Merry former Christmas

By DOLPH HONICKER

Critics who condemn movies sight unseen and would ban books they've never read fascinate me. I can only recommend to them Adolf Hitler's solution to their concerns: bonfires. Big bonfires.

A recent letter writer urged parents to prevent their children from seeing "Golden Compass" for fear their little tykes, having been infused in the Christian story since falling out of the crib, suddenly would flee the theaters like miniature Red Guards and espouse the cause of atheism.

Now that Christmas carols have faded into the ozone, ending another Pagan holiday adopted as a Christ fest, and as families sit on pins and needles awaiting the credit card bills from Wal-Mart for doodads and junk mostly made in China and bought on a last-minute whim for fear of leaving out Uncle Tim, I can only hope this brief can get at least a blurry-eyed New Year's airing.

Consider the aforementioned film. It's a fairy tale, a watered-down version of a book written by the Brit, Phillip Pullman, an acknowledged atheist. The word atheist is mentioned at least one time less in the film than the word Mormon in Mitt Romney's political speech explaining his beliefs.

But Christians, who thus far are an overwhelming majority in America, see Barbarians banging at the box office gate to view the movie.

Voicing particular concern is the Catholic League, led by its president, Bill Donohue. The "Golden Compass," the first of Pullman's trilogy of children's books titled "His Dark Materials," is an attempt, says Donohue, to "sneak his atheism in back door to kids. If he had any courage, he'd defend his work, but instead he continues to do what he does best--practice deceit."

Perhaps kids ought to shun the movie and, on visiting days, go see the Catholic priests and bishops building time for molesting kids who once were their peers.

In a November interview last year with "Today" host Al Roker, Pullman had this to say of Donohue's remarks:

"Well, you know, I always mistrust people who tell us how we should understand something. They know better than we do what the book means or what this means and how we should read it and whether we should read it or not.

"I don't think that's democratic. I prefer to trust the reader. I prefer to trust what I call the democracy of reading--when everybody has the right to form their own opinion and read what they like and come to their own conclusion about it. ..."

But it seems like when you're in the limelight, brickbats are flung from all sides. Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society says, "We knew from the beginning that the producers (of 'The Golden Compass') intended to leave out the anti-religious references. We think this is a great shame."

Donohue counters: "Eighty-five percent of the people in this country are Catholic or Protestant and I'd like them to stay at home, or go see some other movie."

I'd recommend "Elmer Gantry."

Home: 706-884-7765 Cell:205-790-0476 P.O. Box 637 LaGrange, GA 30241-0011
Honicker is a retired newspaperman and a freelance writer appearing regularly in the Liberal Opinion Weekly.

Just bottle the smell of war

By DOLPH HONICKER

It matters not one iota what political party is in power, or what president holds the reins of office. We are not politicians or public thinkers: we are the rich; we own America; we got it, God knows how; but we intend to keep it.

--Frederick T. Martin,

The Passing of the Idle Rich (1911)

I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.

--Jay Gould, railroad financier

Virtually every American wartime president from George Washington on has expressed abhorrence for the killings and atrocities that go on. This current president, George W. Bush, and his chicken hawk vice president, Richard Cheney, are the exceptions.

This administration does not even question the use of torture.

The closest either man has come to hearing a shot fired in anger is Cheney's mistaking a hunting partner for a quail.

As our treasury sinks as deeply into the red as the blood being shed in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush blithely demands that Congress pluck money out of thin air to pay for the endless carnage, unheard of during previous wars -- but shun the wallets of his wealthy benefactors.

There's no rationing; shop 'til you drop; no dollar-a-year industrialists as there were in World War II, which right-wing pundits favorably compare to Iraq by citing the lower number of deaths. It's the high percentage of permanently wounded that's going to hit home in the long run.

While Cheney is off getting a heart tune-up, Bush visits a military rehab center to play video war games with some of the legless and armless warriors.

Video games. If this is as close as Bush can get to war, I suggest he read a novel, Once An Eagle, by Anton Myrer, who graduated from Boston Latin and entered Harvard College in 1941, but left to join the Marines soon after Pearl Harbor. He served more than three years in the Pacific, took part in the invasion of Guam, rose to the rank of corporal, and was wounded.

The book, first published in 1968 by Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, was published by the Army War College Foundation in 1997.

The Army War College? Yes. The novel, about the making of a general, Sam Damon, is one of the textbooks. Why?

Listen to Army Gen. John W. Vessey Jr. (ret.):

"First and foremost, this is a consummate anti-war book. ... His descriptions of combat based on his personal experiences engage all our senses. Myrer forces us to smell and feel the battlefield as well as hear and see it. His narrations horrify, provoke and frighten. No one who has experienced combat directly, or even vicariously, would seek it."

If you wonder what America is today with Democratic and Republican presidential candidates strutting across a stage like semi-trained seals, spitting out sound bites, each vowing not to raise taxes, you have to ask: How do you pay cops, firefighters, teachers and, yes, troops without taxes?

Consider these prescient words by Damon's mentor, Gen. Caldwell, on page 537:

"... what would emerge from (postwar America) would be a vast, impersonal juggernaut of industrial cartels, a mountainous administrative bureaucracy and a prestigious military junta -- and beneath these, far beneath, an emotional and highly subservient citizenry whose attitudes and actions would be created, aroused, manipulated, subverted by the roar of the mass media ... whoever rode this wave deftly, keeping just ahead of the boiling crest -- would hold the future securely in his fine right hand ..."

If only there could be a way to bottle the stench of the Iraqi war and release it full blast in the Oval Office, Congress and boardrooms of arms manufacturers.

Fortunately, Myrer's Colonel Beaupre has captured it all during a jungle battle. Don't turn away. Read:

"It was impossible to walk without stepping on the bodies--this tumult of crushed heads and sheared-off legs and tight bouquets of guts flowering from ruptured bellies. Flies clung in loose, weaving masses, like slick blued bees swarming; the whole valley hummed with their odious presence. Maggots worked in gross struggling chains at the gaping wounds, bloated and intent. ...

"If you could bottle it, Beaupre thought savagely, swallowing, fighting the hot clutch of nausea with all his might, trying not to breathe ... This smell. If you could bottle it, store it in some tanks just outside Washington or New York City or Chicago; and then when the drums began to beat, when the eminent statesmen rose in all their righteous choler and the news rags and radio networks started their impassioned chant, if you could release a few dozen carboys on the Senate floor, the executive offices of Du Pont de Memours, Boeing ... the trading posts on Wall Street; and seal off the exits. Repeat every three hours as needed. Rx. By God, that would take some of the fun out of it. If you could only bottle it and feed it to the fire-eating sons of bitches, jam it down their throats."

Don't leave yet, Mr. Bush and Cheney for Myrers has a special message for you. Listen to his character named Bill Bowdoin:

"Every war has to be a gleaming crusade, with a hovering Grail of Joseph of Arimathea for only the holiest of eyes to behold. When the plain fact of the matter is the war resembles nothing so much as a big corporation going full blast, with its board of directors meetings and reports and prospectuses, its graphs and charts and shipping sections, layout and advertising--right down to the final product."

Anton Myrer spent 30 years researching and writing his novel. He'd never heard of Bush, Cheney, Haliburton, tag-team presidential debates and sound bites. But he sure got it right.

Dolph Honicker is a retired newspaperman and a freelance writer.

Pythian Press.

Atheism now in the open

By DOLPH HONICKER

Thank God we live in an era where atheism can be discussed in public, even on Fox News, although the network gave short shrift to nonbelievers.

The appearance on the best-selling nonfiction list of three books by atheists has pushed reason to the forefront.

First was Sam Harris' The End of Faith.

Then came Richard Dawkins The God Delusion.

Lastly, my favorite by a splinter off the True Cross is Christopher Hitchens' god (cq) is Not Great.

Though I once proposed, as Hitchens does in his book that all religions are man-made, I won't sue him for plagiarism for others have long offered this reasonable supposition.

Right off, let's dispose of the canard that morality rests in belief of a supreme being, whether it be Jesus, Allah or any one of a thousand and one other gods. Ask your preacher, priest or rabbi if he would abandon himself to adultery, rape, robbery and murder if it were not for his faith in the hereafter. Given that he's an honest man he'll tell you that no, his conscience won't let him, but ...

Following that "but" will come a string of arguments trying to convince you that his brand is the one true faith.

I use the masculine gender because the church of Rome, Islam and most mainstream Protestant denominations forbid women to assume the authority to pass on nostrums from the past.

Pope Benedict XVI makes no bones about it: the Roman Catholic Church is the only true church. All others are false.

When I read of the pope's elevation of 23 new cardinals, I was taken by his haberdashery. I wondered which Bible verses inspired his ornate vestments. Associated Press writer Nicole Winfield says Benedict "donned a long, golden silk cape, embroidered with scenes from the life (sic)of the saints that was held up by two altar servers as he processed down the main aisle."

Was one of them St. Francis Xavier? It was he, says Hitchens, "who brought the Inquisition to Asia and whose bones are still revered by those who choose to revere bones."

Religions sell the fear of hell the way George W. Bush sells the fear of terrorism -- good or evil -- my way or the highway.

Hindus set a time limit on hell. "A sinner, for example," says Hitchens, "might be sentenced to a given number of years in hell, where every day counted as 6,400 human hairs. If he slew a priest, the sentence thus adjusted would be 149,504,000,000 years. At this point, he was allowed nirvana, which seems to mean annihilation." But Christians found a hell from which there is no possible appeal.

Fundamentalists cling firmly to Old Testament myths. The National Park Service, pressured by Bush appointees, forbid rangers from giving an official estimate of the Grand Canyon's age to avoid offending the author of a Creationist book on sale in the park's bookstore claiming the canyon was formed by Noah's flood. Touchy, touchy.

As Sam Harris notes in his book: "Most of the people of this world believe that the Creator has written a book. We have the misfortune of having many such books, each making an exclusive claim to its infallibility."

Told in Sunday School as a kid that God created the heavens and the earth and then breathed into a cloud of dust to create Adam, thereafter performing a ribectomy to create Eve, I asked what seemed a logical question: "Who created God?"

"God has been with us always," said the flustered Sunday School teacher.

Lot's of things we can't prove "exist," says James Martin, a Jesuit priest and author of A Jesuit Off-Broadway: Center Stage With Jesus, Judas and Life's Big Questions.

"Love, for instance," he says. "Many believers would say that they've experienced God's presence in ways that go beyond the bounds of reason. They stand on the seashore and feel profound longing. They hold their newborn baby and feel profound joy."

Is Martin saying atheists have no such feelings?

As Hitchens notes, "It may have been a Jesuit who was first actually quoted as saying, 'Give me a child until he is ten, and I will give you the man.'"

Since the Catholic church, having paid out billions for cases of sex abuse against children by its priests and bishops, "one can only shudder to think what was happening in the centuries where the church was above all criticism," says Hitchens.

The astronomer Carl Sagan said he could look into the sky and admire its vastness without seeking divine origins.

Albert Einstein, addressing a writer troubled by a misrepresentation attributed to him, replied:

"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

Years later, to another query, he said:

"I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it."

A few quickies from god is Not Great:

• Jehovah's Witnesses have refused blood transfusions for their children.
  
• Followers believed an illiterate scoundrel, Joseph Smith, was led to buried golden tablets by an agel named Moroni which, with help, he "translated" into the Mormon bible.
  
• Shia fundamentalists in Iran lowered the age of "consent" to nine, perhaps in admiring emulation of the age of the youngest "wife" of the "Prophet" Mohammad.
  

It's an empirical fact that elephants and mice die, as do mighty oaks and roses. Yet, in this 21st century, we have a president who questions evolution, believes it's his Christian duty to kill tens of thousands of innocents to plant his brand of democracy at gunpoint and that he will some day swap one of his earthly mansions for a more glorious one in heaven.

I submit that if all Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews and others of faith held a massive prayer day it would have no more effect on the cosmos than this proposal by Robert G. Ingersoll:

"Would Calvin have been more bloodthirsty if he had believed in the religion of the South Sea Islanders? ... Would the Dutch have been more idiotic if they had denied the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and worshiped the blessed trinity of sausage, beer and cheese?"

Dolph Honicker is a retired newspaperman and a freelance writer.

Copyright 2007, Pythian Press

An honorable general gets the axe

By DOLPH HONICKER

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing. --George Bernard Shaw

... we have violated the laws of warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and ... the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe ... that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.--Gen. Antonio Taguba (ret.)

Why in the name of God -- if there’s such a being -- create a nation in which its leaders countenance medieval torture ... warrantless wiretaps on its subjects ... imprisonment without the right of trial ... questionable elections ... a milquetoast media and a timid legislative branch?

Yes, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia come to mind. But that was yesterday. Today is today.

With a pair of lame ducks pooping on them, why doesn’t a nation of sheep tire of the embarrassment, tune out “American Idol” and Paris Hilton, rise up as one and, like the star of the movie “Network,” shout, “I’m mad as hell and not going to take this any more?”

Realistically, what kind of a president allows his minions to send Maj. Bryan Bowlsbey to Iraq as part of a transport unit?

Who is Maj. Bowlsbey and why should this long-time National Guardsman, the director of the Illinois Veterans’ Affairs Department, get a free ride?

In the months before being shipped out, Bowlsbey was getting his home readied so that his invalid wife could get around. She’s missing two legs.

In 2005, his wife, Maj. Tammy Duckworth, was piloting a Blackhawk helicopter over Iraq when it was struck by a rocket propelled grenade. She tried vainly to control the chopper by pressing on the rudders.

She couldn’t feel them. Her right leg was shredded to the hipbone. Her left leg was shot off just below the knee, her right arm broken in three places. She lost almost half her blood.

One assumes that because Tammy Duckworth ran an unsuccessful race for Congress in 2006 on an anti-war campaign, denouncing the policies of President George W. Bush, had nothing to do with Maj. Bowlsbey’s deployment.

You have the right to assume that.

Meanwhile, is the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh the only reporter digging through the muck of the Bush/Cheney torture policy as enunciated by the know-nothing U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez?

Hersh’s latest report details how an honorable general, Antonio Taguba, tried to tell the truth and was steamrollered by the White House and his peers in the Army.

In his first meeting with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Taguba told Hersh that an old friend, Lt. Gen. Banz J. Craddock, who was Rumsfeld’s senior military assistant, met him at the door and coldly told him, “Wait here.”

When ushered in, Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice, “Here ... comes that famous General Taguba -- of the Taguba Report!”

Also in the meeting: Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy; Stephen Cambone, under-secretary of defense for intelligence; Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Gen. Peter Schoomaker, Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials.

All professed ignorance of Abu Ghraib.

Asked if he had found abuse or torture, Taguba recalled telling the group: “I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, ‘That’s not abuse. That’s torture.’ There was quiet.”

Tugaba says Rumsfeld denied seeing his in-depth investigative report despite having sent dozens of copies through several channels at the Pentagon and to the Central Command Headquarters, in Tampa, Fla., which ran the Iraq War.

Also, before the meeting, Tugaba says he’d spent weeks briefing senior military leaders on the report.

He says when he urged one lieutenant general to look at the photos, the officer rebuffed him, saying, “I don’t want to get involved by looking, because what do you do with information, once you know what they show?”

Gen. Myers testified that in January of 2004 information about the photographs had been given “to me and the Secretary up through the chain of command. ... And the general nature of the photos, about nudity, some mock sexual acts and other abuse, was described.”

Yet, testifying before Senate and House Armed Service Committees on May 7, Rumsfeld, said, “I wish we had known more, sooner, and been able to tell you more sooner, but we didn’t.”

Taguba told Hersh he was appalled, saying the secretary was in denial. Had an aide withheld the facts?

“Rumsfeld is very perceptive and has a mind like a steel trap,” said Taguba. “There’s no way he’s suffering from C.R.S. -- Can’t Remember Shit. He’s trying to acquit himself, and a lot of people are lying to protect themselves.”

What particularly galled Taguba was that Rumsfeld was accompanied by senior military officers who concurred with his denials.

In January 2006, Gen. Richard Cody, the Army’s vice-chief of staff, calls Taguba, who’d served 34 active years, and says, “I need you to retire by January 2007.” No chit-chat, though the two had known each other for years. Then Cody hangs up.

"They always shoot the messeger," Taguba told Hersh. "There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this."

The message is: Don’t rock the bleeping boat.

Pythian Press.

Red tape clogs 'terps'way out

By DOLPH HONICKER

Poker has two inviolate axioms: (1) know when to hold and when to fold and (2) never send good money after bad.

In Iraq, President George W. Bush and the president of vice, Dick Cheney, have run roughshod over both rules.

The time for folding has long since past. In fact, it was a hand that never should have been dealt. That brings us to No. 2. In Iraq, we’re not only spending like it was Monopoly money, we’re spending our most valuable assets, boots on the ground -- some 30,000 pairs of them.

They’re volunteers. But if you polled them, most probably would prefer going to Afghanistan, where the 9/11 terrorists trained, so they could make a dent against a surging Taliban and al-Qaeda force .

Some of us, even though we were not military experts, saw the error of pulling troops from Afghanistan as we were zeroing in on Osama bin Laden and sending them to invade Iraq. It was stupid since allied forces controlled the air over Iraq and Saddam Hussein wasn’t going anywhere.

The world knows we cherry-picked faulty evidence from the likes of “Curveball,” Amad Chalibi and, my favorite, this from the archives of Newsweek, which said information about links between Iraq and al-Qaeda came from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. “I been a shaky alibi (?)”

Imagine the immediate days post-9/11. The world was with us. We could have had half a million U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan. With that show of force, Pakistan would have thrown in her lot wholeheartedly. Saddam could have been held off with our left hand. How could he hit New York with Scuds that had a range of 100 miles?

But today Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf sits on a powder keg, his will weakened. Time quotes a senior military official in Afghanistan as saying: “The bottom line is that the Taliban can do what they want in the tribal areas because the {Pakistani} army is not going after them.”

Taliban and al-Qaeda forces are settled in small groups in a heavily forested band of mountains that has virtually been conceded to them. It’s called Talibanistan. Digging them out will be like plucking fire ants one at a time.

Iraq presents a sorry tale of betrayal on our part as detailed in a lengthy New Yorker piece by George Packer. Hundreds of Iraqi translators and intelligence agents that served America, facing daily risks of having their heads chopped off, have been shafted. Many have died.

For instance, Ali spent his childhood in Pennsylvania and Oklahoma while his father completed graduate studies. Unfortunately, they returned home to Baghdad when he was 11 so his father could get his green card. The Iranian war prevented them from leaving.

Packer says Ali had to learn Arabic from scratch and “considered his American childhood a paradise lost.“ In 2003 he became an interpreter with the 82nd Airborne Division. He could not tell his family.

“Ali found that, although many soldiers were friendly, they often ignored information and advice from their Iraqi employees,” Packer writes. “Interpreters would give them names of insurgents, and nothing would happen. When Ali suggested that soldiers buy up locals’ rocket-propelled grenade launchers so they wouldn’t fall into the hands of insurgents, he was disregarded. ...“

Consider this vignette of Othman, a Sunni doctor, 29, and Laith, a Shia engineer, a few years younger, who shared a strong friendship based on a desire for the Americans to arrive and change their lives.

“Most of the people Othman and Laith knew had left Iraq,” says Packer. “House by house, Baghdad had been abandoned. Othman was considering his options: move his parents from their house (in an insurgent stronghold) to his sister’s house (in the midst of civil war); move his parents and brothers to Syria (where there was no work) and live with his friend in Jordan (going crazy with boredom while watching his savings dwindle); go to London and ask for asylum (and probably be sent back); stay in Baghdad for six more months until he could begin a scholarship that he had won to study journalism in America (or get killed waiting). Beneath his calm good humor, Othman was paralyzed -- he didn’t want to leave Baghdad and his family, but staying had become impossible. Every day, he changed his mind.”

As for Laith: “Sometimes I feel like we’re standing in line for a ticket, waiting to die.”

Many of the young Iraqis who signed up with the U.S. military to become translators, or “terps” as the soldiers called them, “had learned English,” says Packer, “from American movies and music, and from listening secretly to the BBC.”

Otherwise, under Saddam, as one said, it “was a one-way road leading to nothing.”

Ironically, that’s where it stands today. Red tape and indifference clog their every step. Try to teach a soldier cultural dos and don’ts, he won’t listen. You’re an Iraqi and untrustworthy. Just translate for me, mother.

Iraqi “terps” received inferior or no body army, leading Baathists to make a persuasive case that Americans treat all Iraqis badly, even those who work for them.

L. Paul Bremer III, as the virtual dictator in Iraq for 14 months, ditched the entire Iraqi army, threw hundreds of thousands out of work and lit the fuse that has led to today’s chaos. He spoke no Arabic and knew nothing about the Middle East. By the time he was forced to fold his hand, it was too late.

As the banner across the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln the summer of 2003 so blithely put it: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

Sooner or later -- a year, four years, twenty years -- we’ll be out. What happens then to all the Iraqi “terps” who served us at great risk but have been fingered by both Sunni and Shia insurgents as collaborators?

Many of them now seek safe flight ahead of the eventual exodus, before heads roll. They’re snarled in red tape.

It’s Catch-22. We can’t tell you when we’re leaving. It would tip off the enemy. Anyway, American personnel will leave first. You’re on your own. Catch a chopper out, if you can.

With friends like us, who needs enemies?

copyright 2007 Pythian Press

Ghost letters: read 'em and weep

By DOLPH HONICKER

To you SUV owners sporting “Support Our Troops” ribbons and “God Bless America” posters plastered on the rear of your vehicles, close your cell phone and detour to the nearest newsstand to get the April 2 special issue of Newsweek.

Read “The War in the Words of the Dead.”

There are photographs of them as well -- while they were alive. Warning: It’s not easy going. Read it and weep. I did.

The families granted Newsweek permission to run these e-mails and letters. My focus is on two officers and two enlisted Marines because their stories seem to sum up the surreal nature of the Iraqi War.

Here are two excerpts from Army Col. Theodore Westhusing, the first dated April14, 2005, from Baghdad:

“It is really an eye-opener how the real person comes out over here in battle, the heroics by so many ... At times things appear suspicious with a few {Iraqis} we are dealing with, and we don’t know how they are going to act. Remember, some were Saddam’s elite army special forces and guards, who never liked us and now we work/fight side by side. There is a chance the enemy could be right beside you.”

Finally, there’s this brief note, dated May 10, less than a month later, that Westhusing wrote from Baghdad:

“Life is worthless over here to so many. Killing everywhere and always ongoing. So many people don’t care and appear to have given up. But I won’t, I need to be here to help them ...”

Westhusing, 44, died , an apparent suicide, on June 5. He was less than a month from going home.

Among the most moving letters are those hand-written that begin, “If you are reading this ...”

One of those was that of Lance Cpl. Lance Graham, 26, of San Antonio, 6-foot-5 and 240 pounds. His father says, “He made other people feel safe -- even other Marines.” He died May 7, 2005, near Haditha Dam when a pair of suicide bombers hit his convoy. Here are excerpts from the hand-printed letter (his spellings):

“Well if your reading this, I guess this deployment was a one way trip. I just have one thing to ask. Please don’t be mad at the Marine Corps. It was my choice to join & come here. I honestily belive this what I was meant to do. I don’t care what the media says we are making a difference here. Know that I did not die in vain or for some worthless cause. ... Not all the people here are bad. Don’t fill your hearts with anger & hate. ... Just know that I have God in my life & Im in a better Place & Marines guard the streets in Heaven. Who else would God trust? ...

“Semper Fi

Love Lance”

This excerpt is from Army Maj. Michael Mundell, Sept. 1, 2006, from Fallujah:

“The question has been asked ... what this place is like. Try to imagine this: if you go out in your front yard, take a weapon with you and stare REAL careful at all the neighbors’ houses. One of them may be on the roof, trying to snipe you. Also, don’t stay out too long -- someone down the road may just try to lob a few mortars at you, or drive by and fire some machine guns, or perhaps shoot an RPG rocket. ... If you get in your car to go to the grocery, you can never ever go by yourself -- you gotta have at least two cars and at least three people in each one. And make sure that at least one of your passengers is a medic. ...

“Is that a trash bag? An empty box? Or a command-detonated bomb? ... Never let any other car get close to you -- EVER. ... If they get too close ... wave a flag ... shoot a flare ... honk the horn and blink your lights. If they don’t move, or keep driving at you kill them. Period ... That is what it’s like here.”

Thirteen days later Mundell writes, “Audrey once asked me what the attitude of the troops is over here, about the war, about the President and so on. ... You can’t see what we see every day (like today, dead kids {killed by an IED} and not get a little cynical ... High-minded political phrases sound pretty hollow out here ... things look a lot different down here at the point of ‘W’’s spear. The ones at home rattling the loudest saber aren’t here helping load dead kids into and ambulance. WE are. And that just sucks.”

Lance Cpl. Anthony Butterfield, 19, enlisted straight out of high school. He and three other Marines were killed when a suicide bomber set off a propane truck in Rawah (cq) on July 29, 2006.

Here are excerpts from his unsealed “if you read this ...” letter:

“Hi Mom, Dad, Britney, Jeremy, and Bartley.

“If your getting his letter then I’m sure you’ve already heard. I’m so sorry. But I know that I’m safe now. I’m with God watching over you. I wanna tell you all some special memories I’ll always hold on too. Staying up late with you Mom watching the food channel while you rub my back, or when I was little you’d always get me a glass of chocolate milk with a lid and a straw . With you Dad going out on the sidecar and driving to volleyball tournaments. ... Brit, trying to hold my hand crossing the streets. ... Jeremy, you and me always building cool ass stuff. ... Bartley remember all those late nights when you’d come into my room and we’d just talk. ... Just know that I made it to heaven before you and we’ll see you all again.

“Your loving son, brother,

“Anthony Edward Butterfield”

And this from Maj. Mudell, Nov. 8, 2006, from Fallujah:

“... I hope that no one is making decisions about the war based on what I’m saying. I don’t know what’s going on in Baghdad or Ramadi or Mosul or anywhere else. ... I can only tell you what I see, hear, think or experience. I don’t have the vaguest idea as to who is winning this war, and I don’t care. My job is to bring home my boys and I will do whatever I have to in order to accomplish that. Lance Corporal Danny Catron, all of 19, his wife (18) and their new baby are counting on me not to screw it up here. I could care less what is going on in Baghdad. Or anywhere else.

Mundell, 47, was killed by an IED in Fallujah Jan. 5, 2007. (Corporal Catron is still in Iraq, due to return home soon).

Impeachment off the table ... why?

By DOLPH HONICKER

"President Bush lives in a world where in effect it is always the summer of 1945, the Allies have just defeated the Axis, and a world filled with darkness ... has been rescued by a new and optimistic democracy ... His is a world where other nations admire America or damned well ought to ..." --David Halberstam


Who are the criminals today? Look in the mirror. It is we who allowed a criminal regime to take over, to shred our Constitution while we, a nation of sheep, doped out on American Idol, Survivors, Jerry Springer.

The Democratic victory in November of 2006 was a phony spring. Winter chills set in when House Speaker Nancy Polosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced they were taking impeachment off the table, thus giving Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Karl Rove & Co. free rein to run rampant.

California Sen. Barbara Boxer's recent attempt to revive impeachment comes many days late and half a trillion dollars short.

George W. Bush verus the U.S. Constitution, with a forward by Rep. John Conyers Jr. and an introduction by Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson laid out the criminal articles for impeachment in 287 pages in 2006. Since then, an addendum could add many hundred more pages.

Had such an impeachment been brought forward, it should have been a twofer with Cheney as the lead defendant -- Cheney the war lover who skipped Vietnam with five deferments.

An event that churned my stomach in early July was a speech Bush delivered to a safe audience in Cleveland. He used his father to make a point -- not his heavenly father, but the one whose sperm spawned him.

You see, Bush said, Japan was our mortal enemy during World War II. And his daddy flew a torpedo bomber. He was shot down. He was a hero (true). Now Japan is one of our strongest allies. That's what we're doin' in Iraq today. Some day, just let me pour more and more troops into the maw, and we'll be one happy family.

You craven so-and-so, I wanted to yell, Vietnam is a trading partner today. Why don't you tell us about your heroic exploits in Vietnam, protecting the friendly skies of Texas, partying and politicking in Alabama before opting out of the Texas Air National Guard early after family influence got you in ahead of 500 other recruits.

As much as I hold Dubya in disdain, I yield to a 20,000-word article July 3 by Washington Post writers Baron Gelllman and Jo Becker to express my feelings for Cheney.

Cheney, they write, has been the most influential public official in the country, not necessarily excluding President Bush, and his influence has been entirely malign. He is pathologically (but purposefully) secretive; treacherous toward colleagues; coldly manipulative of the callow, lazy, and ignorant president he serves; contemptuous of public opinion; and dismissive not only of international law (a fairly standard attitude for conservatives of his stripe) but also of the very idea that the Constitution and laws of the United States, including laws signed by his nominal superior, can be construed to limit the power of the executive to take any action that can plausibly be classified as part of an endless, endlessly expandable "war on terror."

The August Vanity Fair has run Halberstam's last article before his untimely death, "The History Boys."

"Recently," Halberstam wrote, "Harry Truman, for reasons that would surely puzzle him if he were still alive, has become the Republicans' favorite Democratic president. In fact, the men around Bush who attempt to feed the White House line to journalists have begun to talk about the current president as a latter day Truman: Yes, goes the line, Truman's rise to an ever more elevated status in the presidential pantheon is all ex post facto, conferred by historians long after he left office a beleaguered man, his poll numbers hopelessly low. Thus Bush and the people around him predict that a similar Trumanization will ride to the rescue for them."

The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzbg sums up Cheney:

"Cheney has been the intellectual author and bureaucratic facilitator of the crimes and misdemeanors that have inflicted unprecedented disgrace on our country's moral and political standing: the casual trashing of habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions; the claim of authority to seize suspects, including American citizens, and imprison them indefinitely and incommunicado, with no right to due process of law; the outright encouragement of 'cruel,' 'inhuman,' and 'degrading' treatment of prisoners; the use of undoubted torture, including waterboarding (Cheney: 'a no-brainer for me'), which for a century the United States had prosecuted as a war crime; and, or course, the bloody, nightmarish Iraq war itself ..."

Is there any reason why Cheney and Bush should not be impeached, convicted and their cases sent to the International War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague to be tried for war crimes?

No.

Pythian Press.

An honorable general gets the axe

By DOLPH HONICKER

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing. --George Bernard Shaw

... we have violated the laws of warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and ... the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe ... that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.--Gen. Antonio Taguba (ret.)

Why in the name of God -- if there’s such a being -- create a nation in which its leaders countenance medieval torture ... warrantless wiretaps on its subjects ... imprisonment without the right of trial ... questionable elections ... a milquetoast media and a timid legislative branch?

Yes, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia come to mind. But that was yesterday. Today is today.

With a pair of lame ducks pooping on them, why doesn’t a nation of sheep tire of the embarrassment, tune out “American Idol” and Paris Hilton, rise up as one and, like the star of the movie “Network,” shout, “I’m mad as hell and not going to take this any more?”

Realistically, what kind of a president allows his minions to send Maj. Bryan Bowlsbey to Iraq as part of a transport unit?

Who is Maj. Bowlsbey and why should this long-time National Guardsman, the director of the Illinois Veterans’ Affairs Department, get a free ride?

In the months before being shipped out, Bowlsbey was getting his home readied so that his invalid wife could get around. She’s missing two legs.

In 2005, his wife, Maj. Tammy Duckworth, was piloting a Blackhawk helicopter over Iraq when it was struck by a rocket propelled grenade. She tried vainly to control the chopper by pressing on the rudders.

She couldn’t feel them. Her right leg was shredded to the hipbone. Her left leg was shot off just below the knee, her right arm broken in three places. She lost almost half her blood.

One assumes that because Tammy Duckworth ran an unsuccessful race for Congress in 2006 on an anti-war campaign, denouncing the policies of President George W. Bush, had nothing to do with Maj. Bowlsbey’s deployment.

You have the right to assume that.

Meanwhile, is the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh the only reporter digging through the muck of the Bush/Cheney torture policy as enunciated by the know-nothing U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez?

Hersh’s latest report details how an honorable general, Antonio Taguba, tried to tell the truth and was steamrollered by the White House and his peers in the Army.

In his first meeting with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Taguba told Hersh that an old friend, Lt. Gen. Banz J. Craddock, who was Rumsfeld’s senior military assistant, met him at the door and coldly told him, “Wait here.”

When ushered in, Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice, “Here ... comes that famous General Taguba -- of the Taguba Report!”

Also in the meeting: Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy; Stephen Cambone, under-secretary of defense for intelligence; Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Gen. Peter Schoomaker, Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials.

All professed ignorance of Abu Ghraib.

Asked if he had found abuse or torture, Taguba recalled telling the group: “I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, ‘That’s not abuse. That’s torture.’ There was quiet.”

Tugaba says Rumsfeld denied seeing his in-depth investigative report despite having sent dozens of copies through several channels at the Pentagon and to the Central Command Headquarters, in Tampa, Fla., which ran the Iraq War.

Also, before the meeting, Tugaba says he’d spent weeks briefing senior military leaders on the report.

He says when he urged one lieutenant general to look at the photos, the officer rebuffed him, saying, “I don’t want to get involved by looking, because what do you do with information, once you know what they show?”

Gen. Myers testified that in January of 2004 information about the photographs had been given “to me and the Secretary up through the chain of command. ... And the general nature of the photos, about nudity, some mock sexual acts and other abuse, was described.”

Yet, testifying before Senate and House Armed Service Committees on May 7, Rumsfeld, said, “I wish we had known more, sooner, and been able to tell you more sooner, but we didn’t.”

Taguba told Hersh he was appalled, saying the secretary was in denial. Had an aide withheld the facts?

“Rumsfeld is very perceptive and has a mind like a steel trap,” said Taguba. “There’s no way he’s suffering from C.R.S. -- Can’t Remember Shit. He’s trying to acquit himself, and a lot of people are lying to protect themselves.”

What particularly galled Taguba was that Rumsfeld was accompanied by senior military officers who concurred with his denials.

In January 2006, Gen. Richard Cody, the Army’s vice-chief of staff, calls Taguba, who’d served 34 active years, and says, “I need you to retire by January 2007.” No chit-chat, though the two had known each other for years. Then Cody hangs up.

"They always shoot the messeger," Taguba told Hersh. "There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this."

The message is: Don’t rock the bleeping boat.

Pythian Press.

When in Nice, wear sandals

By DOLPH HONICKER

It was a lesson I should have learned when still wet behind the ears: never watch sausage being made or Congress at work.

But there I was viewing CSPAN as Democratic congresspersons tried vainly to pass a resolution to up the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour -- a pittance that hadn’t been changed in a decade -- as one Republican speaker after another rose to defend our troops, our flag and our record deficits. No, scratch that last item.

Having a weak stomach, I switched to the Discovery Channel. There I saw the No. 1 concern of my Republican friends. The channel was running a segment on yachts.

One of my favorite yachts was built for speed at 140 feet long and 26 feet wide. The master bedroom with its king-sized bed stretched from port to starboard. On a trial run, its owner got it up to 69 knots. That’s 74 miles an hour. Imagine the wake!

This fits the GOP axiom that a rising tide lifts all yachts. Leaky rowboats fend for themselves.

Was that yacht powered by 2,000 horsepower or 20,000 horsepower engines? I don’t recall. I just remember the owner smiling into the camera and saying, “When you open this up to maximum speed, it could burn up your credit card.”

Yeah.

Have no fear, Mr. Yacht Owner, President George W. Bush’s tax cuts that turn millionaires into multimillionaires will bail you out at the pump, and his pie-in-the-sky hydrogen program, run by nuclear power plants, will have your boat running on water vapors.

The speedy yacht sleeps ten plus its crew with a mere $30 million price sticker. And, when hurricane season approaches, you can avoid dings in the hull and bent windshield wipers by having it transported on specially built tankers to the Mediterranean off Monaco or Nice where the young maidens go topless on the pebble beaches.

Transportation cost? A shade over $200,000 one way. But, when you own a $30 million yacht, what’s a few hundred thou? Play your cards right and Bush-Cheney will reimburse you.

The yacht that really caught my eye was a large steamer built in 1921by the founder of Dodge auto works (I think his name was Dodge) which burned in 1926 and was refurbished a year or so later. Its original $2 million cost would be the equivalent of $100 million today -- chicken feed for the current crop of Bushonaires.

Teakwood furnishings, Jacuzzies and the all comforts of home (yours, not mine) abound in this floating luxury hotel.

But I offer this small bit of advice to neophyte yachtsmen sailing off to Nice. My wife and I were there in 1991. I was armed with a primitive video cam that weighed about 20 pounds. I zoomed in on the nubile beach scenery, swinging my neck from left to right. The next day in Avignon I woke up with a stiff neck that stayed that way for a month.

Note: Pebbles on the Nice beach hurt bare feet. This is not Florida. Wear sandals.

Pythian Press.

King George to be anointed?

By DOLPH HONICKER

More than one person close to President George W. Bush has said that he has a messianic complex. The Rev. Pat Robertson says that when Bush was governor of Texas Bush informed the evangelist that God had told him to run for president.

Since biblical happenings seem to occur in threes -- the Three Wise Men, Christ rising from the tomb on the third day, the Holy Trinity of Jesus, God and the Holy Ghost -- what could be so unusual about a third, self-anointed term for a man who considers himself above the law? In other words: King George.

Don't laugh.

At least don't laugh until you have absorbed National Security Presidential Directive NSPD 51 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive HSPD-20.

They were handed down by the White House May 9, although you did not read them in the Washington Post or the New York Times. If you'd been one of the few thousand readers of the Progressive, you could have read it in their May 18 issue.

To be brief, Bush's two directives grant the presidency extraordinary powers without apparent congressional approval.

WorldNetDaily.com columnist Jerome R. Corsi says the directives establish under the office of the president a new national continuity coordinator to make plans for "National Essential Functions" of all federal, state, local, territorial and "tribal" governments, as well as private sector organizations to continue functioning under the president's directives in the event of a national emergency.

Tribal? Once again the Indians get the shaft.

National emergency?

This smells of martial law.

Ah, as though Bush and his joined-at-the-hip president of vice, Dick Cheney, did not have enough power already.

Under the definitions (b) "Catastrophic Emergency" means any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, economy, or government functions.

Another Katrina and perhaps another Michael ("Ya doin' a fine job, Brownie") could take over.

Under (c), (d) and (e), alphabetical agencies take over: COG, "Continuity of Government; COOP, "Continuity of Operations; and ECG, "Enduring Constitutional Government.

One thing bureaucracy never runs out of is letters. So under (h) we have NEFs, or "National Essential Functions," which must be supported through COOP and COG capabilities, and (i) PMEFs or "Primary Mission Essential Functions," those government functions that must be performed in order to support or implement the performance of NEFs before, during, and in the aftermath of an emergency.

The directives, which meander on for six and one-eighth finely printed pages, is another example of why lawyers in the Bush administration have nothing better to do than to grant more powers to their leader.

Will the Democrats put a stop to such nonsense?

Sure, just like they've dilly-dallied over halting the war in Iraq.

The worst national disasters that these directives do not seem to recognize is the Bush/Cheney administration itself.

Pythian Press.

Get ready for the long, long haul

By DOLPH HONICKER

What would happen in Iraq if American troops suddenly withdrew tomorrow and the Green Zone became a giant Motel 6 to house displaced Iraqis?

Chaos would erupt. But not necessarily in Iraq. That country already has its own brand of chaos which its own people must end, just as a minority of Americans overthrew the first King George in the 1700s.

If Sunnis and Shi’ites wake up tomorrow to find their streets free of roadblocks, troops kicking in doors, Humvees, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, tanks, jet fighters roaring overhead, and helicopters chopping up the desert air, the tribes might actually shout, “Praise Allah for delivering us from the infidels!” They’d probably exchange high-fives and move back into their formerly mixed neighborhoods.

The real chaos would break out in America.

Stocks in Halliburton, Lockheed, General Dynamics, Boeing, Raytheon and other defense firms would plummet, with layoffs in the millions.

Silicon Valley would panic.

China, Japan and other foreign nations would demand payment of trillions of dollars in loans that the U.S. under Bush/Cheney has used to finance wars and deficits and prop up the economy.

The GOP accused the Democratic Party of being the one of “tax and spend.“ Is it worse than being a party that chews ever so lightly on the upper crust to borrow and spend?

If an Iraqi pullout occurred tomorrow, you’d have to dodge CEOs leaping off tall buildings.

Tiger Woods might have to sell his yacht and play tournaments with second-hand driving range balls.

Paris Hilton might shave her head and sell her hair to cancer victims.

THINK.

Think back to 1929 and the Great Depression. Millions in bread lines. Massive runs on banks.

By 1933, 26.6 percent of Americans were unemployed. Those still working were paid less. Factory workers were forced to work twice as hard for the same wages.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made noble efforts to bring the country to its feet with such alphabet agencies as the WPA (Works Progress Administration), the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), and the NRA (National Recovery Agency).

He declared a bank holiday to prevent devastating withdrawals.

FDR’s efforts made a dent in the Depression, but it took World War II with the U.S. serving as the Arsenal for Democracy to bring about full employment.

And we’ve been on a wartime economy ever since -- from the Cold War with the Soviet Union, to the Korean Conflict, to the Vietnam War, to our mighty victory in Grenada over a fifth-rate police force and a bunch of Cuban workers building a runway, to Bosnia, Somalia, Panama, Desert Storm, Afghanistan and now the quagmire in Iraq.

Did I leave out any?

Sadly, we’re a nation made up of intelligent people who can be fooled some of the time but seem to catch on only when it’s almost too late to play catch-up.

Barack Obama and John McCain spoke the truth -- before they tripped over themselves apologizing -- terming the loss of troops in Iraq a waste. True. Those in uniforms didn’t give up their lives for mom, the flag and apple pie. Their lives were ripped from them by sniper bullets, RPGs and stress-induced suicides. Wasted!

If is the biggest little word in the English language.

If Adolf Hitler had sent his Panzer divisions into Russia a month earlier, we’d be speaking German today. If Japan had followed up after its Pearl Harbor attack, we’d likely be bilingual -- speaking German and Japanese.

And if George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Pearle and the other neocons had not been so fixated on invading Iraq even before 9/11 and concentrated on taming the Taliban and capturing Osma bin Laden THINK of all the lives and money that would have been saved.

Should we leave Iraq tomorrow? Official numbers answer in the affirmative.

President Bush is sending 21,500 additional troops to Iraq. But, wait! He’s supplementing that with 4,700 support troops for a total of 26,200 troops, and maybe more. According to Pentagon assessments, Iraqi security forces now number 357,400.

That adds up to 383,600. That should be enough to start easing our forces out -- if not tomorrow, then by mid-summer.

All this is a dream, of course. Truth is, we’ll probably have boots on the ground there for 30 more years, long after my bones have turned to dust. How else would our economy survive?

And then there’s the oil, you know.

Pythian Press

Red tape clogs way out for friends

By DOLPH HONICKER

Poker has two inviolate axioms: (1) know when to hold and when to fold and (2) never send good money after bad.

In Iraq, President George W. Bush and the president of vice, Dick Cheney, have run roughshod over both rules.

The time for folding has long since past. In fact, it was a hand that never should have been dealt. That brings us to No. 2. In Iraq, we’re not only spending like it was Monopoly money, we’re spending our most valuable assets, boots on the ground -- some 30,000 pairs of them.

They’re volunteers. But if you polled them, most probably would prefer going to Afghanistan, where the 9/11 terrorists trained, so they could make a dent against a surging Taliban and al-Qaeda force .

Some of us, even though we were not military experts, saw the error of pulling troops from Afghanistan as we were zeroing in on Osama bin Laden and sending them to invade Iraq. It was stupid since allied forces controlled the air over Iraq and Saddam Hussein wasn’t going anywhere.

The world knows we cherry-picked faulty evidence from the likes of “Curveball,” Amad Chalibi and, my favorite, this from the archives of Newsweek, which said information about links between Iraq and al-Qaeda came from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. “I been a shaky alibi (?)”

Imagine the immediate days post-9/11. The world was with us. We could have had half a million U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan. With that show of force, Pakistan would have thrown in her lot wholeheartedly. Saddam could have been held off with our left hand. How could he hit New York with Scuds that had a range of 100 miles?

But today Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf sits on a powder keg, his will weakened. Time quotes a senior military official in Afghanistan as saying: “The bottom line is that the Taliban can do what they want in the tribal areas because the {Pakistani} army is not going after them.”

Taliban and al-Qaeda forces are settled in small groups in a heavily forested band of mountains that has virtually been conceded to them. It’s called Talibanistan. Digging them out will be like plucking fire ants one at a time.

Iraq presents a sorry tale of betrayal on our part as detailed in a lengthy New Yorker piece by George Packer. Hundreds of Iraqi translators and intelligence agents that served America, facing daily risks of having their heads chopped off, have been shafted. Many have died.

For instance, Ali spent his childhood in Pennsylvania and Oklahoma while his father completed graduate studies. Unfortunately, they returned home to Baghdad when he was 11 so his father could get his green card. The Iranian war prevented them from leaving.

Packer says Ali had to learn Arabic from scratch and “considered his American childhood a paradise lost.“ In 2003 he became an interpreter with the 82nd Airborne Division. He could not tell his family.

“Ali found that, although many soldiers were friendly, they often ignored information and advice from their Iraqi employees,” Packer writes. “Interpreters would give them names of insurgents, and nothing would happen. When Ali suggested that soldiers buy up locals’ rocket-propelled grenade launchers so they wouldn’t fall into the hands of insurgents, he was disregarded. ...“

Consider this vignette of Othman, a Sunni doctor, 29, and Laith, a Shia engineer, a few years younger, who shared a strong friendship based on a desire for the Americans to arrive and change their lives.

“Most of the people Othman and Laith knew had left Iraq,” says Packer. “House by house, Baghdad had been abandoned. Othman was considering his options: move his parents from their house (in an insurgent stronghold) to his sister’s house (in the midst of civil war); move his parents and brothers to Syria (where there was no work) and live with his friend in Jordan (going crazy with boredom while watching his savings dwindle); go to London and ask for asylum (and probably be sent back); stay in Baghdad for six more months until he could begin a scholarship that he had won to study journalism in America (or get killed waiting). Beneath his calm good humor, Othman was paralyzed -- he didn’t want to leave Baghdad and his family, but staying had become impossible. Every day, he changed his mind.”

As for Laith: “Sometimes I feel like we’re standing in line for a ticket, waiting to die.”

Many of the young Iraqis who signed up with the U.S. military to become translators, or “terps” as the soldiers called them, “had learned English,” says Packer, “from American movies and music, and from listening secretly to the BBC.”

Otherwise, under Saddam, as one said, it “was a one-way road leading to nothing.”

Ironically, that’s where it stands today. Red tape and indifference clog their every step. Try to teach a soldier cultural dos and don’ts, he won’t listen. You’re an Iraqi and untrustworthy. Just translate for me, mother.

Iraqi “terps” received inferior or no body army, leading Baathists to make a persuasive case that Americans treat all Iraqis badly, even those who work for them.

L. Paul Bremer III, as the virtual dictator in Iraq for 14 months, ditched the entire Iraqi army, threw hundreds of thousands out of work and lit the fuse that has led to today’s chaos. He spoke no Arabic and knew nothing about the Middle East. By the time he was forced to fold his hand, it was too late.

As the banner across the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln the summer of 2003 so blithely put it: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

Sooner or later -- a year, four years, twenty years -- we’ll be out. What happens then to all the Iraqi “terps” who served us at great risk but have been fingered by both Sunni and Shia insurgents as collaborators?

Many of them now seek safe flight ahead of the eventual exodus, before heads roll. They’re snarled in red tape.

It’s Catch-22. We can’t tell you when we’re leaving. It would tip off the enemy. Anyway, American personnel will leave first. You’re on your own. Catch a chopper out, if you can. With friends like us, who needs enemies

Pythian Press

Stay the course, slay the horse?

By DOLPH HONICKER

In a rapid advance to the rear in the bloody occupation of Iraq, George W. Bush and his fellow warriors have muzzled their impotent “stay-the-course” weapon and unleashed newly coined rhetorical artillery under the rubric of “progress moving forward.”

This new “strategy” is anchored upon a three-legged stool of (1) governance, (2) security and (3) economics.

At least it has a far better ring to it than the shock and awe

pre-preempted invasion labeled Operation Iraqi Liberation and changed as rapidly as you can spell OIL to Operation Enduring Freedom.

Democrats can never hold a candle to the way Republicans can shoot themselves in the foot and tap-dance away from “stay the course” to “a study of constant motion,” meaning that stay the course did not mean what it said.

Still, in a Salt Lake City address in August 2006, Bush said: “We will stay the course. We will help this young Iraqi democracy succeed.”

And July, in Milwaukee, according to the Washington Post: “We will win in Iraq so long as we stay the course.”

Earlier, in June, after returning from Baghdad, “I saw people wondering whether the United State would have the nerve to stay the course and help them succeed.”

But, just as he cut and ran from Afghanistan, Bush has cut and run from that phrase of steely resolve.

White House press secretary Tony Snow and the Bush team has tried to explain that “stay the course” does not actually mean stay the course but is a study in constant motion by the administration.

And what once was “we’ll stand down as soon as they stand up” is now we’ll “step back as they step forward and step up.” A little longer, perhaps, but it gets the point across.

In an Oct. 11 news conference, Bush became tangled over the original phrase, complaining, “The characterization of, you know, ‘it’s stay the course’ is about a quarter right. ‘Stay the course means keep doing what you’re doing. My attitude is: Don’t do what you’re doing if it’s not working -- change. ‘Stay the course’ also means don’t leave before the job is done.“

In a later appearance with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, it was no longer a quarter right as Bush said: “We have been -- we will complete the mission, we will do our job and help achieve the goal, but we’re constantly adjusting tactic. Constantly.“

It was painful to watch Marine Gen. Peter Pace, head of the Joint Chief of Staffs, blinking rapidly like a resurrected Richard Nixon as he tried to put a new face on a disintegrating policy.

Instead of a target date to withdraw from Iraq, we now have a timetable with windows of opportunity for the Iraqi leadership to meet. If they fail to meet our timetable for cleaning up corruption, protecting the population and rebuilding the infrastructure, then we’ll adjust the timetable and open the windows a little wider. To put a precise date on our leaving, Pace says, meekly echoing his boss, would result in chaos -- as though Iraqis today were living in Ronald Reagan’s peaceful city on a hill.

Anyway, as the commander-in-chief himself once announced -- in words meant to sound Churchillian -- the war against terrorism will be long hard, bloody and victory will be up to the next president(s).

Blame Bob Woodward for the recent Republican shift in “strategy” that’s merely a shift in rhetoric. In his book, State of Denial, Woodward peels away the framework from the false White House of cards to reveal the arrogance of the neocons, particularly former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney who led a willing Bush into the Iraq quagmire.

And remember, Rummy was Bush’s point man until the day after the election.

Pythian Press

Everything's just too damn small

By DOLPH HONICKER

My wife Jeannine and I own a cell phone (one). We share it. If she’s out, it’s attached to her purse, which means she has to drag her purse up to her ear if anyone calls. People stare when she’s at a restaurant and appears to be talking into her purse while leaning under the table.

If I’m out, she still has the cell phone with her. I haven’t quite got the hang of it. My fingers fumble.

It’s a remarkable device. Fits in the palm of your hand. It can take photos. It has a button that turns it into a video camera. I think it can add, subtract, divide and multiply (not like rabbits but with numbers). It may even have a timer and a button to get the latest stock market reports.

We use it to call people and receive calls from other people. That’s it. The luxury services remain unused.

If we had a flat tire on the highway or saw a traffic accident, our cell phone would come in handy. Unless we were in a dead zone, we could call 911 and tell them where we were -- if we had a global positioning system.

But, even if we saw a spectacular accident, worthy of CNN coverage, I wouldn’t know how to photograph with a digital camera which I usually leave at home.

Many years ago, I had a Rolliflex camera. I never used a flash. I learned to use available light. A light meter gave me settings for Tri-X film which I could juice up to an even higher speed.

Our digital camera fits in the palm of your hand. We ordered it over the internet. Yes, I’ve learned how to use the internet. Small as it is, the ad said the camera can turn out images of 10 pixels, which means it can cram a bunch of dots smaller than a period at the end of this sentence so tightly the photo would be almost as sharp as an old-fashioned darkroom photo -- so sharp you could blow up the image into a poster.

By the time I added a battery charger and lots of other stuff to my order, the bill came to $318.

We’ve had it for almost a year now. Every time I take it out and look at it the damned thing intimidates the hell out of me. It came with a manual. The manual also intimidates the hell out of me. It also came with a CD of instructions. But I’ve lost it.

With my Rolliflex all I had to do was look down, focus, set the shutter speed and snap. I could develop and print my own pictures. I was no Ed Weston or Ansel Adams, but some of my shots looked pretty good. Or, as Larry David would say: “Pretty, pretty good.”

Today everything technical seems to be getting smaller and smaller. Next year I may be able to watch Lawrence of Arabia on my thumbnail.

But do I?

Technology is passing me by. I have no idea what an iPod is. It sounds like one of those old black-and-white horror films where giant ants from outer space land in pods, hatch and then begin gobbling all the people in their path until a handsome young scientist develops a death ray that kills the ants.

Apple (not the edible type but the Silicon Valley version) is coming out with an iPhone that’ll sell for $500 to $600. What will you get for your money besides a mobile phone? Here are the other features: music player, camera, wireless e-mail, Web browser and video player.

For that money, it ought to have a device that will burn in CDs, although I have no idea how to burn in CDs. However, there’s a lot of rap music I’d like to burn. I come from an era of 78-rpm records with one song on one side and a second on the flip side.

Forget this high tech stuff. In my book, the greatest invention of the modern era was the flip-top can that replaced the ubiquitous “church key,” once a must at all beer busts.

And forget about making things smaller. Give me something Big like Sharp’s 108-inch flat panel television, the largest ever made. Of course, the only place we’d have to put it would be on our roof.

If we sat out chairs in the backyard and charged admission, it might be worth it.

Pythian Press

Just a bunch of ‘lucky’ stiffs

By DOLPH HONICKER

A man can be rich, but only a nation can be wealthy. And if any person of any age suffers from poverty, then our whole country bears the shame.

--Walter Mosley in the Oct. 23 issue of The Nation.

There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.

--Warren Buffett

Who says the American economy is not booming? The cup not only is half full, it’s overflowing.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, especially if you are an investment banker. For instance, John Mack, chief executive officer of Morgan Stanley, was to be awarded a Christmas bonus in 2006 worth about $40 million in stock and options for 2006, according to the Washington Post.

That’s a nice hunk of change. But it gets better.

At Goldman Sachs, jaws dropped on Wall Street as the investment bank reported that profits soared 93 percent. As a result, its CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, was in line to receive a record compensation exceeding $50 million in his Christmas stocking.

The New York Times quotes Michael Holland, chairman of Holland & Company, a New York-based investing firm, as saying: “Anyone at the bonus line at Goldman Sachs died and went to bonus heaven. It doesn’t get any better than this.”

But CEOs were not alone in being awash in greenbacks. Outside directors at hundreds of American companies received option grants that were likely to have been manipulated, says a new study printed in the Washington Post.

It reported that 9 percent of 29,000 option grants to outside directors from 1996 to 2005 were granted on a day the company stock hit a monthly low. “The likelihood of such a concentration of ‘lucky’ grants is so low as to be statistically impossible,” say the study’s authors.

Post writer Terence O’Hara quotes Lucian Bebchuk, a Harvard University professor who co-authored the report -- “Lucky Directors” -- with Cornell University’s Yaniv Grinstein and Urs Peyer, a professor at the

French business school, as saying:

“It’s like going to Vegas thousands of times and betting on red every time and winning more than half the time. From a numerical standpoint, it can’t be random. There has to be some manipulation in the outcome.”

Of the more than 130 firms that have disclosed probes of their options-granting practices, only a handful of CEOs have been canned.

The latest study is the first focused solely on grants to directors. Oddly enough, another study, this one by the Corporate Library of 120 companies implicated in backdating, found a high incidence of interlocking directors who served on more than one company that backdated.

Ain’t America wonderful?

Retired teachers, police officers and firefighters and other public workers might differ.

As state governments cut benefits, set aside money to cover future costs and shift expenses to the federal Medicare program, USA Today says 43 state legislatures are set to convene in January to address a liability of more than $1 trillion to provide medical care promised to some 25 million current and future retired state and local civil servants.

The newspaper quotes state Rep. Dale Folwell (R-NC) as saying, “The numbers make your jaw drop.”

North Carolina, for instance has reported a $23.8 billion unfunded liability for retiree healthcare, more than three times what the state owes in ordinary debt.

Meanwhile, at Goldman Sachs, the bank earned nearly as much per share in 2006 as it had in the last two record years combined, and paid out $16.5 billion in compensation this year, or roughly $623,418 per employee.

No retirement worries for these guys.

And if by chance one of these bankers had to live from paycheck to paycheck, like millions of Americans who live in dread of receiving pink slips, it would be a long time before the wolves started to howl at the doors of the boys on Wall Street.