impending buildup at the Crawford Ranch, protesters, that is

[jimboloco]

Tampa Bay Chapter 119 VFP



needs you at



Camp Casey - Tampa Bay / St Pete



for the Peaceful Sign-Waving Rally to Stand in Solidarity with Cindy Sheehan



We may have the media local affiliate TV crews there since Crwford will have Joan Baez



we MUST show FLORIDA our growing numbers at 4th and Gandy



with signs as HONK for Cindy or MR BUSH - MEET WITH CINDY!



We need members and combat VETS to speakto the press!!!!!



Also looking for member(s) to speak on Sept 24th Rally against the war with Ray McGovern and we need help in that organizing committee to delegate duties as some of us go to Washington



Please contact me by phone or email if you can come or tell me at BayWalk tonight



We are the People and United we can bring peace.



Jay Alexander 727-527-3996 jayalexus@yahoo.com





When: Monday, August 21st at 5:30 to 7 :30 p.m.



Where: Intersection of 4th Street and Gandy Blvd. (west of the Gandy Bridge),St. Petersburg



What: Peaceful Sign-Waving Rally to Stand in Solidarity with Cindy Sheehan



Join us as we conduct a peaceful sign-waving cornering rally at the intersection of 4th Street and Gandy Blvd. in St. Petersburg.



This busy corner with motorists traveling in all directions is an opportunity to stand in solidarity with Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a fallen U.S. soldier in Iraq who is currently keeping vigil in the ditches near President Bush’s Farm in Crawford, Texas to ask Mr. Bush the truth about the Iraq war.



Ms. Sheehan is a courageous woman who has become a modern day Rosa Parks in her stand to ask to Mr Bush a simple question on a noble cause.



We invite anyone who supports Ms. Sheehan’s mission of demanding truth-telling and accountability from the U.S. President and his Administration regarding the war, which claimed her son’s life as well as the lives of thousands of other U.S. soldiers.



Suggested signs: We Support Cindy Sheehan, We Stand With Cindy Sheehan, Tell Cindy the Truth, Mr.Bush!,

What is a NOBLE CAUSE? Call Whitehouse 202-



POC's



Jay Alexander jayalexus@yahoo.com 727 527 3996

Sam Simpson sammscript@hotmail.com 727 734 4192

Bill Bucolo bbuc@mac.com 727-347-1829

working Moonday, will be there next Wed afternoon.

[jimboloco]

Message: 12
Date: Sat, 20 Aug 2005 10:45:58 -0400
From: Anita tarotlaydee@gmail.com
Subject: I posted this on Mystic Wicks, on a not so favorable forum
about Cindy...

Keep in mind that Cindy is no longer at Crawford. She left to check on
her
mother, as her mother had a stroke and is in a hospital in LA. She
expects
to return as soon as her mother is out of danger healthwise. The
following
article was written last Monday. Since then literally hundreds of
people
have converged on Crawford, at Camp Casey. Contrary to the reports on
CNN
and FOX, the anti-protest, pro-Bush supporters has been very small and
weak
in comparison. During the week the peaceful protestors engaged in
peaceful
protest! Bush's own neighbor offered the large group a place to
re-pitch
their camp on his property for safety's sake. Another neighbor has
fired his
gun in the air to scare them. A memorial was built to honour the war
dead
and another neighbor mowed the crosses down. They have constantly been
monitored by chopper flybys and media and Secret Service. These are
PEACEFUL
PROTESTORS people, not enemies of the state! And to those who think
that
Cindy is not doing a good thing, walk a mile in her shoes. Try losing
someone you love to war, and a senseless one, or even lose a loved one
in
the military during peacetime. Try being in a cemetary with taps
playing and
a 21 gun salute and a folded flag being handed to you. And then judge
her!
But not until then. You have no right.

But a miracle has happened! Because of Cindy's stand, now the
mainstream
media is talking about peace, the majority opinion by the people in
this
country. Finally! I believe she is being divinely guided. I for one
will
stand in solidarity with her. Because I believe that the Goddess wants
peace
and wants this present nuclear war to end--this war affects each one of
us
directly as DEPLETED URANIUM is being spread all over the globe WITH
THE US
WEAPONRY BEING USED and will affect us on this planet for years to
come. So
far we have over 100,000 (unofficial) Iraqis dead, over 25,000 military
men
and women have been maimed and injured and over 1800 (official) and
9000
(unofficial) are now dead. Let's stop the killing. Not one person's
life
should have been lost based on lies and propaganda. Enough is enough.

For more, see:
http://www.meetwithcindy.org/
*************************************
http://infowars.com/articles/iraq/alex_crawford.htm
Bedlam at Bush's Ranch
Alex Jones Goes to Crawford
Infowars.com <http://Infowars.com> | August 15, 2005
by Alex Jones

I'd been to Crawford on the eve of the Iraq war and on its first
anniversary, so I thought I knew what to expect when I traveled there
yesterday. Upon my arrival Sunday morning, I found myself beset on all
sides
by the massive media circus surrounding Cindy Sheehan, the mother of
Casey
Sheehan, a soldier who tragically died in Iraq while attempting to give
medical aid to his wounded buddies.

I could easily write a volume on what I witnessed. To put it simply, it
was
a paradox. The hundreds of anti-war, peace demonstrators for the most
part
were kind, compassionate, informed and genuine. Clashing against them
was a
maximum of eight (sometimes only two held down the fort) crazed Bush
worshippers. And, by "Bush worshippers," I mean actual worshippers of
the
President.

Although labels are ulitmately meaningless, I consider myself to be a
classical liberal, in the vein of Thomas Jefferson or George
Washington. I
believe in the Second Amendment and National Sovereignty. I've never
been
with "those people:" the liberals and the hippies who in many cases
follow
mindless dogma and believe in a powerful centralized government which
students of history know is anathema to freedom.

But in all of my years I have never seen more mindless frothing than
what I
saw spouting from these kool-aid drinking neo-con sycophants. And I've
got
video of it all, which, in the next week, will be posted on
infowars.com <http://infowars.com>and
prisonplanet.com <http://prisonplanet.com>. I would calmly approach the
counterfeit conservatives and simply ask them with my crew why Bush is
talking about invading Iran when the CIA admits it will be ten years
until
the Iranians can even hope for a nuke, and why they weren't worried
about
the CIA protecting the mad nuclear scientist AQ Khan who has
proliferated
WMDs worldwide?

They would literally hiss at me, and talk about how they could "take a
swing" at me. One father, with the eyes of Charlie Manson, repeatedly
barked
that he was a former marine. His son, who could have been no older than
four
was in combat fatigues from head to toe and was energetically carrying
a
plastic AK-47. The father was instructing this child that, in the
future, he
would need to attack me.

What's so scary about this is that they were such a good-looking
family.
Rather than the toothless rabble you would expect they were normal,
decent
looking folks who had been brainwashed. No doubt in Kim Jong-Il's North
Korea you would find similar zealots.

Another man, who looked like a NFL linebacker sat in a lawn chair
reading
the Bible. I walked over to him and asked him why he was there. With a
look
of religious rapture, he said he hoped to simply see the President. The
man
had stars in his eyes. Bush was anointed of God: this was a religious
pilgrimage for him. If the President drove by he just wanted to support
him
and let him know that he was there for him.

I asked him why, if Bush were so Christian, was he a member of Skull
and
Bones. The man just said, "no…no…no…you're not one of them." I
responded
that the Skull and Bones are a real group and that I was sure that he
had
heard of them. I asked him if he would go to a church if the pastor
engaged
in druidic rites. The man began to shrink up in his chair as if here
were
about to go into a catatonic state.

Sixty-year-old yuppie bikers with giant American flags (made in China)
would
scream profanities in our face if we calmly asked them questions about
the
war. It went on and on.

Of the hundreds of people in the anti-war crowd that we talked to, many
people from around the nation were actually followers of our work, and
had
broken through the left-right paradigm. Many of them told me that they
owed
their breakthrough to listening to the radio show.

In a way, I'm rambling, but how do I, in the 20 minutes I have before I
go
on-air, describe what I witnessed in the 12 hours I spent in Crawford
yesterday? Here are a few key points before I run out of time:

1. FOX News, CNN, and various newspapers have all been reporting that
there
are hundreds of protestors "on both sides." This is a lie. At any one
time,
there were at least 150 people camped out on the road to Bush's ranch
protesting his illegal war, and eight or so counter protestors for
Bush.
There were a minimum of 70 people at the Crawford Peace House in town
and
five people protesting them.

2. Cindy Sheehan is a very kind and loving person. I watched her keep
up a
grueling pace as she was interviewed by over 50 reporters individually
just
when I was around. She really is an amazing person. Across the street,
the
Bush worshipers had signs of Casey Sheehan saying "he died for me" and
they
would say that he "belongs to us." Meanwhile, they would growl that
Cindy
was scum and that she was just using her son for political gain. The
Bush
faithful would chant that "he signed on the dotted line" and the "he
belonged to the Army." Can you imagine a mother having to stand such
degradation of her son's name, such misuse of his image and such
slighting
of her love for him? Casey was Cindy's son. Nonetheless, she has
remained
steadfast in the face of her loss and the attacks against her grief.
The
reason why she is protesting now is to save others from similar grief.

3. The neo-con minions' creed or battle cry that they chanted like some
Hari
Krishna cult was, " We got to fight them over there before they come
over
and get us here!" "Better over there than getting bombed over here!" I
would
point out to them that the Pentagon's own internal reports state that
invading Iraq has only expanded violence against the West worldwide and
that
the Pentagon actually wants that reaction so they can widen the war. I
would
state admitted fact: Saddam Hussein did not attack us on 9/11. Our
government helped put Saddam into power. The Iraqis have been under 14
years
of sanctions. None of it meant anything to them. The attitude was:
"kill
them all and let God sort it all out."

4. In closing, looking at that road leading to Bush's ranch in Crawford
with
the crazies on one side and the well-meaning, but at many times misled
liberals on the other, I was looking at a physical example of the false
divisions in this country. I would mention to the pro-war crowd that
Bush
has been anti-Second Amendment, that he wants an open border that he
signed
on to the UNESCO UN treaty, that he's pushing the FTAA which will
destroy
our sovereignty. Some would hiss and say, "You're one of them
right-wing
conservatives," or "I don't care, let them take the guns, I love Bush!"
These poor men and women didn't have any view of their own. It was like
it
was just a big football game and they were simply cheering their team.
The
thinking process had been switched off.

Then, I remembered with horror, how Democrats couldn't see the
corruption of
Bill Clinton as he invaded and bombed innocent countries.

What we need in America is a Bill of Rights culture, not this
emotionally-based Roman coliseum form of politics. Ten years ago I
wouldn't
have understood why the liberals would have been so horrified at the
sight
of that father who dressed up his son in the military uniform with the
toy
machine gun. But then I had a chance to talk to the father. He
literally
wants to offer his son up to the Empire to be cannon fodder for the New
World Order.

My father frowned upon toy guns and would take them away if I aimed
them at
a person or at the family dog, but any time I wanted to go to the
shooting
range or the woods, he would enthusiastically take me. By the time I
was
twelve years old I could shoot through the same hole with a Remington
700 at
200 yards. I was given the same firearms training that fathers gave
their
sons in the 1750's on the Virginia frontier. I was taught respect for
the
gun and its awesome power. I was instructed in history and on the
horrors of
war. I was taught the historical importance of an armed population to
resist
tyranny as an insurance policy for freedom.

Then, yesterday, I saw these disgusting neo-cons. They were boorish and
as
weak as rotten trees ready to be felled. To put it simply: we can
deprogram
liberals. My show has turned hundreds of thousands into proficient gun
owners. We sell them on real liberty.

Imagine trying to sell peaceniks on truly conservative and libertarian
ideals when the example that they're given are these clown-like nut
followers of Bush. Bottom line: congressional Democrats predominantly
voted
with Bush for the war, the National ID Card Real ID Act, open borders,
Alberto Gonzales, who says that Bush is above the law, and a hundred
other
issues. We don't have two parties in this country. We have one party:
the
corporate party. Here's a analogy: our political system is like the
same
person owning two football teams that go to the Super Bowl. Either way
they
win. It's time for us to realize that. It's not what politicians say.
It's
what they do.

If you're doubting me, travel to Crawford yourself.


"Sarah, if the people had ever known the truth about what we Bushes
have
done to this nation, we would be chased down in the streets and
lynched." -
George H.W. Bush speaking in an interview with reporter Sarah McClendon
in
Dec. 1992

"Those who make peaceful change impossible, make violent change
inevitable."
- Robert F. Kennedy


--
the Tarotlaydee )0(
TAROT & ASTROLOGY SERVICES!!!
~.:*~.:*~.:*~.:*~.:*~.:*~.:*~.:*~.:*~.:*~.:*~.:*
http://tarotlaydee.blogspot.com
http://cosmicstargazing.blogspot.com
http://www.witchnet.org/paganveterans/
http://www.geocities.com/tampabayvfp/Chapter119.html
http://tampabay.indymedia.org
http://www.groups.yahoo.com/group/codepinktampabay
http://dopdistrict10.blogspot.com/
~.:*~.:*~.:*~.:*~.:*~.:*~.:*~.:*~.:*~.:*~.:*~.:*
ALL life is sacred!
So we do not forget the War Dead:

Kill ratio in Modern Warfare
7% military personnel to 93% non-combatants
(34% are children & 59% civilian men and women)

Current Body Count:
http://icasualties.org/oif/
Iraqi Civilian Deaths:
http://civilians.info/iraq/

THE CURRENT US TROOP DEATH COUNT:
1858+
THE IRAQI DEATH COUNT:
26,705+
~.:*~.:*~.:*~.:*~.:*~.:*~.:*~.:*~.:*~.:*~.:*~.:*

[Zlatko Waterman]

(ANOTHER GOLD STAR MOM FOR PEACE)

( An interesting letter from a mother who lost her son in a traffic accident shortly before the 22-year-old's deployment to Iraq. This woman is obviously no run-of-the-mill peace activist, but her rage at DUB II is certainly genuine enough. One wonders how many other "ordinary folks" are out there, hating the war-- or at least hating the commander-in-chief, his passle of lies and government liars who tell them . . .)



An Open Letter to President George W. Bush From a Gold Star Mom

President George W. Bush
1700 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, D.C.
Re: Sgt. Jeremy R. Smith, U.S. Army Reserves, Deceased

Mr. President,

On Feb. 13, 2004, I lost my son, Sgt. Jeremy R. Smith, U.S. Army Reserves, while he was on active duty preparing for deployment to Iraq. Jeremy was killed on Highway 36, just outside of Gatesville, Texas, on the way back to Ft. Hood after renting a car so he and his buddies could have one last night out on the town before their departure to Iraq five days later. Jeremy was not killed in action, but he died a hero just the same, a hero formed from the standards of the United States Army that helped to shape him. On the way back to the base, Jeremy attempted to pass a car in order to get ahead of it. Too late, he saw a truck coming from the opposite direction. Jeremy could not get back into his lane without causing an accident. So he drove off the road and straight into a stand of trees going 80 mph. The location of my son's death is about 27 miles from your ranch, where you are currently vacationing.

Jeremy chose not to harm another person because of a stupid mistake he made. He paid the price of that mistake with his life. It's too bad Jeremy's commander-in-chief doesn't have even close the amount of honor my son had. Jeremy was promoted to sergeant posthumously, and at his funeral I was presented with an Army Commendation Award and Medal for heroism and bravery. You, on the other hand, have absolutely no idea what honor and bravery are.

I want to take a few minutes and tell you about Jeremy and how his loss has affected my family.

First of all, Jeremy was my firstborn child and only son. When he died, Jeremy was only 22 years old. He left behind two younger sisters, Danielle and Jaime, who loved their brother with all their hearts and who, to this day, are heartbroken with the knowledge they will never see their big brother again. This past week, Jaime gave birth to a beautiful little baby boy who she named after her big brother to honor him. My grandson Aiden will never know his Uncle Jeremy, who would have been thrilled to be an uncle. My son loved his family and was very protective of his sisters and me.

Jeremy had big, dark eyes and a strange sense of humor. He was quick to laugh, but hid his smile in a shy kind of way that was endearing to all who loved him. Before being called to active duty, Jeremy was a good student at ITT in Houston, Texas, where he was studying computer science. He left behind two computers he had built at home by himself that he used to run an Internet server. He had techie friends from all across the globe who still mourn his loss.

Jeremy will never marry and he will never have children of his own that I can bounce on my knee, a proud grandma. I will never again hear his laugh, caress his face, or hug him. Day after day, I imagine Jeremy walking through my back door, calling out "Mother, I'm home!" as I awaken from a terrible nightmare that never ends. I have spent the last 18 months pacing the floor, sleepless, night after night wondering why this war had to happen and why you were so driven to do it. I have been in the deepest, darkest pit of hell, where depression grips you to your soul.

Jeremy entered the Army several months before 9/11, fulfilling a dream he had had since he was in high school to serve his country. At the same time, Jeremy wanted to see the world and be able to go to college, all of which service in the Army would be able to provide. On 9/11, my family gathered together in fear, knowing that Jeremy would eventually be sent into a war zone. As a family, we were supportive of this and of Jeremy's desire to protect our country.

Mr. President, my son loved his country and all that it stands for. He believed you and your administration when you said there were weapons of mass destruction, that the 9/11 terrorists were linked to Saddam Hussein and Iraq, and that America's invasion of Iraq would only help the Iraqi people. For the record, I was supportive, in the beginning, of America's invasion of Iraq and the liberation of the Iraqi people from an oppressive, inhumane dictator.

On Nov. 29, 2003, my husband and I drove Jeremy to report for active duty in Huntsville, Texas. It was two days after Jeremy's 22nd birthday. How can I put into words that you could ever possibly understand what it's like to spend two decades of my life protecting my precious son from all harm, only to be the one to take him to report to go to war? It was heartbreaking, to say the least. I knew I was sending my son into harm's way, yet I was helpless to do anything about it. Is there any way that you can find it within your heart to understand this?

Even before Jeremy's untimely death, I began to have nagging doubts about this invasion. At one time, I tried to get my son to leave the Army because I felt you and your administration were sending Jeremy into an unwinnable situation, a situation that would, at the very least, cost Jeremy his humanity and, at worst, his life. Jeremy reported back from training in Ft. Hood his concerns about the lack of equipment, especially protective equipment, for his unit. At first, I thought he was exaggerating because I couldn't believe my country, my president, would send thousands upon thousands of soldiers into a war zone without the proper equipment to protect them.

Sir, we do not go to war with the military we have, we go to war with the military we have built up. If you are going to take a country to war, to pull America's sons and daughters away from their homes, their families and their lives, you had better make darn sure you have properly equipped them and that it's for a damn good reason. In your zeal to get into Iraq, you didn't care about these things, and neither did the people who orchestrated this whole thing for you. You, as their leader, should have protected these men and women, but you didn't. You didn't care and couldn't take the time out of your busy vacation schedule to make sure these needs were met. As a result, many thousands of soldiers have been wounded or are dead.

How does it feel to have their blood on your hands? Do you dream of this at night?

Your callousness and distasteful jokes about the war are offensive to me. One instance that instantly comes to mind is when you were jokingly looking under your desk and other places for WMDs when they weren't found in Iraq. The day you stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and declared victory and that the war in Iraq was over was another offensive moment. It was only a few short weeks after the invasion began, and our soldiers were still being killed. How could you declare victory in an invasion that was still going on? You were a fool that day, and you are a fool today.

Still, you continue to run your mouth as you try to gain support for your illegal war and invasion of Iraq. You do not acknowledge the thousands upon thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens who have died because of this war. You do not acknowledge the broken infrastructure of the country. Let's see, the most recent report was that residents of Baghdad get at most four hours of electricity a day. How can you run schools with that? In the staggering heat? What about fresh, sanitary water? I'm seeing video of people getting water out of mud puddles!


What fools are the men who run our country.


You continue to insist that there is a link between 9/11 and Iraq when it is very common knowledge that this is not true. The only link between 9/11 and Iraq is you and your continued insistence on lying to the American people, and the world, that this is true. Sure, you are fooling a few people, but more and more people are waking up, doing their own homework, and feeling betrayed by you.

Furthermore, you can't decide what the justification for continuing to be in Iraq is. That justification changes from week to week, I guess in response to how well the American people are accepting your excuses to stay there.

So, Mr. President, exactly what is the "noble cause" that my son and the other sons and daughters are dying for? It's not the liberation of Iraq and it's not for democracy, because most of the people of the Middle East don't want democracy. It's not to fight terrorism, because we are only fanning the flames of terrorists every day that American troops are in Iraq. It is not to make America safer, because you have done nothing to make America safer. Your "noble cause" couldn't possibly have anything to do with giving the Iraqi people a better life, because their lives are worse now, not better. Our borders are wide open for terrorists to come across, but you insist on keeping them open to make your pal Vicente Fox happy. Your "noble cause" changes from week to week.

I believe your "noble cause" is oil and blood money for those good buddies of yours who are making money off this war. Your "noble cause" is to go down in history as a War President, something you are proud of and have worked very hard to accomplish. While you sit in your nice, comfortable home, work out for two hours a day, and get on with your life so you can maintain balance, you need to think long and hard about what a truly noble cause is. You have no idea.

Our soldiers are out there daily, putting their lives on the line for you, while you have been on vacation almost 365 days during your presidency. These guys don't get vacations. Their families don't ever get a chance to maintain balance in their lives, as they live in daily fear for their loved ones.

The tide is turning, Mr. President. The mothers and fathers of America are saying "not my child," just as they said during Vietnam, "Hell no, we won't go." You had better start listening and talking with us, because we are the ones who are paying the price for your war, and we aren't going to take it anymore.

Sincerely,

Amy Branham
Houston, Texas
Proud mother of Sgt. Jeremy R. Smith
Nov. 1981 – Feb. 2004

[Zlatko Waterman]

(DEAD MARINE CHASE COMELY'S AUNT-- HER LETTER)


Published on Sunday, August 21, 2005 by the Pittsbugh Post-Gazette


An Honorable Marine Killed in a Dishonorable War
by Missy Comley Beattie

He is number 1,828, 1,829 or 1,830. We don't know for sure, because so many died last week.
Marine Lance Cpl. Chase Johnson Comley died when his vehicle was hit head-on by a suicide bomber. His death admits his family to a club no one wants to join: the grieving, questioning families who have heard the dreaded ring of the doorbell followed by a messenger's words, "We regretfully inform you that your son ..."

You realize that nothing you've thought, done or felt has prepared you for this reality. The feeling is so much worse than a broken heart. It is an evisceration.

As I write, Chase is being flown to Dover Air Force Base. His 6-foot-4 body is in a coffin draped with the U.S. flag. He loved his family, his country, his high school classmates and his life, but we don't think he loved his mission in Iraq.

When he was recruited, he told us he would be deployed to Japan. He called every week when he wasn't in the field to tell us he was counting the days until his return. He tried to sound upbeat, probably for our benefit, but his father could detect in Chase's voice more than a hint of futility and will never say, "My son died doing what he loved."

For those of you who still trust the Bush administration -- and your percentage diminishes every day -- let me tell you that my nephew Chase Johnson Comley did not die to preserve your freedoms. He was not presented flowers by grateful Iraqis, welcoming him as their liberator.

He died fighting a senseless war for oil and contracts, ensuring the increased wealth of President Bush and his administration's friends.

He died long after Bush, in his testosterone-charged, theatrical, soldier-for-a-day role, announced on an aircraft carrier beneath a "Mission Accomplished" banner that major combat was over.

He died in a country erupting into civil war and turned into a hellhole by Bush, a place where democracy has no chance of prevailing, a country that will become a theocracy like Saudi Arabia.

Have we won the hearts and the minds of the Iraqi people? Apparently not.

Have we spent more than half a trillion dollars -- an amount that continues to rise -- in a war that King Abdullah advised Bush against because it would disrupt the Middle East? Apparently so.

Consider what the money spent on this could have done for health care, our children's education or a true humanitarian intervention in Sudan.

And then think about Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when he visits our troops. Picture his heavily armored vehicle, a machine impregnable to almost anything the insurgents toss in its path, while our troops are not provided sufficient armor to survive an improvised explosive device.

Think of the mismanagement of this entire war effort. Consider what we've lost. Too much. Think of what we've gained. Nothing.

And think of someone who says, "We will not cut and run," but who did just that years ago when he was called.

Think about a man who speaks about a culture of life when the words fit a wedge issue such as abortion or the right to die when medical effort has failed.

Then think about this war, Bush's not-so-intelligently designed culture of death.

Think, too, about naming a campaign "Shock and Awe" as if it's a movie and, therefore, unreal. And then think that this, perhaps, is one of the problems.

For many Americans, the war is an abstraction. But it is not an abstraction for the innocent Iraqis whose lives have been devastated by our smart bombs. And it certainly is not an abstraction for those of us who have heard the words that change lives forever.

So think of my family's grief -- grief that will never end. Think of all the families. Think of the wounded, the maimed, the psychologically scarred.

And then consider: The preservation of our freedom rests not on U.S. imperialism but on actively changing foreign policies that are conquest-oriented and that dehumanize our own young who become fodder for endless war as well as people in other countries who are so geographically distant that they become abstract.

The answer is not Bush's mantra: "They're jealous of our freedoms."

And, finally, think about flowers: The flowers for Chase Comley will be presented not by grateful Iraqis but by loved ones honoring him as he's lowered to his grave and buried in our hearts.

Missy Comley Beattie is the aunt of Marine Lance Cpl. Chase J. Comley of Lexington, Ky., who was killed in Iraq on Aug. 6.


© 2005 PG Publishing Co., Inc.

###

[Zlatko Waterman]

(Justin Raimondo-- and his usual effectively-applied sting . . .)


August 22, 2005



Why Are We In Iraq?



The invasion not only killed innocents and decimated the country, it also empowered tyrants – so why are we still there?
by Justin Raimondo




The ugliness of the regime we have installed in Iraq has finally bubbled up to the surface, like the outbreak of an oozing syphilitic sore, and spilled over onto the front page of the Washington Post:

"Shi'ite and Kurdish militias, often operating as part of Iraqi government security forces, have carried out a wave of abductions, assassinations, and other acts of intimidation, consolidating their control over territory across northern and southern Iraq and deepening the country's divide along ethnic and sectarian lines, according to political leaders, families of the victims, human rights activists. and Iraqi officials. …

"While Iraqi representatives wrangle over the drafting of a constitution in Baghdad, the militias, and the Shi'ite and Kurdish parties that control them, are creating their own institutions of authority, unaccountable to elected governments."

Cindy Sheehan is camped outside George W. Bush's Crawford ranch, demanding to know why her son – and 1,800-plus other American soldiers, as well as tens of thousands of uncounted Iraqis – had to die in this bitter war, and the answer is: to install sharia law in southern Iraq and deliver the country over to parties for whom the Ayatollah Khomeini is a hero. As the Post reports:

"Since the formation of a government this spring, Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, has witnessed dozens of assassinations, which claimed members of the former ruling Ba'ath Party, Sunni political leaders, and officials of competing Shi'ite parties. Many have been carried out by uniformed men in police vehicles, according to political leaders and families of the victims, with some of the bullet-riddled bodies dumped at night in a trash-strewn parcel known as The Lot. The province's governor said in an interview that Shi'ite militias have penetrated the police force; an Iraqi official estimated that as many as 90 percent of officers were loyal to religious parties."

The death of journalist Steven Vincent, the war supporter killed by Basra Shi'ite militiamen who have taken over the Basra police, brought the ugly reality of what U.S. intervention has wrought home to all but the most ideologically blinded of the Busheviks. Southern Iraq has become, in effect, Little Iran – a result foreseen in this space years ago. Another consequence has been the unleashing of the Kurds, whose pro-U.S. stance belies their brutishness when it comes to dealing with those they perceive as political opponents:

"Across northern Iraq, Kurdish parties have employed a previously undisclosed network of at least five detention facilities to incarcerate hundreds of Sunni Arabs, Turkmens, and other minorities abducted and secretly transferred from Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, and from territories stretching to the Iranian border, according to political leaders and detainees' families. Nominally under the authority of the U.S.-backed Iraqi army, the militias have beaten up and threatened government officials and political leaders deemed to be working against Kurdish interests; one bloodied official was paraded through a town in a pickup truck, witnesses said."

Sunday morning on Meet the Press, Senator Russ Feingold – an opponent of the war who recently endorsed a timetable for withdrawal – was asked whether the world and Iraq weren't better off with Saddam Hussein out of power. Feingold's answer was great: America's interests, not Iraq's, are primary here. But here is a truly devastating answer, coming as it does from an Iraqi:

"'I don't see any difference between Saddam and the way the Kurds are running things here,' said Nahrain Toma, who heads a human rights organization, Bethnahrain, which has offices in northern Iraq and has faced several death threats. Toma said the tactics were eroding what remained of U.S. credibility as the militias operate under what many Iraqis view as the blessing of American and British forces. 'Nobody wants anything to do with the Americans anymore,' she said. 'Why? Because they gave the power to the Kurds and to the Shi'ites. No one else has any rights.'"

Aside from enabling Kurdish thuggery, the American "liberators" are also in league with aspiring Shi'ite tyrants who want to impose sharia law on the nation. As Juan Cole points out, the Shi'ite parties' demand that Islamic law must be the fundamental source of legislation – rather than one source among others – has been met and is likely to be enshrined in the constitution with full American support. Cole cites al-Hayat newspaper:

"Also, an agreement was reached that Islam is the religion of state, and that no law shall be enacted that contradicts the agreed-upon essential verities of Islam. Likewise, the inviolability of the highest [Shi'ite] religious authorities in the land is safeguarded, without any allusion to a detailed description. The paragraph governing these matters will specify that Islam is 'the fundamental basis' for legislation, though there will be an allusion to the protection of democratic values, human rights, and social and national values. A Higher Council will be formed to review new legislation to ensure it does not contravene the essential verities of the Islamic religion."

Meet the new boss – worse, in many respects, than the old boss.

"Democracy" in action in Iraq means that the biggest vote-getter, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), launches an armed assault on police headquarters in Nasiriyah, expels the police chief, and installs one more to their liking. In the Kurdish region, the Kurdish "Democratic" Party runs a "maze" of secret prisons where the disappeared are languishing, tortured and denied any access to a court, let alone lawyers:

"'There is an absence of law,' said a 40-year-old Transportation Ministry official who was detained for five days in Dahuk last month. The official said a Kurdish officer had accused him of 'writing against the Kurds on the Internet.' '"Freedom" and "liberty" are only words in ink on a piece of paper,' he said. 'The law now, it's the big fish eats the small fish.'"

Both the neocon Right and the "centrist" (i.e., left-neocon) Democratic Leadership Council denounce the antiwar movement – and any timetable for withdrawal – as "anti-American," but how "pro-American" is the regime we've installed in Iraq by force of arms? When you look at what we've actually done in Iraq – the emerging Islamist-Kurdish tyranny we've empowered – it turns out that the U.S. government is the biggest exponent – and exporter – of true anti-Americanism. The irony and tragedy of this seems lost on those for whom "anti-American" is the main epithet in their rhetorical arsenal.

The Bushies and their Democratic enablers see only what they want to see, and blame the "MSM" for perpetrating a supposedly false idea of what is really going on in Iraq. But who cares if Americans are building schools and ensuring elections when the former become fundamentalist indoctrination centers and the latter enshrine mob rule and religious fanaticism as the law of the land?

As Shi'ite party militias roam the ruins of Iraq's cities killing and beating political dissidents, and whipping women who fail to wear the requisite head-to-toe chador, our "democracy"-crazed neocons cite the country as a "model" – and look forward to the "liberation" of the rest of the Middle East along similar lines. The world seen through the prism of neoconservatism is truly a Bizarro World, where everything is stood on its head, not just physical laws but also traditional moral precepts as well as the rules of logic.

Americans are naturally repulsed by the sight of what the Busheviks have wrought in Iraq, but the alternative is not to turn around and make war on the Shi'ite-Kurdish tyranny we made possible in the first place. A war along those lines would be an act of such incredible hubris that it would make our prior mistakes – beginning with the invasion of Iraq – seem almost benign.

It's time to face up to the horrific reality: there are places on this earth that in no way resemble the cultural and political landscape of the U.S., and nothing we do will turn Iraq into a suburb of the American metropolis. Short of wiping out a good portion of the population and imprisoning most of the rest in "reeducation" camps where they'll be forced to memorize Robert's Rules of Order and the aphorisms of Emily Post, it simply cannot be done.

The criminality of this war is exacerbated by the utter evil of the cretins we've catapulted into power. During World War II, the massive bombing campaigns – including the gratuitous nuking of two Japanese cities and the firebombing of Dresden – involved massive loss of civilian lives, yet the victors could at least claim that an imperfect means was utilized to achieve a desirable result. Not so in this instance: the "liberation" of Iraq is turning out to be a cruel joke.

The main argument against an immediate U.S. withdrawal is that our absence would have to mean civil war: but that is preferable to the imposition of the tyranny that is taking shape under the suzerainty of the U.S. occupation. In any case, civil strife has already begun in Iraq, with the Shi'ites and Kurds firing the first shots, albeit under the color of state authority. The Shi'ite party militias, merging into the Iraqi "police," have become death squads. The "El Salvador option" is now fully operational. The longer we remain in Iraq, the more we become complicit in the consolidation of at least two vicious tyrannies, and a reign of terror that can have no moral or political justification.

Yet some still persist in trying to justify and even valorize the war effort as a "noble" cause, albeit one that – somehow – went tragically wrong. Never ones to shy away from brazen lies, the War Party is now frantically trying to shift the blame for their failure – onto the backs of their critics!

Writing in the War Street Journal, Reason contributing editor Michael Young accuses the antiwar left and the "isolationist right" (i.e., real libertarians) of rooting for the failure of the "American democratization effort," which he attributes to "carelessness." We are guilty, according to Young, of "solemnly" and even "pleasurably" pointing out the "derailing" of the "Iraqi project." Aside from wondering where's the pleasure in saying "I told you so" if those in the wrong aren't either behind bars or shamed into silence, one has to ask: was it carelessness – or calculation?

When Saddam's alleged links to al-Qaeda were debunked and those fabled "weapons of mass destruction" turned out to be massively missing, the ideologues of "regime change" declared that capital-"D" Democracy was the real goal all along, and George W. Bush enthused about "a fire in the mind" that would set the whole world aflame. That, too, was a lie, as we are beginning to discover.

It didn't require a Nostradamus to predict the outcome of an attempt to impose Western-style liberal constitutionalism by force of arms. Please don't tell me that the authors of this invasion didn't know what they were doing, and that they really believed they'd be greeted as liberators by a grateful populace, which would then proceed to create a Mesopotamian Republic along Jeffersonian lines. No one, not even the most blinkered ideologue – say, Michael Young – could possibly believe that. Certainly not our hardheaded, hardhearted neocons, those admirers of Machiavelli and masters of political calculation who managed to hijack the government and American foreign policy, and lie us into war.

Why, then, are we in Iraq?

If there's no vengeance for 9/11, no WMD, and certainly no democracy as we or anyone else would ever want to know it, then what's up with this interminable and increasingly painful war?

That's what Cindy Sheehan wants to know – and she's not alone. The question haunts our nation, baffling war opponents, and the answer is proving maddeningly elusive even to supporters of the president's policy, who can no longer coherently articulate a clear answer – as Young's War Street Journal op-ed makes painfully clear to his readers.

Amid the tortured syntax and self-conscious preciosity of the prose, Young avers that the failure of the "Iraqi project" is due, not to the hallucinatory dogmas of its architects, but to the skeptics who never accepted on faith what experience has now proved delusional. Whose fault is the mess we created in Iraq? According to Young, it's the Arab opponents of the invasion – not only in Iraq, but throughout the Middle East – who let their reactionary nationalism get in the way of fulsome support for the American conquistadors, although a good deal of the blame can be laid at the doorstep of Noam Chomsky, with those gloating "isolationists" over at Antiwar.com and The American Conservative also claiming their fair share.

What unmitigated rubbish. Is there no limit to the dishonesty of these people, who run from the consequences of their own hallucinations and then try to attribute the resulting crack-up to others? Are we to be spared nothing – not even the indignity of being lectured on the subject of moral accountability by the supporters and authors of what is shaping up to be the most catastrophic failure in the history of American foreign policy?

As farce descends into tragedy in Iraq, the braying of the War Party has not abated: incredibly enough, it has gotten even louder. These people never shut up. Confronted with the disastrous results of their ideology-driven experiment, these eggheads-in-arms just start shouting and turn vitriolic, sliming war critics as traitors and worse, even as they try to squirm out of any responsibility for the unfolding nightmare. If I were the editors of Reason magazine – who officially take an agnostic position on the war, but in reality, in terms of sheer verbiage, have expended a lot of energy rationalizing it – I would stick to romanticizing methedrine addiction and leave the foreign policy analysis to those who have a firmer grasp of core libertarian principles.

The Busheviks, especially including those of the "libertarian" persuasion, are responsible for what is happening today in Iraq – because they wanted it, they argued for it, and they are still trying to rationalize it, even as their "Iraqi project" collapses in a paroxysm of appalling violence. "Carelessness"? Not on this scale. It seems to me that this is the sort of "failure" that is really a success, in terms of the actual objective of the "Iraqi project" – which was and is to break up Iraq and atomize what was once a nation. This, it seems clear, is the real goal of the neocons' regional "project" – "creative destruction," as one of them put it, with the emphasis on the destructive aspect.

This, when you get right down to it, seems to be the real purpose of the war: to inure us to the horrors of it, and get us ready for more.

Anyone who continues to defend this war, or even the idea of it, is certifiable, and we have every right to either ignore them or just emit an occasional guffaw. I, for one, am through arguing with them: they are beyond reason and redemption. In a more just, paleo-libertarian world, these people would be put in the public stockade and made to feel the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortune they've visited upon the rest of us. Why, after all, should the Kurds and the Shi'ites have all the fun?

– Justin Raimondo

[Dave The Dov]

The War On Communism - Vietnam

The War On Terror - Iraq

When are we ever going to lean????

Time to put an end to the idiotic polictical meat grinder once and for all!!!!
_________________
Hinduism Forum

[Zlatko Waterman]

(A close-up of Camp Casey-- with a counter, Pro-War demonstration . . .)


Camp Casey, PTA

By Amanda Marcotte, AlterNet. Posted August 22, 2005.


Cindy Sheehan's rapidly-growing contingent of moms in floppy hats and comfortable shoes throws the cowardice of the opposition into sharp relief.



Crosses lining the road at Camp Casey I. The organizers are going to move this memorial to Camp Casey II soon, where it will be safe. Photos by Amanda Marcotte.
Making the decision to go to Crawford, Texas and visit Camp Casey was easy -- it's just a two hour drive from my house in Austin, and the stubborn righteousness of Cindy Sheehan puts to shame any weak excuses I could make. I made the decision about a week ahead of time, assuming that protest conditions would remain more or less static.

I was wrong.

During the course of that week, Sheehan was suddenly pulled from her vigil by her mother's stroke, taking most of the media with her. But strangely enough, Cindy's departure didn't slow the momentum of the demonstration, which was, after all, about more than a single woman's question -- it was about Bush's refusal to take responsibility for this war that is being paid for, one way or another, by all of us.

Of course, what emboldened the anti-war protesters more than anything was the chance to change locations from the side of the road to the ranch of Crawford resident Fred Mattlage, whose cousin Larry had gained a bit of notoriety when he fired his shotgun near Camp Casey to, as he put it, prepare for dove season. The move protected them from passing traffic and enabled them to spread out more.

And spread out they did. My traveling companion had gone out to Camp Casey last week and was blown over by how, in the past week alone, the influx of assistance and donations has managed to turn a makeshift operation expanding from one woman's tent into, well, something much bigger and much more organized.

The first inkling we had of this growth was at the Crawford Peace House. On the drive up, my friend remarked on the humor of watching a few people try to feed the dozens arriving at the Peace House on the previous weekend, at one point even pitching in to make the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches required to feed the arrivals. This time we were greeted with tables of food, much of it honest-to-god hot meals and cooler after cooler of soda and bottled water.







Camp Casey II has used donations to upgrade the camp with a large tent and a small stage where people sing songs and make speeches to pass the time waiting.




We got there early and it wasn't hopping yet, but tons of cars were already there. In order to make the entire thing less of a strain on the people of Crawford, the Peace House organizers were putting volunteers to work driving shuttles down the narrow roads out towards Bush's ranch. So we parked our car, got a snack and then grabbed a ride with a shuttle volunteer and another visitor to Camp Casey.

We arrived to find that Camp Casey was actually in transit to a new location. Shuttle drivers insisted that visitors stop at one and then the other. As we approached Camp Casey I, it was hard not to sympathize with the cops' request that this entire circus be shut down, as it was a traffic hazard. The roads out there are narrow and Camp Casey has turned into a snarl of cars, tents and people standing in the middle of the road staring at the long line of crosses representing the dead.

My friend noted that last week it had just been crosses, but people have been adding things like American flags, handmade dolls, handmade coffins, flowers and photographs of the dead, which made some onlookers burst into tears. The baby pictures were especially moving. The memorial was so engrossing that I didn't even notice the two counter-protesters across the street, and was genuinely shocked to hear that they were there at all.

A resident of Vidor, TX, our shuttle driver had decided to go to Camp Casey after hearing about it on Air America's Randi Rhodes show. We had the typical conversation liberal Texans have in these situations, which is to mock our fellow Texans who bought this war hook, line and sinker.

He told me he got into an argument with a 19-year-old co-worker who supported the war. When he asked her why she didn't enlist and go fight if she was so gung-ho, she piously replied, "God has other plans for me." He responded in standard East Texas fashion, involving some blaspheming and a whole lot of cursing, which may have shocked the more gentle member of our group. I'm afraid that being a liberal in Texas does teach one to use the F-word frequently and with enthusiasm.







This coffin is covered with the names, pictures, and details of all the soliders who've died in Iraq.

(picture of a large coffin)



People at the Peace House told us that Camp Casey II was bigger than Camp Casey I, but we weren't prepared for just how much bigger it was. This was no ragtag group of tents on the side of the road. This was a huge tent with electric lights, a small stage and tables and signs. This overwhelming display was paid for, an organizer told us, with donations to the Peace House and built with volunteer labor. Someone had painted a huge banner with Casey Sheehan's portrait, but the most compelling display was a 20-foot coffin covered with tiny little stickers. As you approached you realized that each sticker had a picture of a fallen solider with age, hometown, and details of his or her death.

My friend pointed out that even if this entire thing doesn't change a single mind about the war, it will still be worth it for the comfort it provided to the bereaved and for them to see that so many people around the nation are supporting them. All of a sudden, the arguments that this shouldn't be big and shouldn't be loud seemed extremely silly. The military families who had shown up to brave the weather and the abuse to demand, if nothing else, that the cost in human life of this war be acknowledged by the President deserve to have as much physical, emotional and financial support for their mission as we can give them.

I guess I read too many right-wing blogs, because I really did fear that this was going to be a load of navel-gazing hippies, but they represent only a tiny minority of the people milling around. The majority of the people we saw at both camps and at the Peace House were middle-aged women in shorts with sensible shoes and sensible hats. Really, if I didn't know what was going on and just stumbled upon this group of women putting up signs and tables, putting out food and chatting amicably, I would have thought it was the local PTA throwing a high school dance.

And the way that all this came together -- so quickly, so amiably and so well-organized -- seemed to be a direct result of just that fact -- you were looking at women who'd put together their share of high school dances and church bake sales and other community events, and they saw no reason to have their anti-war protest be any different. In fact, it hardly seemed like a protest as we're used to thinking of it.

Of course, it was early in the day, but from talking with people around, it was clear that these anti-war protesters weren't really the shouting, marching types. And this normalcy, the mom-ness really, was exactly their strength. People told me that when the right wingers would show up and shout at them, it seemed nearly as peculiar and off-putting as if they'd showed up to shout at a PTA meeting.

In fact, contrary to the claims of conservative pundits and bloggers that this is simply a bunch of unreformed hippies pulling a stunt and yearning for the '60s, most people I talked to said that they'd never done anything like this before, that they'd never been to a single protest and didn't really like politics outside of the bare minimum of civic duty -- reading the paper and voting. I heard the story repeatedly -- didn't like the war, didn't ever do much about it, heard about Cindy's stand and decided they needed to help. People were tired, but they were joyful and it was hard to find room to be cynical in the face of so much good-humored but stubborn determination to smoke President Bush out of his hidey-hole to answer Cindy's questions.

One exception -- we had to laugh when the people setting up the stage tested the sound system by playing the most earnest and unintentionally comical protest song I have ever heard. At one point, the lyrics even referred to a "smear campaign," which made us laugh so hard we never did hear what he tried to rhyme with "smear campaign." And then I started to cry, because it was so painfully earnest I could only imagine that it was like twisting the knife in the hearts of those present who had lost sons or daughters in Iraq.

It drove home how it must feel to be Cindy Sheehan -- everywhere you looked, there were references to the war dead. You couldn't escape the grief for even a moment. The only thing people had to distract them from their grief and sorrow was hard work. To be in the middle of this, I thought, must feel like someone is rubbing salt in your wounds without end, and all for the purpose of getting President Bush to stop for even a moment to consider how many lives his little adventure has ended or ruined.

Organizers told us that a big counter-protest was expected that afternoon, but we saw no signs of it so we headed back to Crawford. On the way we watched the cops prepare for the counter-protesters, turning the church across the road -- the one Bush attends -- into a mini police station. And that's when we saw it -- though us Camp Casey newbies didn't realize that's what it was initially. A seemingly endless stream of motorcycles poured out of Crawford and headed towards the ranch.

The shuttle driver identified them as counter-protesters, noting that that was the way they protested -- driving down the road with their lights on. She said they occasionally tried to stop and yell at the protesters, but since the cops were making them keep their distance they were rendered impotent and wouldn't stay long. On the way back, I made note of the counter-protesters at Camp Casey I -- three people with signs referencing 9/11.

But we didn't get to gloat for long about how small or impotent the counter-protest was, because while the anti-war faction had taken over the roads leading out to Bush's ranch, the pro-war demonstrators had taken over the one real intersection in the town of Crawford.







The corner store in Crawford that was hosting the counter-protest. This monument is the Ten Commandments flanking the Liberty Bell.



When we got there, we saw where all the motorcycles had come from. They had amassed at a convenience store and were leaving two at a time towards Bush's ranch. More intriguingly, across the street was a huge and tacky store that seemed to depend on Bush's proximity to sell most of its merchandise. They had built a monument of the Ten Commandments flanking the Liberty Bell and decorated it with American flags. It was like some big kitsch-magnet with giant knick-knacks attaching themselves randomly. Gazing at it in awe, we noticed the pro-war rally right next to it, where about 40 people were milling around.

They looked friendly enough so we joined the pro-war rally. The man and the woman emceeing it were on horseback holding an American flag and handing the microphone to a series of people to make speeches about why they supported the war and President Bush. We were curious to hear one of these speeches so we stuck around.







The hosts of the small counterprotest in Crawford emceed on horseback. The counterprotest was apparently called "Fort Qualls" after the fallen son of a Bush supporter.




A man dressed as a revolutionary solider approached and politely offered us water but we thanked him and declined. We listened to one speech by a middle-aged man whose main pro-war points were that Cindy Sheehan was prostituting her son's name and that Camp Casey wasn't as uncomfortable as people were saying it was. He sounded like he was reading a blog post by Michelle Malkin.

As we left, I pointed out that it didn't surprise me that the supposedly big man President was scared shitless of a sweet, middle-aged woman, as he is the very definition of a sniveling coward. But it was truly surprising to see this outpouring of anger and fear from ordinary people, most of whom have to live in the real world and therefore should be made of tougher stuff in the face of Cindy Sheehan's grief.

And we just started cracking up. It seemed so ridiculous, all these people in such a rage, arranging over-the-top counter-protests and bringing out an army of motorcyclists all to bear down on a group of floppy-hatted, middle-aged women in matching pink shirts. But the more people who turned out to protect George Bush from having to answer Cindy Sheehan's questions, the more ridiculous he looked -- it's hard to maintain the manly man cowboy image when you cower in fear behind a group of bullies who stoop to attacking the character of a bereaved mother.

One thing is for certain -- I never thought I'd see the day that a bunch of Harley-riding men in leather jackets would come out to scare a bunch of hard-working soccer moms because they were angry that the soccer moms were counter-cultural threats to authority.


Amanda Marcotte co-writes the popular blog Pandagon.

[Zlatko Waterman]

(Tom Engelhardt's "Summer of Cindy" reading list for George Bush)


George's Lucky 'Top 13' Summer-of-Cindy Reading List
by Tom Engelhardt


Tom Dispatch



It's been a month of momentous White House announcements. First, there was Laura's gender-bending, glass-soufflé-dish breaking decision to choose Cristeta Comerford for the previously all-male post of White House head chef. Then came the issuing of the presidential vacation reading list. Besieged in Crawford's Green Zone by Cindy Sheehan and her supporters, but also by sinking poll numbers, rising casualty figures in Iraq, Republican fears for the 2006 midterm elections, soaring gas prices, and a world generally spinning out of control, the president has sworn to stick to vacation normalcy – biking, brush-cutting, and, of course, reading. "I think it's also important for me to go on with my life" has been his response to the building pressure – and to prove it, we're told, he's settled in with three good books: Mark Kurlansky's history of salt, John Barry's tale of the great flu pandemic of 1918, and… hmmm… Edvard Radzinsky's upcoming Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar.

But in his summer of non-fun, further steps on the book front may be in order. Admittedly, he's already signed on for 1,500 pages of heavy reading, but tsars, salt, and the flu? As the berms go up and the universe closes in, what the president really needs is a genuinely useful summer-of-Cindy reading list and, as a longtime editor in publishing, I decided I could provide exactly that. So I took an informal survey of editors and writers I know, asking for their thoughts on a presidential reading list that might bring closure to George's beleaguered August. The books, I suggested, should be attention-grabbing, informative, and above all utilitarian.

The list that resulted from my survey includes several books on (or recently on) bestseller lists, a couple of eternal classics (child as well as adult), and other intriguing suggestions that add up to a hefty 4,000 pages of help. I've taken the liberty of arranging them into four categories – a lucky "top 13" list of books whose order is meant to offer a shape to the last weeks of a long, hot presidential summer.

13 Problem-Solving Books for George

On Handling the New Neighbors

1. Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee: A South African fable about strangers at the gates of a disintegrating empire.

2. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons: A satire about a country-city collision – for those nights at the "ranch" when the chanting of demonstrators rises to an otherwise unbearable din. (Alternate selection: Bleak House by Charles Dickens.)

3. Dear Mister Rogers: Does It Ever Rain in Your Neighborhood? by Fred Rogers: An avuncular gem offering advice to child letter writers on essential subjects, including how to get along with unexpected neighbors and difficult new friends (sweater not included).

4. Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs, Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World by Adrienne Mayor: Necessary background for another possible approach to relocating Cindy Sheehan's "Camp Casey" – the discovery of a weapons-of-mass-destruction program, possibly even the precursors for a nuclear bomb, on its present one-acre site.

On Drawing a Line in the Sand Without an Oasis in Sight

5. A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence by John E. Mack: The biography of a modern Western intruder who helped establish a base line for disorder in the Middle East.

6. The Persian Boy by Mary Renault: A don't-ask, don't-tell novel about Alexander the Great, another shock-and-awe visitor who had a terminal case of being unable to get out of the Middle East.

7: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell: Administration officials have already announced so many Iraqi "tipping points" that it's time for George to consult a tipping-point expert.

Domestic Conundrums Wrapped in Administration Enigmas

8. On Bull____ by Harry G. Frankfurt: Suggestions from a philosopher that the president can pass on to White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan. (After all, reading to help others is a giving way to go.)

9. Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife: In case the president's poll numbers really do turn out to be in freefall.

10. All the President's Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein: In case Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald lowers the boom on a presidential aide or two just as the fall begins, tips from the Watergate era.

11. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond: Even a president should understand the ways in which an overreaching society (party, administration, cabal) can eat its own tail.

Looking Back with Feeling

12. Pat the Bunny (touch and feel book) by Dorothy Kunhardt: For reassurance when your aides are indicted, your numbers in the toilet, your soldiers in the quagmire, your party's never heard of you, and history's knocking on the door.

13. Paradise Lost by John Milton – What else is there to say?

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media") and is co-founder of the American Empire Project, has been an editor in publishing for three decades. He is now consulting editor for Metropolitan Books. The paperback of his novel, The Last Days of Publishing, is due out in September

[Zlatko Waterman]

( As I discuss the current White House group with my wife, the word that comes up most often in our conversation is "stupid." It's nice to see Karen Kwiatowski--I have been a KK fan for some time--using the same word.

"Just plain stupid", "Incredibly stupid" "Stupid as Community College Management" . . ..Those are some of the phrases we use over and over . . .)

( paste)


The Rise of the Stupid

by Karen Kwiatkowski



Common sense demands the absolute rejection of the idea that public servants are either public or servants.

Politicians and others who dedicate themselves to the state, however, thrill to this particular refrain. They enjoy the idea that they somehow sacrifice something – no matter how small or insignificant – solely to help another citizen, or some group, or some nation.

But the stupidity and crassness of politics always prevails over the idea of public service, as witnessed by the ongoing saga of the Bush vacation at Crawford.

Cindy Sheehan is sitting in the hot sun, leading a simple campaign to extract a small measure of personal accountability from our populist, pedal-pumping president. She and a growing crowd of supporters are waiting for the President to exhibit some sign that he understands what it is he is doing. She is waiting for some sign that Bush understands why he has destroyed Iraq and the lives of thousands of Americans and Iraqis – and can articulate that rationale in either verbal or body language.

Sheehan would like to see some leadership – albeit after the fact – regarding the unacceptable level of pretense and fabrication that led to her son’s untimely and apparently purposeless death. She asks this on behalf of thousands of other American families who are suffering the same angst.

Sheehan wants to know what the President has to say now about his massive propaganda campaign against the American people, and his increasingly bad sales pitch for the neoconservative agenda. She wants to hear from him exactly why he is sponsoring a Washington re-creation of Alexander’s empire, minus the law, the tolerance, the culture, or the courage of political leaders in battle.

She’d like that small sacrifice by a public servant for a citizen, on behalf of our country and our honor. In another world, Cindy Sheehan would be a golden political moment. But in Bushworld she asks too much.

My generation has studied the idiocy of Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs, the ignorance of administrators in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the blighted regimes of LBJ and Nixon, the governing superficiality of Reagan, and the deadly corruption and incompetence of the Bush-Clinton-Bush trinity of post-Cold War emperors. My goodness, we ought to have a clue by now.

We have witnessed the rise of the stupid. Maureen Dowd observes the president and his entourage as meta-insulated; but this is no more than the natural and ideal state for the intellectually incurious and morally weak.

General Tommy Franks said it clearly, in describing the President’s former under secretary for defense policy Doug Feith, who with Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle was a key architect of American security policy, as the "stupidest guy on earth." This description is applicable to most armchair neoconservatives (and there are no other variants). It applies as well to Washington politicians who see no further than their latest deal with lobbies and supporters.

But to explain American foreign and domestic policy as the ascendancy of stupidity seems like a cop-out. Surely there are better, more intellectualized, explanations for our government feeling up old ladies in airports in a search for presumably very tiny terrorists, while attempting to rein in citizens who are actually doing something about drug and human trafficking across the U.S. border with Mexico.

Surely there are better explanations for our government’s mass murder in Iraq for no valid security reason, without possibility of military success, as that same government plans a similarly stupid operation on Iran, or perhaps Syria, or both.

Instead of debating the purpose of American foreign policy and the nature of just war – the Washington pot bubbles over with chatter about the types of weapons we will use in Iran, the sexual charges against this dissenting four star or that one, and how we will justify this next excursion into disaster.

I hope that George W. Bush meets with Cindy Sheehan, in person, and that he does a better job of faking heartfelt empathy than he did last time they met. He seems to be having more trouble acting convinced and convincing, if his television appearances from the ranch are any indication.

This week, Bush presented himself as shaky, repetitive, hoping against hope and pitiful. Diving popularity polls and economic data, neoconservative pressure for war, war, war, and the possibility that comparisons with Nixon in terms of secrecy, illegality and criminality will be the only historical footnote on an otherwise forgettable presidency must weigh heavily on his shrink-wrapped mind. The meta-insulation is peeling off as Republicans realize this Bush is even more toxic for the GOP than his father was. Even the sweet favors of Diebold won’t be enough next time, and they know it.

Perhaps self-selected presidential candidate "I don’t bake cookies" Hillary will be better suited to offer the milk of human kindness to a public she will serve oh so humbly. No matter what, we’d better act like we like it, what with our new SS, the sustained Patriot Act, an imminent national financial crisis, and the permanent "war on terra."

Thanks, Dubya.

But wait, Mr. President. Perhaps I have been unfair. Maybe all your cedar chopping and bike riding and failure to report are the real clues as to how Americans will survive the next twenty years in this country. Did I say "stupid?" I meant "genius!" Sir, you are ahead of your time!

August 12, 2005

Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D., [send her mail] is a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, who spent her final four and a half years in uniform working at the Pentagon. She lives with her freedom-loving family in the Shenandoah Valley, and among other things, writes a bi-weekly column on defense issues with a libertarian perspective for militaryweek.com.

[jimboloco]

The tide is turning, Mr. President. The mothers and fathers of America are saying "not my child," just as they said during Vietnam, "Hell no, we won't go." You had better start listening and talking with us, because we are the ones who are paying the price for your war, and we aren't going to take it anymore.

Sincerely,

Amy Branham
Houston, Texas
Proud mother of Sgt. Jeremy R. Smith
Nov. 1981 – Feb. 2004

glad you are posting ongoing news about this issue and hope you will continue, it would be helpful if you could also post the URL's so that the sources could be verified and also allow for easier forwarding.

This letter is enormous, I will send this to my Texas step-sister, whose son was being courted by the Army, have been forwarding counter-recruiting messages to her.

We are engaging in counter recruiting this friday at 6:15 Am at a local high school, a demo that has some danger to it, danger of arrest, also a trop storm approaching.

Will post that on another string. This letter was so well written and powerful. Thanks. The letters from the parents are the most powerful, better than the journalists, more convincing.

[jimboloco]

http://infowars.com/video/clips/crawfor ... 17wmbb.htm

video of Alex Jones in Crawford Texas

interesting bit with pro and counter protesters
i don't exactly agree with his 9-11 conspiracy theory, unless maybe they "let " it happen with some for knowlegde, perhaps, the lowest kind of covert-ops, I could envision that as a possibility.

1. Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee: A South African fable about strangers at the gates of a disintegrating empire.

I did read this one, interesting story about an imperial outpost in the classic colonial age, and the administrator of the place becomes disenchanted. He sees the cruelty suffered unto the captive barbarians as they are under suspicion for stealing cattle, etc, yet in fact they were coming to the place looking for help, the young boy helping his elder grandparent, they both were captured and suffered.

The story unfolds when a new commandant with his troops arrives, ready to search and destry the enemy, barbarians, so the somewhat softer outpost administrator goes with the army under orders to lead them to where the savages live, taking along the surviving boy as hostage and guide.

They encounter signs along the way, hints at some presence, but suffer through drought and wilderness until the entire expedition breaks down, the boy escapes, the troops return with the administrator in disgrace, he had also befriended a captive crippled barbarian woman, and finally the army leaves, the administratyor is left to survive alone without imperial supply, the place becomes a ruin. He becomes a Robinson Crusoe, last survivor, alone, tending a makeshift garden Coetzee addresses the theme again in his book Foe, the Real robinson Crusoe and Friday discovered by a shipwrecked woman who is looking for her pirated daughter in the south Atlantic, is rescued, Crusoe dies, and Friday accompanies her back to sodden England where she tries to have a recognised auther recount her story, all very tragic in a muted way.

More or less, as I recall. strangely enough, illiterate as I am, I heard about this author from the movie "GI Jane" where the special ops trainer is getting some quiet time seen reading this book.

Unfortunately, at the film's disgrace, after all the training, they decide to go pick on some Arabs in a marine assault, and become heroes to each other, with ceremonial congratulations at the end, so where the relevance of the book comes in to the movie script is shallow, mainly the prop scene of the book with it's title, miscued, without empathy. in otherwords, clever, but

stupid.

Gracias por la lista de libros, voy a mirarla

[Zlatko Waterman]

BUSH BLUNDERS BACK

( from Antiwar.com

and The WashingtonPost Online)


(paste)

Bush Says Activist Doesn't Speak for Kin of Casualties


By Sam Coates
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 24, 2005; A03



BOISE, Idaho, Aug. 23 -- President Bush, confronted by antiwar protesters on his travels, Tuesday renewed his refusal to meet with high-profile activist Cindy Sheehan, asserting that she does not speak for the majority of families who have lost relatives in combat.

Bush dismissed demands from Sheehan and others to bring U.S. troops home from Iraq. "I think immediate withdrawal from Iraq would be a mistake," he said. "I think those who advocate immediate withdrawal from not only Iraq but the Middle East are advocating a policy that would weaken the United States."

The vacationing president called reporters to a mountain resort 100 miles north of here to address efforts in Iraq to reach agreement on a constitution. He issued a blunt warning to the Sunni minority, which has yet to agree to a draft of the constitution. "The Sunnis have got to make a choice," Bush said. "Do they want to live in a society that's free, or do they want to live in violence?"

He praised the "tough decision" by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for pushing through the withdrawal of Israeli settlers from Gaza and repeated his wish for two democratic states to coexist. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas "has made a commitment to fight off the violence because he understands a democracy can't exist with terrorist groups trying to take the law into their own hands," he said.

Bush's quickly scheduled appearance came against a backdrop of antiwar protests that have sprung up during his three-day visit to Utah and Idaho, two politically Republican states. The president's sojourn from Texas suggested the protests threaten to bracket his appearances in ways that could complicate the White House's ability to argue for the Iraq policy and maintain support for it.

While the original demonstration continues outside Bush's ranch near Crawford, Tex., without Sheehan -- who returned to California to look after her mother -- figures from the Crawford protest traveled to Salt Lake City on Monday to speak to 2,000 antiwar protesters who had gathered near the convention center where the president was addressing military veterans. Among the demonstrators was Celeste Zappala, whose son, Sgt. Sherwood Baker, was killed last year.

Later Monday, 200 people turned up for a protest in Donnelly, a town of 130 inhabitants a few miles from the Tamarack Resort, where Bush is spending two nights on vacation. Another protest took place here Tuesday. It was organized by the Idaho Peace Coalition and featured a speech by Melanie House, who lost her husband, John D. House, in January.

"President Bush probably breathed a sigh of relief when he landed in Idaho last night," said Laura McCarthy, whose son is in Iraq, as she addressed 100 people at the Boise protest. "But no matter where he goes, he's going to find a Cindy Sheehan in every community across the United States. The name is going to be different, but the message is going to be the same."

To reinforce their message, protesters recorded a television commercial in which Sheehan accuses the president of lying. It is to air in the regions Bush is visiting. The ABC affiliate in Salt Lake City and the CBS affiliate here refused to broadcast the spot. It has aired in Waco, Tex.

Bush, in his session with reporters, pointed out that he had met with Sheehan and that she had a recent discussion with Deputy Chief of Staff Joseph Hagin and national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley at the Texas ranch. He added that he "strongly supported" the right of Sheehan and others to demonstrate, and said he understood the anguish she has experienced.

Sheehan arrived in Crawford on Aug. 6, four days after the president began a working vacation at his ranch, aboard a bus painted red, white and blue and emblazoned with the words "Impeachment Tour." She vowed she would camp out until Bush talked to her, but she left last Thursday for California after her mother suffered a stroke.

Antiwar activists said that Sheehan's campaign had galvanized interest in their work. "People are coming out of the woodwork to express their opposition to this war and support Cindy Sheehan," said Liz Paul, a coordinator for the Idaho Peace Coalition that organized the demonstration in Boise. She said the group, set up after Sept. 11, 2001, had seen an upsurge in interest since Sheehan's outpost, Camp Casey, had been formed near the president's ranch. Paul said 40 unpaid volunteers were helping with the protest.

Although Bush has mostly avoided direct contact with protesters, about 200 people lined the streets of Salt Lake City as his motorcade drove to the airport Monday. Dozens were holding placards, with messages including "Impeach Bush" and "No War in My Name."

Meanwhile, conservative activists have launched their own drive to boost support for the president. They have chartered a caravan displaying messages of support for U.S. troops and are driving it through California.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

[Zlatko Waterman]

(Another good TomDispatch--with Christian Appy. Iraq with a Vietnam War historical perspective. The role played by "gold star" mothers then-- in 1968)

URL:

http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=7061


(paste)

Military Families May Once Again Lead Us Out of War



by Tom Engelhardt and Christian Appy
Tom Dispatch


On the April day in 2003 when American troops first entered Baghdad, historian Marilyn Young suggested that Operation Iraqi Freedom was "Vietnam on crack cocaine." She wrote presciently at the time:

"In less than two weeks, a 30-year-old vocabulary is back: credibility gap, seek and destroy, hard to tell friend from foe, civilian interference in military affairs, the dominance of domestic politics, winning, or more often, losing hearts and minds."

For Americans, that language and the Vietnam template that goes with it have never left us. Only this week Republican senator and presidential hopeful Chuck Hagel, who served in Vietnam, very publicly attacked the administration's Iraq policy for "destabilizing" the Middle East and suggested that the president's constant refrain about "staying the course" was "not a policy." He added, "We are locked into a bogged-down problem not… dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam. The longer we stay, the more problems we're going to have."

Put another way, Young's statement might now be amended to read: "Iraq is what history looks like once the Bush administration took crack cocaine"; "the United States is now Vietnam on a bad LSD trip."

After all, in Iraq, to put events in a bizarre nutshell, the squabbling leadership of the government just presented (kind of) on deadline a new "constitution" that has blank passages in it and then insisted on taking an extra three days, not allowed for in the present interim constitution, for further "debate." All this despite the intense pressure U.S. "super-ambassador" Zalmay Khalilzad put on the negotiators to make it on time to the deadline, another of the administration's much needed "turning points" for home consumption. (Imagine, a representative of the French king half-running our constitutional convention!) At his Informed Comment blog, Juan Cole has already referred to this as a "coup d'état," though the New York Times more politely terms it a "legal sleight of hand." ("The rule of law," writes Cole, "is no longer operating in Iraq, and no pretense of constitutional procedure is being striven for. In essence, the prime minister and president have made a sort of coup, simply disregarding the interim constitution. Given the acquiescence of parliament and the absence of a supreme court [which should have been appointed by now but was not, also unconstitutionally], there is no check or balance that could question the writ of the executive.")

More important yet, the politicians involved – many of them exiles, some of them with few roots in Iraq, the Sunnis among them with limited roots in the insurgent Sunni community (and in any case largely cut out of the process of bargaining between Kurdish and Shi'ite politicians) – are fighting for a retrograde-sounding constitution (religiously based and without a significant emphasis on women's rights) inside the heavily fortified Green Zone. It is a constitution aimed at creating an almost impossibly starved central government guaranteed to control little.

Meanwhile, outside the Green Zone, amid a brewing stewpot of internecine killing and incipient civil war, vast parts of the country have simply passed beyond central rule, and significant parts of central Iraq seemingly beyond any rule at all. The Kurdish areas in the north have long been autonomous with their own armed militia. In the largely Sunni areas of central Iraq, chaos is the rule, but whole towns like Haditha are now "insurgent citadels," run, as Fallujah was a year or so ago, as little retro-Islamic statelets. (Grim as this may be, such statelets can offer – as, let's not forget, Taliban-ruled Afghanistan did after two decades of civil war and chaos there – order of a harsh kind that ensures personal safety for most inhabitants. This is no small thing when conditions are desperate enough.) The Shi'ite south, on the other hand, has largely fallen into the hands of Islamic parties and their armed militias, all allied to one degree or another with the neighboring Iranian fundamentalist regime. In the north and the south, security (including detention centers) is increasingly in the hands of local parties, not the central government or even the occupying forces.

Throw in a full-scale insurgency, constant interruptions in oil and electricity production, as well as production levels at or even below those of Saddam Hussein's weakest post-Gulf-War-I days, and high unemployment, and most Iraqis may not greatly care about, or even be affected by whatever "constitution" is produced inside the relative safety of the Green Zone.

With that in mind, imagine some of the hawks and neocons of the Bush administration who first started us (and the Iraqis) off on this glorious Middle Eastern adventure of ours. Were they capable of seeing the situation in a clear-eyed way, they might easily believe themselves on a bad LSD trip out of the Vietnam era. After all, they have essentially created their own worst nightmare – no small accomplishment when you think about it.

In the meantime, while Iraqi police, soldiers, judges, officials, and normal citizens continue to die in horrible ways, in smaller if growing numbers so do American soldiers in Iraq (as in Afghanistan where a resurgent Taliban has clearly imported Iraqi tactical and IED expertise). Ominously, insurgent and terrorist tactics, including the recent missiling of two American warships docked at the port of Aqaba in Jordan, continues to spread.

Today, on the inside page of my hometown paper, under "names of the dead," are listed: "BOUCHARD, Nathan K., 24, Sgt., Army; Wildomar, Calif.; Third Infantry Division; DOYLE, Jeremy W., 24, Staff Sgt., Army; Chesterton, Md.; Third Infantry Division; FUHRMANN, Ray M. II, 28, Specialist, Army; Novato, Calif.; Third Infantry Division; SEAMANS, Timothy J., 20, Pfc., Army; Jacksonville, Fla.; Third Infantry Division."

Three or four American dead a day seems now close to the norm – seldom enough any longer to make the front pages of all but the most local newspapers, yet enough evidently to penetrate the consciousness of growing numbers of Americans. The fact is – and this can certainly be put down, if not simply to Cindy Sheehan, then to the Sheehan moment we're living through – a genuine conversation/debate has begun about being in Iraq, about the Bush administration lies that got us there, and about how in the world to get out. Most important, this surprisingly noisy and discordant discussion is taking place not, as in the last couple of years, in the shadows, or off on the Internet, but right in plain sight: in our newspapers, on television, in the streets, in homes, even in the corridors of Congress.

One symbol of this was Democratic Senator Russell Feingold who, as Peter Baker and Shailagh Murray of the Washington Post wrote, "broke with his party leadership last week to become the first senator to call for all troops to be withdrawn from Iraq by a specific deadline." On the other end of the spectrum, Republicans like Senator Hagel and conservatives of many stripes are raising danger flags ever more often – and in some cases calling directly for us to depart from Iraq. For instance, Andrew Bacevich, who served in Vietnam and is the author of the superb book The New American Militarism, wrote recently in the Washington Post:

"Rather than producing security, our continued massive military presence [in Iraq] has helped fuel continuing violence. Rather than producing liberal democracy, our meddling in Iraqi politics has exacerbated political dysfunction... Wisdom requires that the Bush administration call an end to its misbegotten crusade. While avoiding the appearance of an ignominious dash for the exits, but with all due speed, the United States needs to liquidate its presence in Iraq, placing the onus on Iraqis to decide their fate and creating the space for other regional powers to assist in brokering a political settlement."

Similarly, Donald Devine of the American Conservative Union Foundation, wrote, "The only solution is for the U.S. to exit before the whole thing comes apart."

On Monday, the president, roused from his rounds of vacation bicycling by a ton of bad news and ever worse polling figures, was flown into Salt Lake City to give a speech to the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Inside the convention hall, he met a friendly audience; while outside, in the streets of a red-state capital, demonstrators including the Democratic mayor of Salt Lake City, Rocky Anderson, gathered to hold the president's feet to the Iraqi fire. The last time a president was so dogged by demonstrators in otherwise friendly settings was certainly the Vietnam era. ("We are here today," announced Anderson, "to let the world know that even in the reddest of red states, there is enormous concern about the dangerous, irresponsible and deceitful public policies being pursued by President Bush and his administration.") Note, by the way, another sign of the "chickenhawk" nature of this administration: The president not only won't attend funerals or meet with Cindy Sheehan again; he clearly doesn't dare venture, as has been his general style, into any area where he's likely to meet a challenging reception of any sort. It may, however, already be too late for him to find unchallenging safety anywhere in the United States.

In his stay-the-course VFW speech, you could feel that the president now found himself in a new and confusing moment. Step by step, he's slowly been backing up. This time – contradicting the anti-Vietnam no-attention-to-casualties playbook he has long been working off – he specifically spoke the numbers of dead American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, something of a first for him. Though he never mentioned Cindy Sheehan's name, he might as well have. Somehow its absence acted like a presence, all but ringing from the speech. Read it yourself and you can sense the degree to which he now is uncharacteristically on the defensive. Even to friendly crowds, he finds himself answering questions that, not so long ago, never would have been asked of him. Wherever he is, he is now essentially responding to what is, in effect, an ongoing news conference in which challenging questions never stop being tossed his way.

All and all, in the last weeks, it's been like watching a nation emerging slowly from an all-enveloping state of denial. Such a state of mind, once pierced, will be hard indeed for this administration to recreate. In the meantime, the Vietnam template remains stuck in our collective heads. Even images on television – for instance, the showing of American GIs dragging off the bodies of American casualties under fire as the president calls on the public to stay the course – have grown stronger and more Vietnam-like. This is, of course, Vietnam as seen in an Alice-in-Wonderland, crazy-mirror version of itself. For instance, despite what many think, post-invasion opposition to the Iraq war has grown far more quickly than in the Vietnam era; and a mass antiwar movement is now being jump-started into visible existence by the families of soldiers in Iraq (and by small numbers of resisting soldiers too) rather than, as in the Vietnam era, ending with such a movement. Expect the antiwar demonstrations scheduled for Washington on Sept. 24 to be enormous, to feature Cindy Sheehan, and to be led by military families.

It may be that, despite certain visible similarities between the two, Iraq is not Vietnam, as Time magazine editor Tony Karon argued especially eloquently at his blog recently: But in the United States, at least, there are certain striking similarities, especially in the unequal burden of pain, suffering, and death laid by enthusiasts of each war on working-class, heartland America. Below, Vietnam historian Chris Appy, whose Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides (now in paperback) is the single best book on the Vietnam experience to appear in years and a distinctly eerie read at present, explores two heartland turning-point moments, involving war casualties in Ohio – one in 1968, the other now. Tom

Military Families May Once Again Lead Us Out of War
Casualties in the Heartland, 1968/2005
by Christian Appy

"You bet your goddamn dollar I'm bitter. It's people like us who give up our sons for the country," said a firefighter whose son was killed in action. "Let's face it: if you have a lot of money, or if you have the right connections, you don't end up on a firing line over there. I think we ought to win that war or pull out. What the hell else should we do – sit and bleed ourselves to death, year after year?" His wife jumps in to add, "My husband and I can't help but thinking that our son gave his life for nothing, nothing at all."

These may sound like voices from the present, perhaps from grieving parents who have taken up Cindy Sheehan's vigil in Crawford, Texas, as she visits her ailing mother. Actually though, they come from 1970, and their lost son died in Vietnam. In recent weeks, as American casualties in Iraq continued to mount and opposition from military families has grown, as Ohio families mourned their dead and the Cindy Sheehan story would not go away, I kept remembering the many people I had interviewed about a similar moment during the Vietnam War, a time in 1968 when millions of Americans who had trusted their government to tell the truth about a distant war and believed it was every citizen's absolute duty to "fight for your country," began to turn, like a giant aircraft carrier slowly arcing in another direction, began to doubt, question, and finally oppose their nation's policies.

Many voices of the Vietnam era are long forgotten or were never clearly heard, especially those of people like the firefighter and his wife. In their place, we have a canned image of Vietnam-era working-class whites as bigoted hard-hats, Archie Bunkers all (as in the famed 1970s television sitcom All in the Family), super-patriotic hawks who simply despised long-haired protesters and supported their presidents.

In that stereotype lies a partial, but misleading, truth. Many working-class families were indeed appalled by the antiwar movement of those years. "I hate those peace demonstrators," the same firefighter said. But his hostility did not make him a hawk. He was furious because he saw antiwar activists as privileged and disrespectful snobs who "insult everything we believe in" without having to share his family's military and economic sacrifices. In virtually the same breath, however, he said about the war of his time, "The sooner we get the hell out of there the better."

In fact, poor and working class Americans were profoundly disaffected by Vietnam. A Gallup poll in January 1971 showed that the less formal education you had, the more likely you were to want the military out of that country: 80 percent of Americans with grade school educations were in favor of a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam; 75 percent of high school graduates agreed; only among college graduates did the figure drop to 60 percent.

In Vietnam itself, the mostly working-class American military of that era, formed by an inequitable draft, made its opposition to the war increasingly clear as the fighting dragged on. By late 1969, demoralization and resistance within the armed forces was endemic. Desertions were beginning to skyrocket; drug use was becoming rampant; avoidance of combat routine; outright mutiny not unusual; and hundreds of officers would be wounded or killed by their own enraged troops. By 1972, the military was in shambles. It is now largely forgotten that the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam not just because of domestic opposition to the war, but also because it no longer seemed possible to field a functional, obedient army.

Ohio 1968: Is This War Worth Another Child?

Such levels of opposition did not come out of the blue. They had long histories deeply embedded in that endless war. By the mid-1960s, for instance, many hard-fighting and disciplined American soldiers were already embittered by their commanders' war of attrition that had them "humping the boonies" as "bait" to draw fire from an elusive and dangerous enemy who then determined the time, place, and duration of the vast majority of firefights. They often viewed their officers as ticket-punching "lifers," who sought promotion by jeopardizing their troops in an effort to post the highest possible enemy body counts, the chief measure of "progress" back in Washington. GIs, who might risk everything to save a buddy, increasingly came to view the war itself as meaningless. "It don't mean nothin,'" they commonly said.

In the face of rising opposition, Presidents Johnson and Nixon sought to rally – in Nixon's famous phrase – the "silent majority" in support of the war, not by explaining the need for ever more sacrifice, but by demonizing critics who, it was said, threatened to turn America into a "pitiful, helpless giant." Though the Nixon administration, unlike the present one, did not have its own media machine constantly available to attack its enemies, Nixon often sent out his Vice President, Spiro Agnew, as an attack dog to vilify student protesters ("effete corps of impudent snobs") and the media ("nattering nabobs of negativism").

The cynical courting of "Middle America" may indeed have exacerbated class tensions, but in the end it proved incapable of overcoming the rising tide of outrage among families who believed they were bearing the greatest burden in a war that lacked an achievable or worthy purpose. Already, in the long months after the Tet Offensive of Jan. 31, 1968, when as many as 500 Americans were dying every week, the most basic of all questions was beginning to well up from the heartland: Is this war worth the life of even one more of our children?

You could see it, for example, in Parma, Ohio, a working-class neighborhood near Cleveland that ultimately lost 35 young men in Vietnam. On Memorial Day 1968, the Cleveland Press, a newspaper previously known for its strong support for the war, ran a startling front-page feature by reporter Dick Feagler under the headline: "He Was Only 19 – Did You Know Him?" It was about a Parma boy named Greg Fischer who had just died in Vietnam.

I learned about the impact of that column from Clark Dougan, now an editor at the University of Massachusetts Press. For Clark, the news of Greg Fischer's death hit like a hammer because he had known the 19-year-old. They were classmates together at Valley Forge High School where the school's principal often came on the intercom to ask for a moment of silence because yet another former Valley Forge student had died in Vietnam. When he read the story, with its heartbreaking details, including the letter Fischer had left behind to be opened "if I don't come back from Vietnam," Dougan recalls, "I understood how easily it could have been me. Like any kid who had grown up in the '50s, there was a certain allure to the military. But my parents hadn't been able to go to college and they were determined that I would. So I had gone off to this cloistered college while Greg was going off to die in Vietnam. The article was really asking, how many more people like Greg are we willing to waste? It reflected a feeling that was spreading all over working-class communities like Parma. That was the moment when 'Middle America' really turned against the war."

Ohio 2005: The Chickenhawk War

The author of that article, Dick Feagler, is still on the job. Thirty-seven years later, he writes for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, now lashing out at the war in Iraq, at those who have "a bland, nitwit allegiance to the blood and death as if the carnage in Iraq were some kind of Olympic sport." As in 1968, so now in the Ohio heartland, where the burden of death once again falls heavy, the war makes ever less sense to those most involved. Concern for the well-being of Americans in uniform goes hand-in-hand with the rising dissent. Like many other Ohioan columnists, Feagler often couples his attacks on the war with prayers for the troops, even telling readers how to send care packages and letters of support.

Underlying the two moments – May 1968/August 2005 – is the fact that, once again, our wartime sacrifices fall disproportionately on the working class and, with U.S. deaths approaching 2,000, and thousands more soldiers and Marines horribly wounded, a recent CBS poll found that 57 percent of Americans now believe the war in Iraq not worth the loss of American lives. Another poll showed that only 34 percent support Bush's handling of the war, just two points higher than the comparable figure for President Lyndon Johnson after the Tet Offensive.

As in 1968, so in 2005, as New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has pointed out, "The loudest of the hawks are the least likely to send their sons or daughters off" to war. George Bush continues to call the war a "noble cause" and "the central front in the Global War on Terrorism" even though 60 percent of Americans have come to believe that it has made them less safe. His five-week-long vacation is only the most obvious symbol of the obscene gulf in safety between the advocates of the war and its victims. That gulf is at the very heart of a growing disaffection in places like Ohio, where earlier this month 20 Marines from the same Reserve unit (3rd Battalion, 25th Marines) were killed in Iraq within 72 hours. That unit is headquartered in Brook Park, Ohio, a working-class suburb adjacent to Parma, and the losses included 14 men from Ohio, bringing the state's total fatalities to more than 90.

Sam Fulwood, another Plain Dealer columnist, responded to these losses by recalling Bush's 2003 "bring 'em on" taunting of the Iraqi insurgents. "Two years ago, tucked in the comfort and safety of the White House's Roosevelt Room," wrote Fulwood, "the president challenged 'anybody who wants to harm American troops.' John Wayne couldn't have said it with more cowboy swagger. 'Bring them on.'" As Fulwood concludes with a stridency rarely seen in Midwestern newspapers until recently, "The chickenhawk got his wish."

Now, for the first time, not just in Ohio but all over the country, media outlets are beginning to raise a previously forbidden question: Should we withdraw? As the Cincinnati Enquirer framed it on Aug. 7, in response to the local casualties, "Do we seek revenge? Do we continue as usual? Or do we leave?" The last question, once asked only in a whisper if at all, is suddenly being voiced loudly and urgently. And when it was raised by an antiwar Iraq War Marine veteran named Paul Hackett, running as a Democrat in a special election for Congress, he came within two percentage points of winning in a district east of Cincinnati that had given George Bush a whopping 64 percent of its votes in November 2004, and has elected a Republican to the House of Representatives almost automatically for the past 30 years.

In presidential elections, Ohio is often spoken of as a "bellwether state." It may turn out to play the same role when it comes to America's wars. What we are witnessing in Ohio and elsewhere is a real sea change in public opinion being led by people with the closest personal connections of all to the president's war. Disillusionment has soared not only because of mounting casualties and the obvious lack of progress in quelling the Iraqi insurgency, but also because the military is strained to the limits keeping 130,000 troops in Iraq. Many thousands of Americans are in their second tours of duty with third tours looming on the horizon.

During the Vietnam era, Lyndon Johnson decided to rely almost exclusively on the draft and the active-duty military to fight the war, hoping to keep casualties (and so their impact) largely restricted to young, mostly unmarried, and powerless individuals. The Reserve forces, he understood, tended to be older, married, and more rooted in their communities. Now, the Reserves and the National Guard make up half of U.S. combat forces in Iraq, a figure that has doubled since early 2004. This increasing reliance on the Reserves only serves to accelerate antiwar resistance among military families.

Soldiers, veterans, and their families have, as they did in the early 1970s, once again moved to the forefront of a growing, grassroots struggle to end an unpopular war. Cindy Sheehan's impassioned opposition to the war has not only gained extraordinary media attention but seems to have ignited a genuine outpouring of public support. Many who may have feared that public opposition to the war could be taken as unpatriotic or unsupportive of American troops, have been emboldened by Sheehan's example to demand that her son's death, and all the others, not be used to justify further bloodshed in a war that cannot be convincingly justified by an administration distant from their lives and their suffering.

Christian Appy teaches history at the University of Massachusetts and is the author of Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers in Vietnam and Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides, which is now out in paperback.

[Note: The full text of Clark Dougan's account of Memorial Day, 1968 in Parma, Ohio, excerpted from Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides, can be read by clicking here and scrolling down.]

Copyright 2005 Christian Appy

[Zlatko Waterman]

Finally, a brief, non-professional comment by a non-pundit: me.

When I was marching a couple of days a week down the main street of our town with a hundred or so other local peace activists before the US invaded Iraq, we were saying this:

Don't start this war in Iraq. It will turn out to be a bloody, wasteful and impossibly idealistic venture. You (BUSHCO) know little or nothing about the history and culture of the area, including about ancient factional antipathies. There is no connection between Iraq and 9/11. There are no weapons of mass destruction. The reports on yellowcake uranium from Niger are faked. Saddam is a dictator, but one of the hinges in the loose-pin stability of the area. To remove him might open a Pandora's box of factional bickering and even civil war.


In this invasion, you will needlessly sacrifice the lives of young men and women mostly from the bottom socio-economic stratum of the US population. You will waste and displace the National Guard. You cannot maintain, at current troop levels, a credible occupation force.


You are proceeding in violation of International Law. Millions
( some say 10, some say 50) of ordinary people around the world are saying no to this invasion.

All these things seemed obvious to me. Not because I was clairvoyantly prescient or a professional pundit, but because I interested myself in the affairs of my country and its foreign policy. And I didn't watch tv-- and still don't.

Revelations after the war was started by BUSHCO include the proof of most of these assertions by the government's own bureaucratic investigations and hearings.

The Downing Street Memos show the war had been planned long before Bush began speaking of using force as "a last resort."

I have never liked George W. Bush as President. I have read two books on the man and several on his idol and mentor, Ronald Reagan. I am unimpressed by the intellect of either and deeply unimpressed by Bush's ability to speak publicly, think on his feet, and manage his own native English language.

But it was the policy of the Bush administration and their reaction to 9/11 that was the most disturbing. Ignoring the advice of his own father and millions of ordinary people, as well as experts on Iraqi culture and history, BUSHCO blundered ahead.

Nearly 1900 dead and thousands of seriously wounded
( wheelchair-bound for life, blind, paralyzed) soldiers later, the mothers of those dead and wounded soldiers are beginning to make their voices heard.

The bullying of American hegemonists and suckers of oil, led by no-bid contractors formerly CEO'd by the Vice-President are simply not credible in this vain and arrogant effort to "bring liberty" to this region.

And their commander-in-chief is perhaps most disappointing of all.



--Z

[jimboloco]

well maybe the dissassapointment is also the numbers of people who voted for him, who continue to support him, what really pisses me off, the intransigence of the stupidity of masses of people. yes lets hope for a turning and know that I will be your marching partner from thjis side of the country, we are a community no doubt.