It’s correct to shun the bloody hand.

By DOLPH HONICKER

If you found yourself having to confront a man responsible for the unnecessary deaths of over 3,220 of your countrymen plus 50,000 to 650,000 lives in a nation that was no threat to us, would you go out of your way to be polite?

Assume further that your own son was in harm’s way because of this person and he walked and asked, “How’s your boy?”

Responding to President George W. Bush, the Democratic senator-elect from Virginia, James Webb replied, “I’d like to get them out of Iraq.”

When Bush asked again, Webb replied, “That’s between me and my boy.”

Webb later told the Washington Post about his refusal to pass through a White House reception for newly elected members of Congress, laying grammar aside, “I’m not particularly interested in having a picture of me and George W. Bush on my wall. No offense to the institution of the presidency, and I’m certainly looking forward to working with him and his administration. {But} leaders do some symbolic things to try to convey who they are and what the message is.”

George Will, a top-chop wordsmith, who can write lovingly of baseball, considers Webb’s response to Bush that of a “boor.”

I disagree.

Webb’s son, a Marine, is in Iraq. Webb himself is a decorated Marine veteran of Vietnam, a war from Bush and Vice President Cheney found an exit strategy.

Had I been in Webb‘s combat boots, I’d have had the temerity to answer: “My boy faces death daily, Mr. President. He’s a Marine who volunteered to go to Iraq to fight in your stupid war. May I ask why your two daughters are not over there as well?”

But that’s me. George Will sees it differently.

I remember that when Cindy Sheehan, a mother who lost her son in Iraq, tried to see Bush, he snubbed her. Did Will consider Bush’s behavior boorish? Cowardly? Craven?

Will says of Webb: “In a republic, people decline to be led by leaders who are insufferably full of themselves.”

Could this not be said of Bush who is so sure of his king-like divinity that he refuses to admit mistakes and blindly follows his own counsel?

Rather that grasping the essence of Webb’s message, Will parses words. Imagine parsing some of Bush’s verbal goofs.

Webb wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal that began, as Will notes:

“The most important -- and unfortunately the least debated -- issue in politics today is our society’s steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century. America’s top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the past 25 years. It is not unfair to say that they are literally living in a different country.”

While Will focuses on thee words -- infinitely, tier and literally -- I had no problem getting the gist: that the poor are getting poorer, the rich are getting richer, locked away in their gated communities and the country is headed toward third world status unless our deficits and debt are reined in.

A recent issue of The New Yorker offers Webb more reasons for shunning a man who hasn’t learned the meaning of bipartisanship.

On Nov. 15 Bush renominated four of his hardest-right candidates for the federal appeals:

1. A Defense Department lawyer who has been denounced by a score of retired generals and admirals for his role as an architect of the administration’s infamous interrogation regime.

2. A former Interior Department attorney and mining and ranching lobbyist who sees the Clean Water Act as “regulatory excess.”

3. A district court judge whose decisions have been reversed or vacated more than 150 times, including two reversals from the Supreme Court -- one of them in a unanimous opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, no less, in a voting rights case.

4. A former aide to Sen. Trent Lott who is the first such nominee in a quarter of a century to be unanimously rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Association.

The next day, notes The New Yorker, Bush appointed Eric Keroack as new chief of “population affairs” at the Department of Health and Human Services. A gynecologist, he will oversee Title X, a Nixon-era program that distributes contraceptives to poor and uninsured women.

“Until recently,” says writer Hendrik Hertzberg, “he was the medical director of a Christianist pregnancy-counseling organization that regards the distribution of contraceptives as ‘demeaning to women.’”

There’s more.

“One of his odder theories,” says Hertzberg, “makes him a sort of family-friendly Gen. Jack D. Ripper” (of Dr. Strangelove fame). “In Keroack’s case, the precious bodily fluid ... is the hormone oxytocin, a.k.a. ‘God’s Super Glue.’ Apparently, oxytocin is released during certain enjoyable activities, including hugging, massage, and, of course, sex.

“It is also, according to Keroack, the fluid that keeps married couples bound to each other. ...”

Too much fooling around and you lose it.

Unfortunately, Sen.-elect Webb, Keroack’s appointment, unlike the others, does not require Senate confirmation.

Copyright 2007, Dolph Honicker

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).

Copyright 2007, Dolph Honicker

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 IEDs, 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.

Copyright 2007, Dolph Honicker

Wanted: Rehire gay Arabic linguists

By DOLPH HONICKER

By shooting from the lip, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staffs, put his foot squarely in his mouth before clumsily trying to extricate it.

The general said he erred and should not have voiced his personal view that homosexuality was immoral. Instead, he said he shold have stuck with the military’s policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

But the toothpaste was out of the tube, too late to cram back in.

It’s almost understandable. Among old-time warriors, personal views are deeply ingrained and sometimes slip out, which is one reason why the war in Iraq has faltered so miserably.

Another general began preaching the evangelical gospel before he was reined in.

What’s so wrong about the country’s top general raising the gay spectacle? For starters, consider this: Arabic linguists are sorely needed by an occupying force (us) in Iraq, yet 757 or 8 percent of gays discharged “held critical occupations,” meaning the kinds of jobs the Pentagon offers selective reenlistment bonuses. This included, says an ABC News report, 322 gays with “skills in an important language such as Arabic, Farsi or Korean.”

Among those given the boot were 55 fluent in Arabic.

In all, some 9,500 gays and lesbians have been discharged. That’s roughly a division of troops, almost half the “surge” that President George W. Bush is introducing into the maelstrom.

In February of this year, Congressman Gary Ackerman (D-NY) broached the idea to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to rehire the gay linguists and form them into a platoon.

Cathleen Glover might be among the first to re-up and join that platoon. She learned Arabic at the prestigious Army Language Institute (ALI) in Monterey, Calif. She graduated in 2002 when the Army was suffering from a critical shortage of linguists.

But two years later, after voluntarily signing a statement that she was a lesbian, Miss Glover, 26, was dismissed from the Army and wound up at an $11-an-hour job with a pool-maintenance company at the Sri Lankan ambassador’s residence.

Bleu Copas, who grew up in Johnson City, Tenn., listened to his daddy’s military stories. After 9/11, he was inspired to join the Army. He also was sent to ALI and soon began working in military intelligence.

He told ABC: “It is indisputable that the work that my specific job does is one of the most important in military. It is very difficult to keep tabs on all the different enemies.”

But someone -- he never learned who -- outed him, which led to his discharge.

Back to Gen. Pace, whose rows of ribbons prove that he has never shied from defending his country from foreign enemies, even ones that never posed a threat to us. It appears to be a bogyman of a domestic variety that shifts his eyes off the target.

For the record, my wife and I have been married for more than 50 years, have four adult kids who don’t smoke or do drugs, and six above average grandkids. We've had a number of homosexual and lesbian friends. I have worked with them on newspapers. Not once did they prove threatening.

So, Gen. Pace, get over your phobia. Give Congressman Ackerman his platoon.

Copyright 2007, Dolph Honicker

Not Interested in the Hereafter

By DOLPH HONICKER

If you can’t annoy someone, there’s little point in writing.

-- Kingsley Amis

Frankly, I don’t care if Hillary Clinton is a Muslim or Mitt Romney a Hindu. So what if Barrack Obama is Roman Catholic and Rudy Giuliami a Mormon. It matters not if John Edwards is a Shinto and John McCain a Buddhist.

I’m not interested in their piety or their views on the hereafter. I want to know specifically what they plan to do about the here and now.

In fact, if one of them could present a viable plan to end the Iraq War within three months after his/her inauguration, that person could announce that he/she was a devout atheist and win my vote.

For what hath religion wrought besides one Islamic tribe, the Sunnis, engaged in a bloodletting with another, the Shiites?

I offer one other example of what religion has wrought and unwrought. Ava Lowery is a 16-year-old Alabama girl who protests the Iraq War through her web site. On it she offers short films which she calls “animations.”

Created in March 2005, her web site was getting more than 80,000 hits a month by July 2005 and a high of more than 2 million hits in July 2006.

Ava is home-schooled, has family serving in Iraq, leans Democratic and has been interviewed on CNN. The New York Times and Rolling Stone have written articles about her.

When she turned 16, she organized a peace rally in the state capitol building in Montgomery, the Cradle of the Confederacy.

Her raw films are called “someones” -- a string of bloodied U.S. soldiers interspersed with those of bloodied Iraqi citizens and soldiers with stark black-and-white block captions “SOMEONE’S CHILD,” “SOMEONE’S PARENT,” “SOMEONE’S BEST FRIEND.”

Of course there are other issues my candidate would have to zero in on: global warming, health care, education, restoring our vanishing industrial base, the inequity of the tax burden, disappearing pensions, Social Security, ensuring that our veterans don’t get the Walter Reed shaft, giving unions a level playing field, mending our tattered Constitution and, yes, soaking the rich (why can’t a billionaire learn to be comfortable on half his wealth?).

But back to Ava Lowery.

Along with snapshots, her web site runs quotes from our leaders.

“I don’t know of anybody that I can think of who has contended that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons.” Dick Cheney, June 24, 2003.

“Bring ‘em on.” George W. Bush, July 2, 2003.

While Ava’s most ardent backers have been soldiers and their families, this girl, this devout Christian girl, has received death threats such as, “It’s people like you who need to {expletive deleted} die and get raped while your corpse rots in the sun.”

And:

“Are you a muslem {sic} terrorist?”

Sadly, her most vitriolic attackers proclaim to be Christians.

Before Bush decides to invade Iran, perhaps using remnants from the Mississippi Boy Scouts, he should let that country bleed a little bit. I gleaned this item from a recent issue of The Week magazine, via The Wall Street Journal:

“Iran, one of the world’s largest oil producers, had to import more than $7 billion of gasoline over the past year and may soon begin rationing gas. The country’s aging refineries cannot keep up with the demands of the booming consumer economy.

Getting back to our theme were these poll numbers from The Week:

24 percent of Americans say they would not vote for a Mormon (such as Romney) if their party nominated one for president.

30 percent say they would not vote for someone who’s been married three times (Giuliani).

42 percent wouldn’t vote for someone who is 72 years old (which McCain will be in 2008).

43 percent say they wouldn’t vote for a homosexual.

53 percent wouldn’t vote for an atheist.

There goes my vote.

Copyright 2007, Dolph Honicker