Getting nothing for something

You're at an upscale speakeasy. A man peers out a peep-hole and says, "Yeah?"

You say, "Bernie sent me."

The guy replies, "Come back later. We're full."

Repulsed a second time, you appear a third time and say, "Mr. Madoff sent me."

This time you're allowed in but told you're allowed one drink, a smooth, 18-year-old scotch.

That, in essence, is how Bernard Madoff lured his investment suckers. He made them want to part with their money. Only later did they learn it was rotgut whiskey, not scotch, they were being served.

It's difficult to feel much pity for them. Most were super rich to begin with. Rather than shoot for the moon they saw paper profits of 8 to 12 percent even in down markets, year after year. Each felt that he/she was one of a hundred of so privileged to park their life savings--hundreds of thousands, tens of millions--into Madoff's Ponzi scheme.

As Ron Chernow notes in The New Yorker, "The aura of exclusivity was bogus, of course; he ended up with almost five thousand client accounts."

Google "Ponzi scheme" and you get 5,010,000 hits.

Some of Madoff's early investors did see rewards from money "invested" by later arrivals. But when the market began to bottom out, $7 billion in chits came pouring in. That's when "Uncle Bernie" 'fessed up. His total take: some $65 billion, the largest scam in history.

Mark Seal, writing about "Madoff's World" in Vanity Fair, says he himself tried to get into Madoff's investment fund, fortunately, in vain.

"In November," says Seal, "I invited a friend and long-time Madoff investor to dinner and literally begged him to get me in. He listened politely, then shook his head slowly. 'Forget it,' he said. 'Bernie was closed; Bernie didn't need the money.' His discouraging response only made me want Bernie all the more."

Seal interviewed dozens of former millionaires and multi-millionaires for his article.

Some wealthy widows, heeding to their dying husbands' wishes to put everything in Bernie's hands, wound up as paupers.

Houston stockbroker Joyce Z. Greenburg had a fortune invested in Madoff. But when she inherited an investment from her husband she resumed a part-time job at a brokerage. Seal says Madoff found out and called her in 1999, fuming, "I never manage money for anyone who works at a brokerage." Either chose between his account or her job. She closed her account, and he wired her the money.

Seal quotes her further: "That's the good part. The stupid part is that I retired in 2001 and asked to open a new account. ... And now that's gone with the wind."

Two older men, Norman F. Levy and Walter J. Shapiro, both wealthy philanthropists, treated Madoff like a son, including him and his wife Ruth to every birthday, anniversary, bat mitzvah, wedding or graduation. He took Shapiro for more than half a billion dollars. The Betty and Levy Foundation and those of their sons had to shut down after Madoff's arrest.

The scheme could have been nipped in 2000 when Harry Markopolos, an accountant and private fraud investigator sounded the alarm to the Securities Exchange Commission to no avail. In 2005, he sent regulators a 19-page memo titled "The World's Largest Hedge Fund Is a Fraud."

He was referred to the SEC's New York branch chief, Meaghan Cheung, who, he wrote in an e-mail to one of her colleagues last year, "didn't have the derivatives or mathematical background to understand the violations" much less prosecute them.

One of the sadder cases is that of Maureen Ebel, 60. Seal relates:

"Following the untimely death 1n 2000 of her physician husband, she got suckered into the Madoff fund. 'All your problems are over,' said an elderly relative of her late husband's. 'My guy Madoff has agreed to take you as a favor to me. I pulled on his heartstrings.' Feeling blessed, she eventually transferred everything she had: $7.3 million.

"Now she was sitting among the ruins, having returned Christmas gifts, begged back her annual $5,000 International Polo Club membership fee, persuaded the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society to return her $1,000 donation, sold valuable jewelry, put up her Lexus for sale on-line, and listed her home ... she had to take a job caring for a wealthy friend's 93-year-old mother, which developed into 'basically being a maid,' she said. On the day of my visit, she had just been informed by her employer, 'We're interviewing a Hispanic woman to do the work. It's best for us.'

Ebel added, "If I have to feed myself, I can go and work as a waitress."

Meanwhile, Ruth Madoff, who seeks $69 million, claiming it was not part of the Ponzi scheme, has expensive tastes of her own, going to Davidoff of Geneva on one of her husband's recent birthdays to buy a $14,500 humidor, inlaid with a buffalo motif, filled with his favorite cigars.

{Honicker is a retired newspaperman and a freelance writer}.

May the Green Be With You

By Dolph Honicker

The convergence of three perfect storms shows why the state legislature was in such a rush to do the bidding of Southern Co., its subsidiary, Georgia Power, and their 70 lobbyists to fleece ratepayers.

Late last week the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's three-judge panel told Georgia utilities their application to build two new reactors at Plant Vogtle was incomplete because it failed to consider how nuclear waste would be managed if a storage site remains unavailable when the new reactors begin operation.

Then came the bombshell of Energy Secretary Stephen Chu's announcement that the Department of Energy was dropping plans to store radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada after a 27-year, $13.5 billion outlay.

Earlier, Congress killed a $50 billion subsidy for the nuclear industry from its stimulus plan. And Wall Street won't touch such high-risk investments in this worst of all possible economic worlds.

What to do?

Georgia House legislators, in a 207-66 vote, approved a sweetheart license plan adopted by the utilities known as (CWIP) construction work in progress.

That means you start paying for the nukes now and, 10 or 12 years from now your homes will be juiced with nuclear electricity--provided the plants are ever built and that you're still alive to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Otherwise, it's billions of dollars sucked from the economy that could have gone for renewable energy.

If an automobile dealer offered to deliver a 2020 Jazzmatic SUV 10 or 12 years from now if you started making payments today, you'd think he was loony. But the powerful utilities, rather than risk their own capital, prefer the pay-them-as-you-go plan.

"Radioactive nuclear waste is already piling up right here in Georgia," said Bobbie Paul, executive director of Georgia WAND (Women's Action for New Directions). "Nuclear reactors continue to leave a horrible legacy for all future generations. It's totally irresponsible for the utilities to push a plan that will only make this situation worse."

The Rev. Charles Utley, pastor of a church in Waynesboro within view of Plant Vogtle and a community organizer for the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, said, "Radioactive waste storage in Burke County puts our people's lives at risk. It's an injustice."

"Utilities should instead build clean, safe and affordable energy solutions such as wind, solar, tidal and biopower that don't pose these risks," declared Sara Barczak, program director with Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, one of the intervening organizations in their Savannah field office.

LaGrange, though it has no shortage of electricity, is part of the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia (MEAG) and has agreed to buy a portion of the two new reactors proposed for the Vogtle site. Plans are to sell the electricity it has obligated to buy to Jacksonville, Fla., and to a South Alabama utility.

The NRC's licensing board will conduct a further hearing for the contentions to the early site permit from March 16-19. in Augusta.

Fortunately, the people appear to have an ally in their corner, Barack Hussein Obama, America's first black president, who also is a deep shade of green.

{Dolph Honicker is a semi-retired newspaperman and a freelance writer}.

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