oil. This is why the French were so upset at us. It wasn’t so much at Bush’s six-guns-ablazing approach to the war as it was their loss of these valuable oil contracts for their corporate team. With Saddam & Sons, the Russians, Chinese and French out of the way, the British (British Petroleum) and the U.S. (ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobile, Halliburton, etc.) could move in on the action. Cheney and the neocons even planned that the proceeds from the oil were supposed to pay for the war. It seems that not only couldn’t they use an adding machine, but they were also ignorant of the cultural geography of Iraq and weren’t good at executing the war in the region either. So the Bush administration dug into Iraq for the long haul.

No U.S. president can completely pull out of Iraq now. We’ve done the dirty work of getting rid of Saddam Hussein & Sons and creating a state that can be controlled from the outside and which needs security. Those pesky Islamic extremists were an unexpected problem, but Iraq is now so divided that they will need our presence for some time. Our military has no plans to leave Iraq even if everyone wants them out. Saddam’s crew were beastly cruel in dealing with their opposition and keeping order. They weren’t sharing their oil money with the Iraqi people either. Under democratic principles, Saddam should have been deposed by their own people long ago. President Clinton wanted to go in and take him out. This was not just a Bush plan, but Bush had 9/11 under his belt to persuade the American people to go to war, propaganda as it was. Bill Clinton didn’t have a good reason to rally the U.S. to do the same but he wanted to and tried to taunt Saddam and his military to escalate a war.

Royal Berglee teaches Cultural Geography at Morehead State University in Kentucky.  This is Royal’s response to Mike’s post Walls Tumble and Crumble.

My brother-in-law is a geography professor at a small public university in Kentucky. He brings a unique perspective to world events, because he pulls in the geographical angle. It’s an angle I am not completely studied in, but he recently explained a few things to me that had been puzzling me for a while now.

He explained why no president would be able to do a sudden withdrawal from Iraq. Please understand that I don’t know if he is a conservative or a liberal. He will never tell anyone his personal political views, other than to say that the forces in motion mean that a true revolution will never change things in the long run. We can haz democracy, but it is an illusion that we have more than a superficial influence over national events—this is how he sees it. He thought that Hillary in the long run would run things little differently than George W; she would just have been more articulate and would have sent her appeasement to the centrists and the liberals rather than the arch-conservatives.

It’s Oil

The problem is easy oil, oil that is under pressure under the sands of Iraq and Saudi Arabia. It’s about oil the French need, the Indians need, the Chinese need, the Russians need and the Koreans need. It’s about oil that the United States and Australia need and the British need. Now, mind you, there is oil all over this planet and it is accessible—but not cheaply. For oil in the United States, we have to side drill, we have to force steam pressure into the rock to squeeze it out, and we have to continue to find ways to get it up to our SUV’s and power plants and plastics factories. The oil in Saudi Arabia and Iraq will come up to us if we stick a pipe in the ground and can contain it. We don’t have to push it up.

In geopolitical terms, it isn’t the Iraqis’ oil, it is the world’s oil. They just happen to be there. We aren’t fighting the terrorists as much as we are trying to hang on long enough to get the oil wells up and running again and flowing through American and British pipelines to be sold on the spot market to the rest of the world. If we pull out, someone else will move in. Economically, the world was better off with Saddam Hussein in power than with him gone. When we removed him, and de-Baathifcated the country, we left a huge vacuum. With “Shock and Awe,” we alienated a large force of potential allies in Iraq. Now it’s all blown up and our “best and brightest” can’t figure out how to fix it. The Republicans can’t figure it out, and neither, unfortunately, can the Democrats.

The total victory that Bush promised us would be just around the corner is a country in which we control the wells and the spigots. The terrorists are a minor inconvenience to our national interests.

That’s a brief encapsulation of my brother-in-law’s views, and I hope I have captured his thoughts accurately.

Palestinian Wall

On the separation between Israel and Palestine, most of what we learn is the extremist rhetoric from parties who support either side. It is harder for me to sort out than even the Iraq war, and my brother-in-law the professor gave me a bit more insight than I had before, but then he threw up his hands and said, “I have no idea how that will get sorted out. If there is a Second Coming, then I don’t think even that will sort it out. Nobody has a clear picture of what is going on and no one will, because there is just too much going on to absorb the problem, much less to solve it.”

From an article at take-a-pen.org we have one side of the conflict:

The Head of the security fence or “Anti-Terror Barrier Project” (ATB) in the Israel Defense Force’s Construction Center, Lieutenant-Colonel Erez, lectured on the professional project management aspects of this project, in the Annual Conference of the Israel Society for Quality, in Tel-Aviv, on 27 November 2003. By co-incidence Take-A-Pen’s Chairman, Andre, a professional in project management himself, served as the chair of the Project Management Session of the conference, could ask a few questions from Erez, heard some new information and thus can submit to you this first-hand report.

Lt.-Col. Erez said in his lecture that the most challenging feature of the ATB project has been the need for an extremely wide integration of the great many disciplines involved, and within a very short time.

The top design criterion of the ATB has been to maximize security for the civilian population while causing minimum disruption to the local Palestinian population. In a rare consensus of all security experts in Israel, of all the diverse security forces, and even of most parties in the Knesset, except a few on extreme left and right, all agree that such a security barrier is the most effective and least violent way to save Israeli civilian lives, without endangering any other human being.

There was a wide agreement even on the design concept ‘how’ to do this: most of the line should be a slightly improved version of the traditional electronic wire fences, existing for example on the Jordanian border and around some defense sites, and only where the barrier must protect densely populated urban areas very close to the barrier, should it be built as a concrete wall. Minefields or other similar lethal means so commonly used by Syria and some other Arab states are not used in Israel’s ATB fence.

The routing of the fence was determined by the Israeli government with minimum use of Palestinian land, when necessary taken to public use strictly according to Israeli and international law, and with full compensation properly determined and paid, as it is done for example in a highway project within Israel.

And further down on the same page:

Another Arab complaint is that the fence is causing disruption of the lives of Palestinians who cannot get access to their own fields. It is really an inconvenience and a pity, but these economic type considerations are by far inferior, also by international law, as Professor Emanuel Gross, internationally recognized expert of constitutional law points out, to the importance of saving human lives. Had the Palestinians and the Arab world acted to stop Palestinian terror and not to promote it, there would be no need for the anti-terror barrier in the first place.

How blushingly naive to think that human lives are more important than economics, when economics are all about the distribution of scarce resources. Choking people off from access to supporting and feeding themselves is a major source of the violent conflict causing the loss of human lives. How can we prevent the conflict by ignoring the economics?

My brother-in-law told me that walls can’t last forever, because people on both sides of walls need something from the other side. This wall may stand for fifty years, but it will have to come down. And it won’t be brought about by goodwill nor by religious pressure for peace. It will be because the Israelis will need the Palestinians for cheap labor, to be consumers and to be vendors. It will come down for trade. It will come down whether Hamas surrenders or not. It will come down because it has to. Walls can’t last.

We didn’t get much of a chance to discuss the border fence in Texas and Arizona, but I suspect the same thing will happen with that one. Once the Texans and the Arizonans admit how much they depend on illegal immigrant labor, how much they are missing out on economically, the wall will come down. There may be other reasons given: “renewed ties with our Mexican friends and neighbors,” etc., but the true reason will be an economic one. We will have economic chaos without the immigrants since our domestic labor force won’t be able to replace them if they stop coming.

Paraphrase of my brother-in-law’s comments:

They let us think we have a democracy here. They let us think that because the Iraqis have purple stains on their fingers that they are building their own democracy. They can demonize Putin, the Chinese, the Saudis for the suppression of their people and their press, but governments choose their friends and enemies based on economics. Cheap labor and oil—those are your rulers.

Walls go up, walls come down. They never last. They didn’t last in Berlin. They won’t last anywhere else.

(He was afraid that he had bored me, but I explained that I had enjoyed learning from him. He is almost as smart as my sister.)