Postscripts

OP ED

Labels: Afghanistan War, Op Ed

OP ED

Note: The title is taken from a favorite saying of former Secretary of State James A. Baker.

Dear Mr. President:

Shortly before Christmas of 1945, I was discharged from the Army at Fort George G. Meade in Maryland. I decided that I would make a point of studying the waging of war, a profession that had appropriated four years of my youth. Sixty-four years later, now with a large store of knowledge about war, military science and tactics, and military history, I find myself no closer to fathoming why this country continues to wage wars, particularly wars in which we have no national interest and, lately, no particular skill in fighting. Or why we insist on invading countries about whose cultures and religions we know little or nothing. I write as an ordinary citizen. I mention my war service only to discourage superpatriots from attacking me on that score.

Speaking before the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention on August 17, you defended U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, saying, “This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al-Qaida would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people.”

That's a favorite argument of the hawkish elements in our society who always see war as the only solution. Coming from you, Mr. President, these words were a great surprise. In effect, you acknowledged that the only justification for an increased commitment of American troops and materiel in Afghanistan is the fear that if the Taliban isn't defeated in Afghanistan, they will eventually allow al-Qaida to re-establish itself there. This would enable al-Qaida to mount another attack on the United States--a pretty tenuous reason for continuing the war in Afghanistan.

I respectfully beg to differ. History shows otherwise. Afghanistan had little or no role in 9-11. Nothing we do in Afghanistan is likely to prevent another 9-11 from occurring again. As a result of ignorance or bad advice, your words are an attempt to refute the history of the planning for 9-11, as detailed in the report of the 9-11 Commission.

First, the 9-11 attack was planned and hatched not in the mountain fastnesses of Afghanistan, but in Karachi, Pakistan, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Hamburg, Germany. Yet no one is suggesting that we invade those other places, including Germany, to prevent it from happening again.

Second, the absolutely essential training of the 9-11 terrorists took place in flight schools in the U.S., right under our very noses. For that, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

Third, the Afghanistan camps primarily trained fighters against the Northern Alliance. Whatever incidental training they provided for 9-11 was minimal and could easily have been performed elsewhere. Pilot training was the key to the operation.

These are not suppositions. I repeat: These are all facts detailed in the 9-11 Commission’s Report. Chapter 10 of the Report describes how only three days after 9-11, the State and Defense departments, working swiftly, produced a joint memorandum outlining a course of action: The State Department proposed delivering an ultimatum to the Taliban: "Produce Bin Laden and his deputies and shut down al-Qaida camps within 24 to 48 hours, or the United States will use all necessary means to destroy the terrorist infrastructure." The State Department did not expect the Taliban to comply. Thereafter, State and Defense would plan to build an international coalition to go into Afghanistan.

Both departments proposed to consult with NATO and other allies and ask for intelligence, bases, and other support from countries, according to their capabilities and resources. Finally, the plan proposed that America use all its resources to eliminate terrorism as a threat, punish those responsible for the 9/11 attacks, hold states and other actors responsible for providing sanctuary to terrorists, work with a coalition to eliminate terrorist groups and networks, and avoid malice toward any people, religion, or culture.

The memorandum was entitled, “Gameplan for a Political-Military Strategy for Pakistan and Afghanistan,” and dated 14 Sept 2001. How different history would be if a belligerent cowboy president with token “playboy” military service and little concept of the world had not ignored this memorandum and decided that the U.S. would not only go it alone in Afghanistan, but, in response to prodding by Paul Wolfowitz, would also attack Iraq.

The United States unilaterally invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to destroy the al-Qaida safe haven there—an action that was clearly justified by the 9/11 attacks. But al-Qaida is no longer based in Afghanistan, nor has it been based there since early 2002. According to current intelligence, bin Laden, the movement’s spiritual father, is now headquartered across the border in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

The Taliban movement in Afghanistan is clearly linked with al-Qaida and sympathetic to it, but there is little evidence of al-Qaida infrastructure within Afghanistan today that could directly threaten the U.S. homeland. Besides, the risk of a successful reestablishment of al-Qaida in Afghanistan isn’t really any higher than the chances of al-Qaida growing more powerful in any number of weak states where it is active: Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Djibouti or Eritrea on the margins of the Indian Ocean. The Philippines. Uzbekistan. Even parts of Latin America or southern Africa.

In the spring of 2003 we invaded Iraq with about 130,000 troops. Here it is, more than six years later, and we still have about 130,000 troops in Iraq. We have about 62,000 troops in Afghanistan. We expect to have 68,000 troops there by the end of the year. How many troops would you guess, Mr. President, will we have in Afghanistan another six years from now?

We have lost 772 service members in Afghanistan thus far in eight years, and the monthly casualty numbers are rising. Add that number to the more than 4,200 dead in Iraq and 30,000 wounded. I implore you, Mr. President, do not waste any more of the flower of American youth in another war in which we have no national interest. There is much to be done at home if we are to make the American dream a reality again.

Respectfully,
Robert Scott
Editor of Postscripts

Labels: Afghanistan War, Op Ed

OP-ED

Instead of seeing a coherent plan that anticipates each new crisis, do you sometimes get the feeling that Henry (”I’ve got a 2-1/2 page plan”) Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury, and Ben (“Rubber Stamp”) Bernanke, Director of the Federal Reserve, are making up their strategy for countering a plunging economy as they go along? The nation's sudden realization that these experts allowed the country’s financial health to deteriorate rapidly without sounding alarms is what is truly scary about the present malaise.

No Surprises
We shouldn’t be surprised at the belated awakening to reality of the Paulson/Bernanke duo. Bernanke is an academic and an expert on recessions and depressions, particularly the Hoover Depression of the 1930s, so he should be quite comfortable with the mess the Bush administration has bequeathed us. Before his appointment in 2006, Paulson, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, made over $100 million in total compensation in three years, not to mention the millions of Goldman Sachs shares held in trust for him when his government stint is over. On his watch, the number of competing investment banks was reduced to two--Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase--but the secrecy that surrounded these disappearances led to the air of distrust that refuses to dissipate.

The fact that the U.S. Treasury attached no strings to the cash it handed out to banks makes it appear naïve and trusting, and fails to inspire confidence. Now we have the spectacle of the banks hoarding the cash distributed to them, and the government begging recipient banks to lend the money. For reducing the number of Goldman Sachs competitors, Mr. Paulson will surely be well rewarded when he returns to Wall Street after being booted out by the Obama administration. The big question is whether the country can survive until Inauguration Day, January 20, 2009?

The government is now making emergency loans to financial institutions to the tune of $2 trillion, $200 billion has been made available to Fannie and Freddie, $700 billion to the TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program)--half of which has already been expended--$140 billion in tax breaks for banks, and $110 billion to rescue AIG (American Insurance Group). The total tab now comes to more than $3 trillion. These numbers remind us of the remark attributed to Everett M. Dirksen, longtime U.S. senator from Illinois: “A billion here, a billion there; pretty soon it begins to add up to real money.”

On November 12, Mr. Paulson unabashedly admitted what was obvious from the very beginning: His original plan for buying the troubled mortgage assets bundled by financial institutions was “not the most effective way” to use the $700 billion TARP package. Buying troubled assets of doubtful worth from banks and other institutions was patently unworkable from the moment it was proposed. The now-faltering and discredited bailout plan pushed by Messrs. Paulson and Bernanke appears to have merely been a piece of financial flimfam used to induce an initially reluctant but gullible Congress to pass a massive rescue bill. The more than three trillion dollars it will cost could have brought every uninsured person in the United States under the health insurance umbrella and provide everyone with the kind of health insurance Congress enjoys..

Your Tax Dollars at Work
The plan originally conceived by Mr. Paulson and blessed by Mr. Bernanke was described as a “bailout.” Some regarded it as more of a cop-out by the government. It now turns out to have been a sellout of American taxpayers and a handout to the very institutions that caused the financial meltdown. Among the firms Congress was assured was “too big to fail” was international insurance giant AIG, now wallowing in the massive trough provided by the government. AIG repaid the favor handsomely by spending $440,000 for a retreat by AIG executives at the St. Regis Monarch Beach Resort and Spa in Southern California, only days after the taxpayer-financed AIG bailout. Congress, the White House and "Saturday Night Live" all raked AIG over the coals for its thoughtless behavior.

Here’s where some of your tax money went on this junket: For starters, a generous $2,949 went for tips and gratuities paid to the help at the posh resort. Next, for those keeping score at home, $1,488 was spent at the resort’s barbershop called Salon Vogue. Then there’s the $1,900 spent at the resort’s Monarch Bay Club. And how about the $6,939 of your money spent on the resort’s golf links? Executives need relaxation, don’t they? It just goes to show you. Make bad business decisions, proclaim yourself “too big to fail,” and you’ll get a handsome handout from Uncle Sam.

As TV pitchmen say, “Wait! There’s more!" Four AIG execs sought relaxation from the stress of near-bankruptcy by flying to England for partridge hunting. This junket cost a measly $87,000. One unapologetic hunter told a reporter, “The recession will go on until about 2011, but the shooting was great today and we are all relaxing fine.”

It gets even better! Even as the company was pleading the federal government for another $40 billion dollars in loans, AIG sent top executives to a secret gathering at a posh resort in Phoenix, Arizona, on the weekend of November 5-7. The event was called the "2008 Asset Management Conference,” and attendees included many top managers of AIG.

Reporters for Phoenix TV station KNXV caught the AIG executives on hidden cameras poolside and leaving the spa at the Pointe Hilton Squaw Peak Resort, despite significant efforts by the company to conceal its involvement during the three-day event.

"AIG made significant efforts to disguise the conference, making sure there were no AIG logos or signs anywhere on the property," KNXV reported. A hotel employee told KNXV reporter Josh Bernstein, "We can't even say the word ‘AIG.’" Nick Shook, an AIG spokesperson, confirmed that AIG instructed the hotel to make sure there were no AIG signs or mention of the company by staff. "We're trying to avoid confrontation, keep our profile low," said Ashooh. "Some of our employees have been harassed." Not surprisingly, we might add.

And Wachovia, the largest of the several banks caught with their mortgages down, canceled an all-expenses-paid cruise to the Greek islands for 75 employees of A.G. Edwards (Wachovia’s subsidiary brokerage firm) and their wives or girl friends. Jim Griffin, a Wachovia spokesman, explained the changed plans: “With the uncertainty in the markets right now, financial advisors have told us that they prefer to remain close to their clients.” A likely story.

The government will finance the bailout by borrowing the money in the international monetary marketplace and adding it to our national debt. To keep swindles from happening, Hank and Ben were supposed to be exercising oversight of the money so generously being ladled out to indigent bankers. At the very least, we deserve to see greater transparency as well as tougher and more realistic dealing by the government. After all, the tab for the huge sums Messrs. Paulson and Bernanke are handing out by the bushel basketful with no strings attached will be paid by taxpayers, their heirs and descendants, making for still another blot on the Bush administration's soiled escutcheon.

Labels: Bailout, Op Ed

OP ED

President Bush is off on an eight-day whirlwind tour of the Middle East. He starts in Israel with the hope of solving a thorny problem of a peaceful settlement of Palestinian and Israeli differences. Woefully neglected by Condoleezza Rice, his present secretary of state, this remains a puzzle whose solution has stymied every American president since Harry Truman.

Our President carries with him to the region several fallacies that have been embraced or promoted by him. Unfortunately, he is fond of ignoring the reality that his misbegotten preemptive war against Iraq may have destroyed the delicate balance of the Middle East forever.

Fallacy No. 1. If a Palestinian state were created, many of the world’s problems would suddenly disappear.

Speaking realistically and at the risk of seeming callous to the loss of human life, deaths as a result of fighting between Jews and Palestinians since 1921 total less than 100,000, or about as many as are killed in a season of slaughter in Darfur. Moreover, while it would be nice if the Israelis and the Palestinians could settle their differences, it will do little or nothing to resolve the other continuing conflicts in the Middle East, South Asia or Indonesia. For example:

It will not stop Muslim-Russian violence in Chechnya.

It will not stop Muslim-Igbo (Christian) violence in Nigeria.

It will not stop Muslim-animist violence in Sudan,

It will not stop Muslim-Hindu violence in Kashmir.

It will not stop Muslim-Buddhist violence in Thailand.

It will not stop Muslim-Christian violence in Indonesia and the Philippines.

It will not stop inter-Muslim violence between traditionalists and Islamists.

It will not stop violence and between Sunnis and Shia,

It will not stop violence by radical Islamists against the West for past or present, real or imagined transgressions.

Fallacy No. 2. We must attack Iran to prevent terrorists from getting their hands on an atomic bomb.

It is understandable for Americans to worry about an Iranian bomb, but no more so than a North Korean bomb. In either case, if what we fear is the use of nuclear weapons by either state, there is absolutely no reason to think our strategy of conventional nuclear deterrence, employed successfully for more than forty years during the Cold War, would be less effective today than it was in the past.

Indeed, deterrence would be more effective against such weaker nuclear adversaries than against a stronger one like the Soviet Union. Destruction in such cases would no longer be mutual; for either nuclear weaker nation, Iran or South Korea, it would still be very much assured destruction. Why the Bush administration doesn’t perceive this is beyond comprehension. Perhaps they have begun to believe their own trumped-up fear mongering.

There is another and more real aspect to our worries about terrorists getting their hands on fissionable materials. If we are concerned about nuclear bomb materials falling into the hands of terrorists--and we should be--the Middle East should not be the main focus of our attention. Why would potential perpetrators of a nuclear attack waste time waiting for the development of an Iranian nuclear bomb when the materials and technology needed to develop a nuclear weapon are already in circulation on the world’s nuclear black market?

The threat is real—petroleum money can indeed subsidize dangerous actions against the United States and its interests—but the Middle East is not even close to being the source of that threat. Several regions should demand our attention in order to confront the threat of nuclear terrorism. These are less likely to be in the Middle East and more probably will be in Russia or the states of the former Soviet Union.

More than six years after 9/11, the U.S. commitment to the security of nuclear material in the former Soviet Union is still insufficient and being ignored. Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, supposedly an expert on the Soviet Union, apparently is unaware of the threat posed by such poorly guarded nuclear materials. This is not surprising. By her own admission she could never imagine that planes could be used to bring down buildings in suicide attacks.

The misguided emphasis on threats posed by Middle Eastern countries and groups like al-Qaida and Hizbollah continues to cause our inaction elsewhere. For example, the growing instability of Pakistan, a nation with anywhere from 30 to 80 nuclear bombs, should cause concern over the possibility that these weapons could fall into the hands of disgruntled, Taliban-friendly Islamists. Yet Pakistan is not on Mr. Bush’s itinerary.

Fallacy No. 3. We have not paid enough attention to the Middle East.

The truth is we are much too engrossed in the affairs of the Middle East, yet it is a region about which we are still abysmally ignorant. Nevertheless, it could immeasurably profit from our benign neglect,

The peoples of the countries of the Middle East constitute less than five per cent of the world's population, and are remarkably unproductive. In fact, a high proportion of the population of the backward countries of the Middle East is not in the labor force at all. Consider Abu Dhabi, a city and an emirate overflowing with oil money and very few citizens. The majority of its population is made up of expatriates from other countries that do the actual work.

Similarly, Saudi Arabia's 27.5 million inhabitants also live off the oil revenues and do very little work, leaving that to the 5.5 million foreign technicians and laborers. Even with astronomically high oil prices, Saudi Arabia's annual per capita income ($13,800) is only about half that of the $25,800 per capita income of Israel, which has no oil.

The Middle East (excluding Israel) is an economic and technological backwater. A region that for centuries was the world leader in science and mathematics is now the global laggard in these subjects. In this largely stagnant area almost nothing is created in the sciences or the arts. If we take patents as an example and again exclude Israel, the per capita creation of patents in countries of the Middle East is one-fifth that of the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, itself a region not given to abundant inventiveness.

Centuries ago the Middle East was a seat of learning and the known world’s most advanced region. Today, its principal industries are (1) extravagant consumption by the moneyed classes, (2) wasting time sitting around in coffee houses, and (3) voicing bitter resentment against the West.

If the Middle East as a region is seen today as threatening, it is not because its countries are unusually powerful or menacing, but because most of its undereducated, unemployed and illiterate young people have too much time on their hands and are engaged in a virtually hopeless battle against political repression at home and economic irrelevance abroad. The intelligent, disaffected middle-class male youths who join Islamic fundamentalist movements and who became the perpetrators of the 9/11 disasters recognize that the status quo in the Middle East does not serve a majority of its inhabitants well—but they nevertheless blame the West for this.

The stagnation of the resource-rich countries in the Middle East should come as no surprise. Experts have long noted that countries rich in natural resources are frequently poor in everything else. According to the UN's 2004 Arab human development report, at only 63 per cent, the Middle East boasts the second lowest adult literacy rate in the world (after sub-Saharan Africa). Its dependence on oil means that manufactured goods account for just 17 per cent of exports, compared to a global average of 78 per cent. Moreover, despite its oil wealth, the entire Middle East generated less than 4 per cent of global GDP in 2006.

Anyone who says we are dependent on the Middle East because of its rich supplies of oil simply isn’t familiar with current statistics. Today the region produces lass than 30 percent of the world’s oil. Only about 17 percent of American oil imports comes from the Persian Gulf. In fact, most statements about U.S. dependence on the Middle East for our oil conveniently fail to note that Canada is currently our number-one supplier of petroleum, with Mexico second.

Until oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia in 1938, it was a land of Bedouin shepherds and oasis date farmers who may perhaps be forgiven for failing to catch up with the outside world by continuing their backward ways. Saudi oil export revenues today account for 90–95 percent of the Kingdom’s export earnings, 70–80 percent of its state revenues and roughly 40 percent of the country’s GDP. As a result, oil producers have at least as much reason to be concerned about sustained high oil prices as do oil consumers. Once an advanced economy, Iran is an even better example of the negative effect of an abundance of petroleum. Although it exports only 2.8 million barrels of oil daily, as compared with Saudi Arabia's more than 10 million, oil still accounts for 80 percent of Iran’s exports because its industry and agriculture are now so unproductive.

Vice President Dick Cheney is forever bleating about the strategic importance of the Middle East to justify our occupation of Iraq. But despite its vast petroleum resources, this undeveloped region is less relevant than ever. It would be far better for the United States if we stopped meddling in the Middle East and turned our attention to working with the vibrant and creative nations of Europe and Asia—places where hard-working populations are toiling and looking toward the future, not sitting around puffing on hubbly-bubbly pipes and dreaming of long-gone glories of the past. A genuinely serious effort to make the United States less dependent on petroleum for our energy needs should also be a top priority.

Labels: Israeli-Paestinian Conflict, Middle East, Op Ed, Petroleum

OP-ED

Lately, disquieting saber rattling has been heard emanating from Washington. Talking tough makes sense when you have the muscle to back it up. But with the nearly exhausted U.S. military still bogged down in Iraq and unable to bring peace to that ravaged country, it is foolhardy to be making noises that sound like willingness to undertake still another adventurous cruise in the uncharted waters of the Middle East.

Compared to what we knew about Iraq before we invaded it, Iran resembles Winston Churchill's famous description of the Soviet Union during the Cold War: a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Without diplomatic representation in Iran since 1979, we know woefully little about it.

Facing Iranian Facts
Let's put Iran into perspective by comparing it with Iraq: Iran is slightly larger than Alaska; Iraq is slightly more than twice the size of Idaho, which is to say that Iran is almost four times the size of Iraq. Instead of flat desert and lush river flood plains, Iran's borders are rimmed by formidable mountain ranges surrounding a central basin. In population, Iraq's 27.5 million inhabitants are dwarfed by Iran's more than twice as many 65.4 million. Some estimates place Iran's population as high as 70 million.

In any conflict between Iran and the U.S., the mismatch would be profound. In terms of per capita GDP, the U.S. figure is $43,800; Iran's is $8,700, about equal to Iraq's. Iran spends 2.5% of its GDP on its military; we spend 4.1% on ours. Iran is the key transshipment point for heroin moving from southwestern Asia to Europe, and has the highest percentage of the population using opiates. Lest we attempt to portray ourselves as superior in that respect, let it be noted here that the U.S. is the world's largest consumer of cocaine, and a major consumer of Ecstasy, Mexican heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine. So much for moral comparisons.

With American military forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, Central Asia and the countries of the Persian Gulf, and with carrier task forces patrolling in the Arabian Sea, all literally surrounding Iran, why wouldn't Iranians be apprehensive about our intentions and feel vulnerable? Here at home Americans similarly find the disposition of our forces and the bellicose talk emanating from Washington reason enough for worry.

Iran's professed need to create nuclear power facilities may have some basis in fact. Because of attractively high oil prices and the low level of Iranian industry, petroleum makes up 80 percent of its exports. Other items exported are fruits, nuts and carpets. Little of the crude oil Iran produces remains within its borders. India and Japan are major importers of Iranian oil.

In Iraq, President Bush's managerial ineptitude and poor judgment have left us mired in an endless war with no possibility of either achieving victory or exiting honorably. Thanks to mediocre public education and increasingly irresponsible mainstream media, the United States remains a country where knowledge of the history and geography of the Middle East are virtually absent. Despite having majored in history at Yale, the President has been blinded by his own abject ignorance of the Middle East, and his view of the area obviously has been tinctured by his provincialism, naive idealism and religion.

Similar lamentable ignorance can be found elsewhere in high places in America. Recently, Columbia University's President Lee Bollinger extended an invitation to speak on campus to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s President. In Iran, the presidency is an elected office but is largely honorific with comparatively little power. The only term to describe Mr. Bollinger's introduction of Mr. Ahmadinejad--one that verbally pummeled him to satisfy a pack of yapping yahoos—would be "boorish and ungracious treatment of an invited guest."

But instead of insulting him and thus strengthening his somewhat shaky position at home, Mr. Bollinger, by profession a lawyer, should have made a point of demonstrating democracy and free speech at work. This would have encouraged democracy-loving dissidents in Iran.

Mr. Bollinger's attitude only underscores the low level of knowledge about Iran and its people that is abroad in our land. If an American Ivy League university president knows so little about Iran, imagine the degree of ignorance prevailing at the highest level of our government.

Far from United
The notion that Iranians are united behind their government is preposterous to those who have any familiarity with the country. Among Iran's population, slightly more than half are ethnic Persians and 24 percent are Turks. Other ethnic minorities make up the remaining 25 percent. Many of Iran's 17 million Turks (called Azeri) are in open revolt against Persian cultural imperialism, and so are its 6 million Kurds. An Arab minority regularly detonates suicide bombs in Ahvaz in southwestern Iran. Baluchi tribesmen openly attack police posts in southeastern Iran.

We should be taking advantage of these major rifts and using them to our advantage to cause regime change. If some 40 percent of the American population were actively engaged in separatist struggles, one could hardly claim that the country was united behind Washington. Moreover, many in the bare majority of Persians oppose the theocratic regime of the mullahs because of its many prohibitive restrictions or because they are Sufis, a branch of Islam the regime persecutes almost as much as it does the small minority of the Baha'i sect.

The idea of Iranian national unity is a myth, and so is the concept of Persian nationalism, a minority position in a country where half the population is not even Persian. The U.S. should be capitalizing on these differences instead of portraying Iran as a united country.

Iran's Mythical Military Threat
As they did in the run-up to the first and second Iraq wars in 1991 and 2003, newspapers and magazines are starting to publish statistics about Iran's army, navy and air force to show how formidable they are. What they don't tell you is that Iran's warships are all more than 30 years old; its smaller naval vessels would only be capable of pin pricks against a modern navy. Because of a severe lack of spare parts, most of its combat aircraft (Mirages, F-4s, F-5s and F-14s) have not flown in years. Its army table of organization boasts brigades and divisions that exist only on paper.

Always described as a fearsome elite force, members of the Pasdaran Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are uniformed smartly and appear to be well trained when marching in celebratory parades--but so do American high school marching bands. Although they exude a cocky, triumphant air--the truth is that they have fought only one war--the 1980-88 war against Iraq, and they took a licking in that one. Congress wants this force declared a terrorist force, but that would make them no more a foe to be feared than they are right now.

Iran's control over the narrow Strait of Hormuz through which tanker traffic down the Persian Gulf must pass is often cited as a reason to fear this mythical force, which allegedly could cripple U.S. oil imports and create a worldwide depression. Again, this is another manufactured threat that does not bear close examination. Global dependence on Middle Eastern oil is waning. At the time of the embargo by Arab oil-producing countries in 1973, the Middle East produced almost 40 percent of the world's crude oil. Today, the region produces less than 30 percent. In 1975, 28 percent of oil imported into the U.S. came from the Persian Gulf. Thirty years later only 17 percent came from there.

Miscalculation Common
Overestimating the strength of Middle Eastern military forces has been almost habitual among Western powers. In the 1960s the Soviet Union sold so much equipment to Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt that Western experts saw his military as intimidating. Just before the 1967 war, Field Marshall Sir Bernard Law Montgomery, no slouch at sizing up enemy forces, bought into the myth. While paying a ceremonious visit to the El Alamein battlefield and war cemetery, he predicted that the Egyptians could easily defeat the Israelis. Yet it took the Israelis only a few days to achieve victory. Six years later, with a substantial assist from the U.S. in the form of hastily airlifted munitions, the Israelis needed only three weeks to punish the Egyptians for their Yom Kippur surprise attack.

In the early 1990s, Saddam's army, which had defeated Iran after eight years of war (also with an assist from the U.S.) and was even larger than Nasser's, cast the same formidable shadow. So intimidated were the so-called coalition nations, they assembled a huge force. The U.S. contributed 575,000 troops, and 43,000 British, 14,000 French, 4,500 Canadians and assorted numbers from smaller nations also were arrayed against it.

When the war began in earnest, the Iraqi air force made no attempt to fight. Saddam's tanks that had paraded so threateningly provided little more than target practice for coalition forces. The levies that make up Arab armies have repeatedly shown little stomach for traditional battle, preferring what has come to be called asymmetrical, fourth-generation or guerrilla warfare.

In 2003, President George W. Bush, unknowledgeable and incurious about the Middle East, actually strengthened Iran by attacking and destroying its traditional archenemy, Iraq, previously a counter to Iranian expansionism. He further strengthened Iran by putting into power in Iraq a Shi'ia-dominated government with close ties to largely Shi'ia Iran. Now, possibly in an attempt to undo the mischief they have done to the balance of power in the Middle East, Messrs. Cheney and Bush are laying the groundwork for an attack on Iran.

With their saber rattling and scary talk of World War III, they hope to create the atmosphere of fear that worked so successfully in the lead-up to the attack on Iraq. The big question is whether the American people will hold still and allow themselves to be swindled a second time with the same tissue of lies and phony evidence.

Labels: Iran, Op Ed, Petroleum

ENCORE SELECTION

Editor's Note: Exactly one year ago on May 12, 2006, Postscripts was launched with a combination of high hopes and trepidation. The most pressing question at that time was the miasmic Iraq War, begun, we were told, to retaliate for the 9/11 attack. To mark the first anniversary of the inception of Postscripts, we are republishing this very first posting, originally titled "Then, as Now: The Grim Parallelism of Two Wars." The text has been revised only by the addition of one year to each pertinent date statistic. We regret to record that during the intervening 365 days, more than 900 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died, senselessly sacrificed on the altar of vainglory. Like an immature adolescent, our stubborn and willful president has dug in his heels, determined to expend still more blood and treasure to leave this unnecessary war as his legacy to his successor. Sadly, his name is already stained beyond redemption. Here now is the text of that first piece, as meaningful today as it was one year ago:

We are now in the fifth year of our misadventure in Iraq. A major campaign in our so-called "global war on terror," it has had a singular lack of success. Instead of pursuing and capturing Osama bin Laden, the criminal who had everything to do with the terror that befell this nation on Sept. 11, 2001, we attacked Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with that foul deed.

We are again bogged down in a never-ending war for which we have neither a plan for victory nor a plan for extricating ourselves. Torn between support for our brave troops and a growing conviction the game is not worth the candle, public opinion in favor of the war in Iraq has dwindled. Military leaders, sensing an American military presence there lasting at least until 2010, now privately refer to it as "the long war," a name that brings back memories of our bitter involvement in Vietnam.

Then, as now, a supine Congress was seduced into authorizing a war through presidential deception. Forty-three years ago it was a trumped-up attack on two U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. Four years ago it was Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction plus a trumped-up conspiracy between fundamentalist Osama bin Laden and a secular Saddam Hussein that did the trick.

Then, as now, the administration defended its policies in spite of increasing evidence that nothing was going according to plan, that strategy was being improvised as we went along. Then, as now, we were told there was "light at the end of the tunnel." We must "stay the course." We cannot "cut and run." We would be dishonoring those who had died if we did not stay and take additional casualties.

Then, as now, thousands of fighting men and women were sacrificed because leaders who had never served in a shooting war or had even made an effort to serve in the military, were proclaiming that victory was just over the horizon. To suggest exploring any other course of action was unpatriotic, if not treasonable,

Then, as now, advisors were only too ready to pronounce our mission as accomplished. Walt Rostow, a professor from MIT serving as head of the National Security Council, repeatedly predicted the imminent collapse of the Vietcong insurgency. Two years ago, Vice President Cheney speaking of the violence in Iraq, told the American people, "I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."

In Vietnam, American divisions trained and equipped to throw back Warsaw Pact armies pouring westward through the Fulda Gap in central Germany found themselves facing wily guerrilla fighters in an impenetrable tropical jungle. In Iraq, the small, highly mobile attack force we fielded to defeat Saddam's tenth-rate army in an arid desert found itself undermanned and unable to cope with a fierce insurgency armed with apparently limitless improvised weapons.

Then, as now, it was impossible for military leaders to speak frankly about the ill-defined policy our unprepared forces were valiantly trying to carry out. In 1966, retired Gen. David M. Shoup, former Marine Corps Commandant, who was awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor for valor in World War II, called the Vietnam war a mistake and was criticized for questioning the leadership and military decisions of commander in chief Lyndon B. Johnson, and defense secretary Robert S. McNamara, while our troops were fighting and dying there.

Testifying before Congress, he said that the government's contention that Vietnam was vital to American interests was "poppycock"; in his view, the whole of Southeast Asia "was not worth a single American life." General Shoup expressed the growing feeling of many Americans when he said, "I believe that if we keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-soaked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own." He added, "If unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type, because the 'haves' refuse to share with the 'have-nots' by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don't want and above all don't want crammed down their throat by Americans."

Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway, hero of Korea, braved the same fate in a 1971 article in the authoritative journal Foreign Affairs. He wrote, "It should not have taken great vision to perceive that no truly vital United States interest was present and that the commitment to a major effort was a monumental blunder." Recently, a handful of retired military officers of flag rank spoke out against the conduct of the war in Iraq and the lack of clear-cut goals. They were met with a barrage of criticism for not having spoken up when wearing a uniform and quickly silenced.

Then, as now, we proclaimed that our aim was solely to bring the almost magical curative powers of democracy to a part of the world that had never known it and to restore a nation of longtime antagonistic elements. In Vietnam, our announced aim was to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people, only to discover this could not be accomplished if we were at the same time killing innocent civilians, destroying their villages and despoiling the countryside.

In Iraq, our vaunted reconstruction program to repair and reconstruct what we have damaged has stalled because of poor planning and widespread corruption. We have discovered that an occupying power cannot prevail over a sullen population if entire neighborhoods or even whole cities must be destroyed to root out insurgents who see us not as saviors but as invaders and occupiers.

It took 58,000 American deaths and 150,000 wounded in Vietnam before we concluded that our leaders did not have a clue about their goals nor the courage to extricate themselves from the morass into which they had plunged us. Although undefeated in battle after battle, in the end, we did indeed ignominiously cut and run under the pressure of public opinion.

Future historians will see many parallels between Lyndon B. Johnson and George W. Bush: An immoderate yet insecure ego, a limitless capacity to wield the power of their office without inhibition and a stubborn aversion to altering a course of action once it was decided upon. Lacking their predecessors' ambivalence, which sprang from their keen sense of history, both also lacked their predecessors' capacity for reflective thinking, especially about the consequences of their decisions.

Three decades ago Robert McNamara, a genius at statistical analysis and architect of the Vietnam debacle, was forced to admit defeat and give up the post of defense secretary. Paul Wolfowitz, university professor and author of our failed Iraq policy, similarly gave up his post as deputy secretary of defense when the promised happy throngs of welcoming Iraqis never materialized, replaced by shadowy, vengeful insurgents. Interestingly, as if to reinforce the parallelism of Vietnam and Iraq, both McNamara and Wolfowitz were rewarded with the same new post: the presidency of the World Bank.

Our folly in Vietnam had many sources. Chief among them was the illusion of American omnipotence--a conviction that America could impose its will anywhere in the world. Senator J. William Fulbright properly called it "the arrogance of power," a term eerily echoed today by our actions in the Middle East.

What we failed to understand then was that the problems and conflicts affecting other nations could not be solved simply by the application of American force. Nor could a solution be achieved with American know-how or America's good intentions and by imposing our unique brand of democracy, the latter painfully shaped from the Anglo-Saxon tradition over more than two centuries. Ironically, these very same delusions are now responsible for our entanglement with the tar baby that is Iraq.

Government exists for the benefit of its citizens. We should not be spending blood and treasure in a vain attempt to instill democracy elsewhere if, at the same time, we diminish it here at home. Human casualties are bearable only when they serve a purpose. They become a bitter price to pay when it turns out they were sacrificed for nothing.

Labels: George W. Bush, Iraq War, Lyndon B. Johnson, Op Ed, Vietnam War

OP-ED

Republicans have been fond of calling the Democratic Party "the war party" because of participation in four wars by Democratic presidents--the Spanish-American War (William McKinley), World War I (Woodrow Wilson), World War II (Franklin D. Roosevelt) and the Korean War (Harry S. Truman). The Vietnam War is a standoff; John F. Kennedy/Lyndon Johnson, who started it, and Richard Nixon, who continued it with an even greater number of casualties, both parties get tagged with that one.

The appellation "war party" dates from a time when the Republican Party was timorous and fearful of international entanglements. But take a look at what recent bumbling Republican presidents have managed to achieve. Had they set out to diminish America's image and stature in the world, and to divide and bamboozle the American people, they could not have been more successful. Here's a list of the doleful ingredients they combined to create the disastrous and indigestible stew that is Iraq:

1. Start by having no knowledge of the long colonial history of the Middle East, its nationalities, languages, cultures, religions, or fierce tribalism.

2. If you are Ronald Reagan, take sides in an eight-year internecine war between two neighboring countries, Iraq and Iran, that will cost a million lives on each side. Actively support, supply and prop up Iraq and its dictator, Saddam Hussein.

3. If you are George Herbert Walker Bush, attack your recent ally and evict Saddam from Kuwait in the Gulf War that follows. The punishment for biting the hand that fed it is to wear down the impoverished country with ten years of sanctions--in essence, starving its children with limited access to food, medicines and health care.

The remaining 22 ingredients in this recipe for disaster were contributed by Chef de Cuisine Dick Cheney and Sous-Chef George W. Bush (who has been allowed to think he is in charge of the kitchen).

4. If you are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, in response to a surprise aerial strike on the U.S. by a relatively small band of religious zealots, mostly Saudi citizens, do not relentlessly pursue the mastermind behind the disaster. Instead, allow a group of unelected neocon chickenhawks who never served in the military to make a case for a preemptive attack on Iraq based on the unproven presence of weapons of mass destruction. Quondam spiritual leader of the neocons is the Vice President. When asked about his succession of deferments during the Vietnam War and his own failure to serve in the military, Mr. Cheney's patriotic response was, "I had other priorities."

5. Attack Iraq and invade it with a "coalition force" composed mostly of American troops and a much smaller contingent of British troops.

6. Ignore your military experts' advice on the size of forces necessary to achieve military victory and to occupy a vast country. Instead, listen to civilian advisers from academia with no military experience.

7. Upon gaining victory over an inferior army, fail to anticipate inevitable armed resistance. Allow sectarian militias to be recruited and armed. Attempt to fight a guerrilla war with an army designed and equipped to engage Soviet forces in giant set-piece battles on the plains of Central Europe.

8. Neglect to secure critical sites, ranging from ammunition depots to museums. Look the other way when looting of the country's infrastructure takes place.

9. Fail to equip your troops with adequately armored vehicles and the latest improvements in body armor.

10. Upon finding no weapons of mass destruction, create the fiction that the purpose of the war was to democratize Iraq, a fractionated country that has never known true democracy.

11. Foolishly disband the Iraqi Army, whose officers and non-commissioned officers could have formed the core of new Iraqi defense and security forces. Allow Iraqi soldiers to return home with their weapons and join the ranks of the unemployed.

12. Have your military officers and civilian officials occupy Saddam's ostentatious former palaces and use them as luxurious living quarters and offices.

13. Take over Saddam's infamous prison at Abu Graib. Instead of bulldozing it, staff it and operate it as a detention center for suspected terrorists swept up in broad sweeps. Allow enlisted guards to humiliate and torture prisoners. Blame, then court martial and punish selected enlisted personnel for their offenses but not the officers in charge for dereliction of duty.

14. When insurgency flares up, hunker down behind sandbags and barbed wire in fortified bases, creating "Little Americas" that offer the amenities of life back home in sharp contrast to the highly visible poverty surrounding these camps.

15. Install in power wealthy expatriate Iraqis who had chosen to live abroad comfortably during Saddam's rule. Prime example: Ahmad Chalabi, the CIA's favorite source of tainted misinformation.

16. Dawdle on rebuilding the infrastructure you purposely destroyed or carelessly allowed to be looted.

17. Instead of creating jobs for millions of unemployed Iraqis, award lucrative no-bid contracts to American contractors in a process so rife with malfeasance and corruption that billions of dollars in disbursements disappear and are unaccounted for.

18. To guard favored American contractors holding no-bid contracts, underwrite a heavily armed, highly paid private army of soldiers of fortune leased from security companies like Blackwater and allow them to write their own rules.

19. Despite your failure to return basic services in Iraq to pre-war levels and as the number and intensity of hostile incidents increase, release rosy statements claiming that progress is being made and the situation is under control.

20. Direct the activities and decisions of an interim government and insist that it write a constitution satisfactory to the U.S. government.

21. Arbitrarily extend tours of duty and degrade your troops' morale, especially among Reserve and National Guard units.

22. In the face of steadily mounting casualties and the increasing number of grievous attacks on our forces, close your eyes to grim reality and issue upbeat statements about the imminence of victory.

23. Fail to change tactics to fight a growing insurgency and invite attacks with the challenge, "Bring 'em on." Remain unmoved by thousands of American dead and tens of thousands of American wounded or that you have killed and wounded many times that number of innocent Iraqi civilians. Allow no photographs to be made of returning flag-draped coffins. Avoid attending military funerals.

24. Have no exit plan or timetable for disengagement from Iraq.

25. In the face of plummeting approval numbers at home, refuse to concede that the Iraq misadventure was a gross mistake. Divert attention from your failures and attempt to change the subject by proposing constitutional amendments banning gay marriage and flag burning.

Stir well and season the mélange with the bitter crocodile tears shed for the fallen by this administration. Call the resulting inedible stew "Cheney-Bush Ragout à l'Irakien." Serve cold. Send the check for the meal in the billions of dollars to the table of the American people.

Labels: Iraq War, Op Ed

OP-ED

The title above, of course, has been adapted from the title of John Reed's classic, "Ten Days that Shook the World." No, the three words weren't the famous three little words ("I love you") in the 1930 song titled "Three Little Words," with lyrics by Bert Kalmar and music by Harry Ruby.

Far from it, they were three inflammatory words uttered by President George W. Bush in his 2002 State of the Union address. In this epochal speech he identified Iraq, Iran and North Korea as constituting an "axis of evil." The United States "will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons," he added.

The genesis of the "axis of evil" expression is recounted in speech writer David Frum's book, The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush. It turns out that the phrase grew by accretion. In late December of 2001, chief Bush speech writer Michael Gerson was doling out sections of the forthcoming State of the Union address to White House writers. Frum's assignment: "Can you sum up in a sentence or two our best case for going after Iraq?" Frum rolled up his sleeves and got to work. Pulling books off the shelves, he found what he wanted in the "Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis" of World War II.

"No country on Earth more closely resembled one of the old axis powers than present-day Iraq," Frum writes. But National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, her deputy, insisted that he expand it. "They wanted to take on Iran as well," Frum says, so that nation was added to create an "axis of hatred." A third country, North Korea, which was attempting to develop a a nuclear weapon and had a history of harsh oppression, was added to the list. It was also tacked on because it "needed to feel a strong hand" and to avoid amplifying the suspicion in Muslim countries that the President's "war on terror" was really a war on Islam.

Frum completed his portion of the speech and passed it to his boss. When he next saw a draft of the entire speech, to his surprise, his words were incorporated almost verbatim. "Gerson wanted to use the theological language that President Bush has made his own since September 11th," he writes, "so 'axis of hatred' became 'axis of evil.'"

The glaring flaw in this phrase is that the three nations did not have a formal alliance such as existed between Germany, Italy and Japan during World War II. By lumping them together, the speech obscured the reality that each of the three nations presented special characteristics. In Iraq the regime was secular; in Iran it was fiercely religious. Far from being allies, the two countries were sworn enemies who had fought a bloody mutually destructive war to a standstill between September 1980 and August 1988. (The United States had openly supported Saddam Hussein in that contest.) And, instead of linking itself with other nations, North Korea, an anachronistic Communist dictatorship, was perhaps the most unaligned and isolated country in the world.

President Bush read the draft of the speech and liked what he saw, making a few changes here and there. The day after the delivery of the State of the Union address, the controversial phrase "axis of evil" became the focus of comment. Experts acknowledged that it was a clever piece of speech writing but--as foreign policy--it was incendiary and actually fanned the very fires it was intended to control.

"It was a speech writer's dream and a policy-maker's nightmare," maintained Warren Christopher, Bill Clinton's Secretary of State. Tarring three countries with the same brush "makes it more difficult to deal with them on a different basis," he added. A hodt of academics also weighed in.

"It was harmful both conceptually and operationally," observed Graham Allison, professor of government and former dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. "Conceptually, the 'axis' suggested a relationship that doesn't exist. More important, operationally, the reaction of the world and the North Korean debacle demonstrates that it was a mistake."

Assessing the speech, Dr. Richard K. Betts, director of Columbia University's Institute of War and Peace Studies, noted that the Administration's attention had long been focused on threats by "rogue nations," instead of the danger posed by al-Quaida. The speech "lumped together three countries that the people in the Administration were already thinking about in the same way," Betts said. "Everyone knew before that this was the way they thought but [the speech] did it in a pithy way that made it hard to ignore."

Then there was the use of the word "evil," According to Dr. Joseph Montville, director of the Preventive Diplomacy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, "It's too heavy and radioactive a word. You can't make a deal with evil. You can only kill it." In short, its message to the world was that the United States simply was not interested in negotiating.

Nor did the President improve relations with North Korea with his now-famous intemperate remark to Bob Woodward, "I loathe Kim Jong II." And his ill-considered description of North Korea's ruler as a "pygmy" only poured gasoline on the fire. (Kim Jong II is only an inch taller than five feet.)

Tough talk may play well in Texas, but Dr. Dae-Sook Suh, an expert on Korea and professor of policy studies at the University of Hawaii, criticized Bush for "using this cowboy language in diplomatic circles," noting that in Asia such speech is considered rude, threatening and unseemly.

Domestically, the "axis of evil" speech laid the groundwork for the attack on Iraq the following year. Many believe it also helped to undermine Iran's moderate President Khatami and quashed its burgeoning democracy. A year after the speech, North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. To some, the speech only accelerated the nuclear confrontations we are now facing with that country and North Korea.

Despite the obvious damage that had been done by the phrase "axis of evil," it did not immediately disappear from the Bush administration's vocabulary. In a speech on May 6, 2002, titled "Beyond the Axis of Evil," John R. Bolton, U.S. Undersecretary of State, added three more nations to the list of rogue states: Libya, Syria and Cuba. By the summer of 2002, the phrase had quietly dropped from the lexicon of White House officials.

As recently as January 2005, at the start of re-elected President Bush's second term, incoming Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice came up with a new phrase, "Outposts of Tyranny," to describe six countries the United States deemed dangerous and anti-American. These were Iran and North Korea from the original axis of evil, plus Cuba, Belarus, Zimbabwe and Myanamar (formerly Burma).

Politicians have yet to learn that there can be no winner in an empty war of words. Yet it is frightening to think that this nation may be swaggering toward Armageddon because of some speech writer's casual turn of phrase.

Labels: Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Op Ed

OP-ED

As Charles Dickens put it, verily it was the worst of times. Anguished residents watched as water relentlessly poured through breached levees, rushed down city streets and began to rise, inundating entire neighborhoods. Those who had not evacuated perched precariously on rooftops and held makeshift signs to attract rescuers in helicopters. Fires broke out, sparked by broken electrical wires and fueled by ruptured gas lines. Thousands of residents crowded into shelters.

New Orleans and the consequences of Hurricane Katrina in 2005? No, Grand Forks, North Dakota, reeling from a spring thaw in 1997. A comparison of the experience of these two cities is illuminating. It shows what can happen to a well-run federal department, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), when it has been turned into a dumping ground for political cronies and incompetents.

In April of 1997, the Red River of the North, which forms a long stretch of the boundary between North Dakota and Minnesota, became choked with melting snow. One of the few U.S. rivers that flow north, it was so named to distinguish it from the Red River, the tributary of the Mississippi that rises in the Texas Panhandle.

An error in the hydrological model created by the National Weather Service (NWS) based on the height reached in a 1979 flood compounded by unusually freakish weather to cause the near destruction of Grand Forks, North Dakota, and East Grand Forks, Minnesota, its twin across the river. The weather service had foreseen a height of 49 feet; the river crested at 54 feet and forced the largest evacuation of an American city since Atlanta in the Civil War. At its widest extent, water covered everything up to two miles from the river. Angry with the faulty NWS prediction, one citizen spray-painted a message on the side of his flooded house, "49 feet my ass."

What a difference eight years--and a different FEMA--made. Early in 1997, months before disaster struck, FEMA officials had been in Grand Forks advising residents to take out insurance under the National Flood Insurance Program. And during the flood, the FEMA staff performed in the words of one writer, "like a well-oiled machine," not only in Grand Forks but in the entire Red River Valley. Moving in en masse the moment the NWS warned residents to expect more water than the levees could hold, FEMA employees brought with them a state-of-the-art headquarters trailer, dubbed "Red October." One of FEMA's mobile command centers, it contained a dozen computers linked to the Internet, a satellite communications system, a radio system, and 48 phone lines, including dedicated lines to the White House and the Pentagon.

On the very day the river reached its crest, President Bill Clinton arrived in Grand Forks, bringing with him the director of FEMA, the Secretaries of Agriculture, Army, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation and the head of the Small Business Administration. At the Grand Forks Air Force base they met with the governors of North Dakota and Minnesota, the two states' congressional delegation, and the mayors of Grand Forks and East Grand Forks. Before leaving the White House, Clinton had directed FEMA to raise federal aid to the 100 percent level, instead of the usual 75 percent. Impressed with the so much mobilized expertise, Grand Forks Mayor Patricia Owens, tearfully told Bill Clinton, "You bring us hope." Remarkably, when the water receded and casualty statistics were totaled, not a single life had been lost in the flood. Grand Forks has now been largely rebuilt. Acting on the advice of the Army Corps of Engineers, the vulnerable flood plains have been returned to the river.

Since its creation in 1979 by the Carter administration, FEMA had been a dumping ground for political hacks. Its first director, John Macy, was a longtime civil servant with experience in defense. Next came Louis O. Giuffrida, a close friend of Edwin Meese, later Reagan's attorney general. Mr. Giuffrida resigned amid allegations of misconduct. Julius W. Becton, a retired Air Force lieutenant general, replaced him. On the heels of Hurricane Hugo in 1989, Sen. Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina, with characteristic frankness, called FEMA "the sorriest bunch of bureaucratic jackasses I've ever worked with." President George H.W. Bush appointed Wallace E. Stickney, a protege of White House chief of staff John H. Sununu, in 1990.

A 1992 House Appropriations Committee report described Stickney as "a weak, uninterested executive who has little interest in the agency's programs." The report called the agency "a political dumping ground, a 'turkey farm.'" It charged that FEMA was "filled with inexperienced appointees who mismanaged the agency, misled Congress, and funneled consulting contracts to their friends."

Confronted in 1993 with this shabby history, Bill Clinton selected someone he could rely upon. As Governor of Arkansas, he had put James Lee Witt in charge of reorganizing the Arkansas Office of Emergency Services. People in Washington assumed that since Witt came from Arkansas and they had never heard of him, he must be another hack. Cool-headed James Lee Witt surprised everyone by systematically weeding out most of the incompetents and honing the agency to a fine edge. Recognizing the agency's crucial importance, Clinton raised it to cabinet status.

A 1996 editorial in the Atlanta Constitution noted that Witt was the first director of the agency to have emergency-management experience and praised him for stopping the staffing of the agency by political patronage. The newspaper said, "He removed layers of bureaucracy. Most important, he instilled in the agency a spirit of preparedness, of service to the customer, of willingness to listen to ideas of local and state officials to make the system work better."

Witt's firm hand and contagious management philosophy succeeded. A year after the flood, a Grand Forks police lieutenant who had lost his home described his own experience: "The main thing I got from dealing with FEMA was the courtesy, the compassion they showed. It was truly unbelievable and helpful for us and my family and the town."

Contrast this record with the Administration's performance in Hurricane Katrina, a feeble effort that bordered on criminal negligence: The floundering FEMA director praised on TV by President Bush for "doing a heck of a job"--an empty compliment considering that millions of TV watchers were aware of the totally ineffective federal relief efforts. On the first of his seven photo-op visits to a desolated New Orleans, an insensitive George W. Bush joked about boozing in the French Quarter when he had "sometimes too much fun."

In 2000, candidate George W. Bush had nothing but praise for James Lee Witt. During the first presidential debate with Al Gore, he described the fires and floods that had swept Texas and said, "I have to pay the [Clinton] administration a compliment. James Lee Witt of FEMA has done a really good job of working with governors during times of crisis." Bush would have been wiser to keep him instead of another Clinton holdover, CIA director George "Slam Dunk" Tenet. On taking office in 2001, President Bush returned FEMA to the cronies and hacks, placing at its head Joe Allbaugh, a Bush campaign manager. After Allbaugh left to become a lobbyist for Halliburton, he nominated Allbaugh's deputy, clueless Michael Brown, he of the Arabian Horse Association and the inflated resumé.

Today FEMA is still critically important in emergencies. But it remains only a small cog in the huge, unwieldy bureaucratic machine cobbled together by the Bush administration as the Department of Homeland Security. Hasty patchwork repairs were made to the poorly designed levee system protecting New Orleans by the U.S. Army's Corps of Engineers. Another hurricane season is now bearing down on the recovering Gulf Coast. It will be interesting to see how well the still-battered region fares.

Labels: Grand Forks, Hurricane Katrina, N.D., New Orleans, Op Ed

OP-ED

We Americans live in two worlds. Here at home, we are only dimly aware that a war is going on. Yet half a world away in Iraq and Afghanistan, 2,600 American servicemen, and service women have given their lives and tens of thousands more have been maimed. We are relentlessly sacrificing the flower of our youth in an undeclared war with vague goals, no exit strategy and no way to define victory.

And what sacrifices have we here at home been asked to make? Zip. Zilch. Zero. Nada. Contrast this with the home front during the Second World War. Then we were well aware there was a war going on. Food, clothing, shoes, gasoline and tires were rationed. Scrap metal was collected diligently. Some metals were extremely scarce. An empty toothpaste tube had to be turned in when buying a new tube of toothpaste. Victory gardens sprouted in vacant city lots and suburban backyards to augment the food supply.

A family with sons or daughters in service had a small banner in a window with one or more blue stars on it. The dreaded telegram from the War Department announcing the death of a loved one turned a blue star to gold.

A spirit of purpose was abroad in the land. Through it all, the patrician voice of the president gave comforting assurance in radio broadcasts he called "fireside chats." People learned to make do with less--but these were small sacrifices compared to what was being given up by our fighting men and women.

War bonds financed the massive war effort. Taxes were hiked, and money was made more immediately available to the government by a new gimmick: withholding of taxes, an idea proposed by Beardsley Ruml, chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and adviser to the President. This was a variation of installment buying, a payment plan instituted by Ruml as an executive of Macy's department store. Paradoxically, tax withholding later made possible the outsize spending budgets of some administrations that caused the unimaginable deficit the country is still paying interest on.

Today, apathy reigns at home, and we immerse ourselves in shopping or sports spectacles during which token acknowledgement of the existence of an interminable war in an obligatory moment of silence for the fallen. Then it is back to the mindless game. Our knowledge of the blood and dirt of battle comes from the special +effects created for war movies and violent computer games.

How did we manage to create such an enormous disconnect between the home front and the troops? It began in January of 1973 when Congress abandoned national service, also called "the draft." This reaction to the imbalance of sacrifice imposed by the unpopular Vietnam War effectively changed the American armed forces.

What in past wars had been a succession of vast armies of quickly trained citizen-soldiers responding to an emergency became an all-volunteer force ready to strike on a moment's notice. The gigantic active military machine has now become a class apart, not unlike the priesthood. For most Americans today, military service hardly touches our lives. It is something the children of other people do.

Few of us know how hazardous it is to fight a stealthy enemy with too-few troops using the tools and tactics of conventional warfare, and with equipment unsuited for guerrilla warfare. Thirty-seven months after the premature "Mission Accomplished" moment, some troops are still making do with unarmored vehicles not intended for such stealthy warfare; even an armored Humvee cannot withstand a roadside bomb. And the wheeled landing craft the Marines are using in Iraq were intended for landing on beaches, not cruising hazardous desert roads.

And how do we honor their lonely deaths? We put magnetic yellow ribbons on the rear ends of our automobiles or attach flags to their antennas, and quickly return to complaining about the hardships imposed by the high price of gasoline.

We said nothing when a supine Congress failed to insist on its constitutional prerogative to declare war and surrendered war-making power to the President. Is it any wonder that Congress today is held in such low esteem?

The rush to war was predicated on the imminent danger of attack by Iraq. When no weapons of mass destruction were found there, our government hastily concocted a new purpose for the war: to turn that unruly tribalized country into a democracy. Running for office, George W. Bush blasted nation-building and vowed never to allow our military to become entangled in the process. Now we are up to our elbows in it.

"Stay the course," we are told. What course? The Administration seems to be making it up as they go along, hoping by guess and by God that everything will come out right in the end. Although we pay lip service to democracy, when the time comes to demonstrate to the world our devotion to the system, a majority of the American voting population fails to show up at the polls.

We allowed the hunt for bin Laden and the terrorists responsible for 9/11 to be derailed and converted to an interminable war that has made Iraq a vast training ground for a host of al-Quaida acolytes. We have destroyed cities and killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians. Our response to Iraqis unhappy with our actions as occupiers is to characterize them as ingrates. And we wonder why we are reviled throughout the Muslim world.

Our access to factual information has been arbitrarily curtailed. When our forces accidentally kill one of our own in the heat of battle, as happened to football star Pat Tillman, our government creates a phony story of the circumstances of his death "to shield his family." Officials shamefully tried to conceal the truth for almost five weeks--truth it knew from the moment the first battle reports were collected.

In a replay of Vietnam, the Administration again gives us rosy predictions that never materialize, supported by inflated enemy body counts and distorted news. A favorite line is that the insurgency is limited to only four of Iraq's eighteen provinces. What they do not tell us is that these four provinces contain more than half the population of Iraq. Anyone who legitimately questions the wisdom of this pointless, ill-advised war--even a parent who has lost a son or daughter--is branded as unpatriotic and disloyal.

We have a president who prides himself on not reading newspapers, rendering him unaware of the rising groundswell of opposition to his policies. Our chief executive lives in a cocoon insulated from the world by sycophantic advisors. His administration is rife with croneyism and corruption more blatant than the infamous Harding administration in the 1920s. His favorite venue for speechifying is a military base where service members can be counted on not to raise embarrassing questions.

He is now beginning to rattle his sword in the direction of Iran, a country bent on developing nuclear power that would give it the potential for nuclear weapons. In the meantime, all the while President Bush has been meddling in the Middle East, North Korea has been diligently creating atomic weapons under his very nose, making that country a genuine threat to South Korea and Japan.

We complacently allowed this travesty to happen in our name. Could it be because the Middle East is awash in oil?

Shame on us.

Labels: Iraq War, Op Ed