Bush tries Abbott and Costello routine

By DOLPH HONICKER

Why does it seem that everything President George W. Bush touches turns to {expletive deleted?}

In a single day in April, while surfing the internet, I ran across several news items that may seem redundant but, as the late author Kurt Vonnegut noted, “And so it goes.” So here it goes:

* A suicide bomber rams an explosives-rigged truck into a U.S. military outpost near Baquhah, killing nine soldiers and wounding 20, in one of the deadliest single ground attacks on U.S. bases since the start of the war in Iraq. Suicide attackers rarely penetrate defenses that surround U.S. troops, says the Washington Post, but “a 10-week-old U.S. counterinsurgency strategy has placed them in outposts and police stations that some soldiers say makes them more vulnerable.”

* World Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz meets with senior managers to promise unspecified changes in his leadership and to appeal for their help after ethics complaints over his personnel decisions regarding his companion, Shaha Riza. Not to worry, his newly hired lawyer, Robert S. Bennet, says his client’s “mood is just fine. ... He feels people are trying to interfere with his job to get at world poverty ...” His first act, apparently, was a sweetheart deal for his “companion.” Bush has voiced his full backing of Wolfowitz.

* Mark Dennis Zachares, a former staffer on the House Transportation Committee, agrees to plead guilty to conspiracy to defraud the public by steering potential clients and inside government information to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff in return for cash, gifts and the promise of a high-paying job on K Street. He’s the 11th to plead guilty in the Abramoff probe. Finally, the last item would be almost laughable if it were not so ludicrous.

* Bush says his confidence in Alberto R. Gonzales has grown as a result of the attorney general’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee despite a performance criticized by senators in both parties.

“The attorney general went up there and gave a very candid assessment and answered every question he could possibly answer, in a way that increased my confidence in his ability to do his job. Some senators didn’t like his explanation, but he answered as honestly as he could.”

I can just see Bush glued to the television watching Gonzales, the Justice Department’s equivalent of FEMA’s Michael Brown (“Ya doin’ a great job, Brownie”), testify.

But wait!

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino later told reporters that Bush actually didn’t watch the testimony but received updates from aides.

Picture this scenario as an aide rushes into the Oval Office to deliver an update.

BUSH: Make it quick. I’m on the line to Baghdad hearing about the great progress we’re making in Iraq. What’s the latest on Alberto?

AIDE: I forgot.

B: Quit stallin’. Let’s have it.

A: I don’t remember.

B: Are ya gonna tell me or not?

A: I don’t recall.

B: Ya been monitorin’ that bleeping TV all mornin’. What is it ya don’t recall?

A: I don’t remember.

B: Ya don’t remember what?

A: I can’t recall.

Abbott and Costello had a similar routine. But theirs was more believable.

Copyright 2007, Dolph Honicker

Halberstam: the Best and the Brightest

By DOLPH HONICKER

David Halberstam, three years younger than I, already was an established reporter on The Nashville Tennessean when I arrived in late 1959 as a copy editor.

Hearing on CNN that my old friend was killed Monday, April 22, in a car crash south of San Francisco came as a palpable shock. Dave, like his book about the leaders who dragged us into the Vietnam War, was indeed The Best and the Brightest in the true sense.

I knew him during an era when reporters wrote their stories on paper cut from rolls of newsprint on Royal Upright typewriters that clacked away with the sound of a freight car running over cracks in the rails. Copy editors' tools were pencils and paste pots. It seemed that everyone above the age of puberty smoked in the newsroom. I once had three cigarettes going at the same time and quit cold turkey that very night.

I’ll always remember the first story of Dave that I had to edit. This guy, I told myself, is the absolute worst typist I’ve ever seen -- words xxxxed out, words on top of words. Then I read what he’d written and told myself, this guy is one hell of a writer.

Of course, he went on to prove it by writing 21 books and winning a Pulitzer Prize. He later went to The New York Times where he covered the Congo and then later the Vietnam War where his dispatches outraged generals and the powers that be back in Washington but won him the respect of the grunts on the ground.

Instead of attending the 5 o’clock follies, Halberstam hitched rides on helicopters and rode into the war.

Speaking to a journalism conference in Tennessee last year, according to ESPN, he said government criticism of news reporters in Iraq reminded him of the way he was treated while covering the war in Vietnam.

“The crueler the war gets, the crueler the attacks get on anybody who doesn’t salute or play the game,” he said. “And then one day, the people who are doing the attacking look around, and they’ve used up their credibility.”

Neill Sheehan, who was Saigon bureau chief for United Press International, said: “We were in Vietnam at a time when we were being denounced by those on high. There was tremendous pressure. David never buckled under it at all. He was capable of standing up to it. You could not intimidate David.”

Sheehan recalled how Halberstam once called a general at home for permission to fly to a site of a U.S. defeat. At a briefing the next day, a brigadier general scolded “pitiful, lowly young reporters” for having the temerity to call a general at home.

“General, you do not understand,” Halberstam responded, according to Sheehan, “we are not corporals. We do not work for you. ... We will call a commanding general any time at home to get our job done.”

Despite living a charmed life, tragedy struck in 1980 when an escaped convict killed his brother, Michael Halberstam, a cardiologist, during a robbery.

“There’s nothing you can do,” Dave said in an interview. “You have to get on, and you have to get on with life, and get on with living.”

The one story that set Dave above others while on The Tennessean was one he dug out of a funeral. This couple lived in abject poverty not knowing where their next meal would come from when the husband died. While mourning for him and wondering if she’d have to bury him in potters’ field, she turned over the mattress and found $10,000.

Did she use this money to set her life on a new course? No, she paid the undertaker $10,000 to give hubby a grand exit.

Dave, I’m just one of the tens of thousands of journalists and retired newspapermen and women who’ll miss you.

ESPN had a wonderful quote that you gleaned from the basketball star Julius Irving. It sums up your philosophy:

“Being a professional is doing the things you love to do on the days you don’t feel like doing them.”

{Honicker is a semi-retired newspaperman. Information from The Associated Press was used in this report}.

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

Eternity’s a hell of a long time

By DOLPH HONICKER

Suppose that an infinite God exists, what can we do for him? Being infinite, he is conditionless; being conditionless, he cannot be benefited or injured. He cannot want. He has. Think of the egotism of a man who believes that an infinite being wants his praise!

-- Robert Ingersoll

He has yet to step forward. But suppose that a highly intelligent man, mid-fifties, in the prime of life, fluent in a dozen different languages, married to an equally intelligent and attractive woman, parents of 2.3 children, their lives never touched by a hint of scandal, ran for president of the United States.

Suppose he already has been a foreign envoy to several troubled countries and helped to leave peace and stability in his wake.

Or, maybe he is a successful university president at a college where academics are the No. 1 priority and where there are no athletic scholarships. Kids just go out and play varsity sports and intramural sports for the fun of it. If a kid is too poor to pay tuition, he is allowed to work his way through via a co-op plan.

He could even be a successful businessman who runs a high tech firm where the employees share in the profits and he, the CEO, is paid only five times what the average worker makes -- not 431 times as much.

This man is considered a pillar of his community, volunteering his time and money for all sorts of efforts to improve his city and state.

He even could be a well-thought-of governor who has put his state on a pay-as-you-go plan, brought unemployment to a minimum and raised education to a high standard.

This hypothetical everyman and his family attend church every week, just so long as it’s a mainstream church and not an off-brand such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses or a snake-handling holiness cult.

With a war chest of tens of millions of dollars raised for him in small sums by millions of people who believe in him, would this everyman have an almost sure lock on winning the White House?

You betcha.

Same scenario with a slight difference.

At a nationally televised press conference, a reporter poses these questions to which Everyman responds:

REPORTER: Mr. Everyman, is it true that you and your family do not belong to a church?

EVERYMAN: Yes, it’s true.

R: But surely you believe in God?

E: No, I stopped believing in such myths and superstitions when I was a small boy. But I’ve encouraged my family to seek their own answers on this.

R: How can you expect to lead a Christian nation if you’re not a Christian yourself?

E: First of all, I don’t consider this a Christian nation. We’re a people with all sorts of beliefs -- and unbeliefs.

R: But without the Bible to guide us and the Ten Commandments ...

E: There are many different religions, each with its own bible and each believing it to be the one true religion, although moderates tend to deny this until you pin them down. I don’t need the Ten Commandments to tell me it’s immoral to murder and rape or to steal and lie. There are laws on the books that forbid such crimes. As a young person you learn morality by observation, trial and error. I’ve made my share of mistakes and probably will make more.

R: Aren’t you afraid of going to hell if you don’t accept Jesus as your personal savior?

E: I believe we make our own heaven and hell here on earth. If you’re a normal person -- not a sociopath or a psychopath -- you feel good, or heavenly, when you do the right thing. You feel like hell when you hurt someone, lie or cheat.

R: Where do you plan to spend eternity?

E: Before I was born, I had no memory; I was a nothingness. The moment I die, I’ll return to that nothingness. The idea of eternity -- after what I hope will be a fruitful life on earth -- seems like a terrible bore. Preachers claim the saved will spend eternity singing praises and hosannas to God. Think about it. He, she or it was so intelligent he created the entire universe over a span of billions of years. And now, while this divine being oversees wars, hurricanes, earthquakes, forest fires, porno flicks, AIDS, starvation and poverty on earth, he wants to hear a bunch of yahoos singing his praises in heaven for a few billion more years?

R: This means you’re an atheist.

E. Yes.

R: Sir, I’m being told in my ear-phone that this news conference is being interrupted by a commercial for Viagra to be followed by a bulletin.

BULLETIN: The Party has just announced that it is withdrawing its support for Everyman for president.

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

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, 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