Category: War

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Colin Powell’s Big Lie

According to Colin Powell, the tape that was recently released by Osama Bin Laden and broadcast on the Al Jazeera network, “proves” that Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein are linked.

Ari Fleischer, White House spokesman, was less coy. Forgetting, perhaps, that one of the initial reasons for America’s inevitable invasion of Iraq was its links to the terrorist organization, Fleischer said that the tape showed that Al Qaeda and Saddam were “linking up” (New York Times, February 12, 2003). Ooops. I meant “had linked up”.

These guys have spun out of control here. They are beginning to believe their own propaganda. If, like me, you read the text of the tape first and then saw Colin Powell, you wondered what the hell he was talking about. If, like most Americans, you heard Powell speak first, and never read the transcript, you thought, what’s with those crazy French? Don’t they realize we have proof?

George Tenet of the CIA is somewhat more circumspect. I think he is embarrassed, but, like Powell, has had his arm twisted and has decided he’d rather ride in circles whooping and wheezing with this posse of yahoos than exit quietly out the back door. A few years from now, he’ll need to make some money and you don’t get $50K a speech if you can’t talk about something exciting like plotting the extra-judicial killing of a foreign leader or terrorist.

The scale of the Bush administration’s mendacity has become breathtaking. This government does not “feel it’s way” carefully, with scrutiny and foresight. It acts like it believes it is receiving direct messages from the Almighty on stone tablets that are carefully dusted for anthrax before being smashed over the heads of the Democrats.

How does this play out in 2004? I’m old enough to know better than to think too wishfully. I suspect that Bush will shortly crash and burn– the economy is not perking up and probably won’t perk up until after the war. The war is obviously scheduled for political reasons this year, so it can be done with and celebrated in early 2004, but late enough so that the inevitable debacle afterwards– regional instability, new terrorist attacks, Osama thumbing his nose– won’t happen until after the 2004 elections.

I made the mistake before of believing that U.S. military victory would not come easy. I now tend to think that it will, indeed, come very easily. That’s why Bush has chosen Iraq to bear the brunt of his Mosaic complex. It has no air force. It has no real defense. Bush and Powell keep raving about the “threats” from Iraq as if Iraq had any kind of military strength, but that is essential to their political survival: if Americans see that they are the bully and Iraq is the 90 pound weakling, the medal ceremonies and flag-waving afterwards won’t have much resonance.

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Colin Powell Sells His Soul for a Bauble

Powell Sells Out

You could believe that Colin Powell has come around to the Administration’s way of thinking, and now sees the sense in Donald Rumsveld’s mindless aggression. Or you could believe his arm is so twisted behind this back that he can pick his nose without bending an elbow. I think both are true to a certain extent. It is to Bush’s credit– a credit to his shrewdness– that Powell hasn’t been driven out of this administration. But a day may come when Powell looks back at a rather dubious episode in his career and wonders where he lost his soundness of mind, his prudence, and his wisdom.

Ironically, I used to have more of a problem with the other side of Powell. During the Serbian crisis, Powell insisted he could not send U.S. troops into a region solely for the purpose of keeping the peace, without vital U.S. interests at stake.

I still have a problem with that, and obviously, Iraq is not Serbia.

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The Evidence Comes After the Verdict

One of the many problems with George Bush’s position on Iraq is so embedded in the entire debate that I doubt most people even pay it much thought it any more.

Bush announced that Saddam Hussein was evil and must be deposed and Iraq must be invaded right from the get go. He didn’t say, we have some concerns about Iraq’s adherence to the U.N. disarmament pact. He didn’t say, let’s investigate the issue and communicate our concerns to the world community and to Iraq so that groundwork for a solution can be laid. He didn’t say, here’s the proof. He said, guilty. Let’s invade. He said that more than a year ago.

The U.N. decided to be silly and weigh all the evidence first, as well as the real issue– regardless of Iraq’s alleged infractions, is a military invasion and a war the best way to handle the problem? Is there a downside? Has the U.S. jerked Iraq around, by supporting them against Iran, encouraging them to invade Kuwait, then invading and defeating them and inciting rebel groups to rise against Saddam, only to ensure that he remained in power in the name of stability?

The fact is, the U.S. changed the rules half way through the game.

Most people could see some common sense in a policy of containment. It actually appears to have been working. And most people can see the sense in a line in the sand: if you invade Kuwait, or Iran, or Turkey, or whatever, or you sponsor terrorists, we will take this or that action. In fact, I’m in favor of a clear policy like that, with clear, direct consequences. No negotiations, no extensions, no exceptions. All that is required is for all sides to understand the policy. And of course for a little something called “evidence”.

But when the U.S. blows off North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs, it is clear that there is no policy at all. But that’s been clear all along. Bush wants to whack Iraq, and it was only at Powell’s insistence that he even bothered notifying the U.N. The deck is stacked, however.

Some pundits claim that Powell’s presentation to the U.N. means that Iraq now has “the burden of proof”. Is there a bigger piece of bullshit out there in pundit-land right now? The burden of proof never shifts. It has always been the burden of the United States to show that Iraq’s actions justify war. The absurd insistence that Iraq must prove that they don’t have weapons of mass destruction is surely the emperor’s new clothes of this era. How can you prove that you don’t have something? For some reason, commentators like the New York Times’ William Safire see no absurdity here. That’s how crazy this whole Bush administration is.

You know what I suspect is actually happening here.

1. The Pentagon with it’s $300 billion a year in weapons of mass destruction is always itching for war. It’s in the nature of things. Carpenters want to make things, architects want to design things, actors want to act, Generals want to kill. They look at the world and see all kinds of things that need killing. They look at their chests and see all kinds of space for medals. They look at their billions of dollars worth of bombs and ordnance and jets and submarines, and want to blow things up. It’s human nature. You don’t invest that scale of resources into tools that you really don’t want to use. And military men, of course, see violence and intimidation and plain military might as the solution to everything, just as diplomats see negotiation as the solution to everything, and mothers see an all-knowing beneficent authority as the solution to everything.

2. The Clinton administration was unresponsive, by and large, to the generals’ constant clattering for action, action, action. I’ll bet they had meetings in the situation room in the White House where the generals simply listed hot-spot after hot-spot and begged for authority to act. And Clinton probably said, calm down boys, we’ll try some diplomatic channels first and see if we can get the two sides talking.

3. Enter George Bush. He has a couple of meetings with the generals. They say the same thing they said to Clinton– like, hey, Iraq scares us, lets go over and whack them. He’s a bad guy. And Bush went, he is? By golly, I didn’t know that. Where is Iraq? Why don’t the Iraqians elect a new leader? In short, the generals realized they had an enormously sympathetic, paranoid ear for their ravings and continued to build their case, and reinforce it, and exaggerate it, and accumulate every scrap of evidence they could muster in support of their case. Still, with Powell in State, they weren’t quite able to get the action they wanted until….

4. 9/11. A bunch of Saudis, likely indirectly financed by the Saudi Arabian government which pays off Islamic fundamentalists to go screw up other country’s regimes, attack the WTC. Now the generals sense their opening. There is a mushy, irrational, uneasy shift from Osama, whom they let slip away, to Saddam, whom they are able to locate in the vicinity of Yasser Arafat. Let’s whack him. If he hasn’t already done something evil, he probably will.

5. At this point, the Bush administration is not in analysis mode. They are in prosecutorial mode, and you know how that works.

But I think the world intuitively understands this. The U.N. speeches are not about making a case. They are about twisting arms and bullying for a case that the U.S. does not believe needs to be made. The fundamental arrogance of the U.S. is that they believe that if they prove that Saddam Hussein is willing to resist their ultimatums, that alone is enough to justify a full-scale invasion and the deaths of 250,000 people. They really believe they are “good”, that God has imbued President Bush with the authority to make sophisticated moral judgments about different cultures and histories, and that Jesus is returning soon anyway.

The mocking tone of recent New York Times editorials on the issue make it plain– we’re now into calling the French and Germans weenies and wimps. And how dare they label genetically modified food when the always trustworthy American corporations have determined that this process does no harm whatsoever?

Obviously, these people are serious about weighing all points of view.

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Woodward the Intern

Bob Woodward– he of “All the President’s Men” fame– used to be a journalist. He’ll probably be honored forever for his celebrated expose– with Carl Bernstein– of the Watergate scandal.

He probably doesn’t know why.

He is now an iconographer of the worst sort. He belongs to the Barbara Walters school of pseudo-journalists who think that it is better to write fawning little laudatory tracts from the inside, than incisive, perceptive, important news from the outside.

Bob Woodward is in. He is invited to join President Bush and Cheney and the whole gang in the White House for an “insider” look at the presidency of George W. That’s like getting an “insider” account of the 9/11 bombings from Osama Bin Laden– if he really even had anything to do with it.*

The Bush administration, which, believe it or not, still has few holdovers from the Nixon era, must love the irony of it all, tee hee. Just imagine– one of the most famous journalists on the planet, known primarily for his role in bringing down the Nixon White House, gives his imprimatur of approval to a president that is as far to the right of Nixon as McGovern was to his left.

If George W. Bush had any real character, of course, he would have invited a reporter with acuity and objectivity, to see that he really is, ahem, doing a good job. Democrats sometimes like to do this, because, after all, they are the party of tolerance and diversity. That’s why Clinton had David Gergen on his staff for a while. That’s why President Bartlett on West Wing brought in Ainsley as Sam Seaborne’s nemesis for a while. (Why is it that you just know that a similar show with a Republican president and republican sensibilities would never bring in a liberal to ensure diversity of opinion? Because they believe they’re always right, that’s why.)

Instead, Bush, having established to his satisfaction that Woodward was politically sympathetic, and eager to please, invited the little toady, a naïve little fawn, an intern, for heaven’s sake, into the oval office for what can only be described as journalistic fellatio. Woodward’s stained dress is his “casual” and coy references to files marked “Top Secret” left within his view, and the flattering portrait of the president and his staff as personable, patriotic, and steely-eyed with determination to do something noble, be it whacking the Iraqi’s or giving billions of dollars in tax rebates to the rich.

I don’t mind Woodward fawning over Bush and writing pornographic iconography (pornography of the political mind). I do mind him continuing to pass himself off as a journalist on CNN and other talk shows, and acting as if he has any kind of objectivity left.

Woodward, take off the dress. It’s time to go home.

* I know some people will think it is pretty strange when I say “if he even had anything to do with it”. I’ll repeat it: if he even had anything to do with it.

If you are at all familiar with Nazi history, you know about the concept of the big lie. The idea is that any idea, no matter how ridiculous, can be sold to the general population as unquestionable truth by simply repeating it over and over again, no matter what anyone says.

That is what has happened with Osama Bin Laden. He is absolutely regarded as the mastermind behind 9/11 even though no proof has ever been adduced to that effect. Without a doubt, he approved of the attack. Without a doubt, he hates the United States. Without a doubt, he supports terrorist activities against Israel and the United States, and Western Civilization altogether.

But that is not proof that he orchestrated or financed or designed the attack on the World Trade Centre, and it bothers me, even if it doesn’t bother anyone else, that he would be hanged on the spot in the U.S. if he was ever found there and no one would mind at all

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The NRA and Iraq

Does the NRA, and Charlton Heston, know what their lusty cohorts in the White House are doing in Iraq?

The NRA argues that every man, woman, and child in America should be armed. That’s the best way to ensure democracy and freedom. If the government starts regulating the possession of handguns, rifles, shotguns, and Uzi submachine guns, it will soon be able to take away our precious freedoms and liberties.

The U.S. government under George Bush is trying to do precisely that to Iraq. It is bursting into their “homes” and searching for weapons and it plans to take them away if it finds them.

The NRA says that just because guns are dangerous and are often used to commit felonies doesn’t mean that any citizen should have the slightest difficulty obtaining them. In other words, you can’t assume someone is going to do something illegal with a gun, the way you can assume someone is going to do something illegal with a blank CD or a minidisc.

But here you have George Bush acting as if Saddam Hussein doesn’t have the natural right as a citizen of the world to own a few nukes or chemical bombs.

My question is– what if Saddam, or somebody, persuaded the U.N. to send a weapons inspection team to the U.S., to see if they have anything that could hurt people around the world? Like mines, chemical weapons, nukes, artillery, and guns.

Ah– but we’re the good guys. Well, we are. But we’re not perfect. And who knows what kind of idiot might end up in the White House some day?

It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me that in a society that controlled access to guns, the police would still have access to them. That’s the special nature of their jobs. They have special authority. They’re supposed to keep us from hurting ourselves and each other.

So the U.S., it could be supposed, has to have nukes to make sure that the Saddam Husseins– and Charlton Hestons — of the world don’t go around bullying other people.

The trouble is that the U.S. sells mines and helicopters and bombers to other countries. Sometimes, through happenstance, we end up facing the barrels of our own guns.

Why doesn’t the NRA step up and put an end to this nonsense? Where is Charlton Heston when you really need him? He should be railing against the Bush administration! Chemical weapons don’t kill people– despots do! And when you criminalize the possession of nukes, only the tyrants will have nukes! Saddam Hussein should show up at the next NRA party– usually held in a nearby town after a mass shooting– and hold a nuclear bomb in his arms above his head and proclaim, “…from my cold dead fingers!”

I can’t even begin to explain North Korea or Iran in this context. Except that Iraq, of course, has the oil.

And that reminds me of what a famous outlaw, Willie Sutton, said when someone asked him why he robbed banks.

Because that’s where they keep the money.

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We Were Soldiers: The Lies We Tell Ourselves

I don’t know how many ways it needs to be said, but Hollywood’s passion for fibbing while claiming to tell a “true” story is and always will be one of the most contemptible facets of modern American culture. We just can’t stand the truth.

I’m not talking about factual errors, or even the not unreasonable telescoping of events into a cinematic time-frame. I’m talking about exaggeration and distortion.

In the story told in “We Were Soldiers”, Lt. Col. Moore’s 1st Battalion/7th Cavalry command position was almost over-run when Company C failed to hold off advancing PAVN. It was an exciting battle sequence, and allowed the movie to show Moore himself in action.

In real life, Company C decimated the PAVN so badly that the attack never reached the command position.

In “We Were Soldiers”, the breakaway 29-man platoon led by Lt. Herrick chases a PAVN “scout” off onto a ridge where they are cut off from the rest of “C Company”. In real life, they were chasing nobody: they merely advanced too far. I suspect Director Randall Wallace thought it would be more exciting to show them chasing somebody.  Better yet, it would make Lt. Herrick look less stupid.

In the movie, only one man appears to be left alive of the 29 in the breakaway platoon. In reality, 20 of the men were still alive. That’s a rather big fib. Only 9 of the men were killed, though 13 were wounded, including the platoon leader.

In “We Were Soldiers”, victory is dramatized by Lt. Col. Moore leading his troops up to the PAVN command bunker area, as Lt. Col Nguyen Huu An flees his command post in the tunnels. That did not happen. Nor did the dramatic confrontation between Moore and the PAVN machine gun position (with the exciting arrival of the helicopters at just the right instant). Didn’t happen. Why is it in there? I don’t know. To show that helicopters are good?

A French Bugle was found, a few days after the events of the movie, in the same general area. I don’t care about that inaccuracy. It’s close enough, and it doesn’t materially affect your perception of the events at Ia Drang.

In 1965, the Huey “slicks” did not have machine guns mounted on their sides. An infantry man with an M16 defended each side of the chopper. Not as impressive cinematically, I guess.

A few days after Ia Drang, a far more horrendous battle took place as the relief battalion was about to be airlifted out, near a landing zone designated Albany. The 2nd Battalion/7th Calvary was spread out in a long column of 400 – 500 yards when attacked by surprise by a fresh regiment of PAVN. According to Jack Smith, most of the early casualties were due to friendly fire as panicked soldiers surrounded by PAVN snipers fired everywhere and anywhere. After a horrendous three-day battle, the survivors were air-lifted out. Casualties: 151 killed, 121 wounded.

Hal Moore, Jack Smith (son of Howard K. Smith, the ABC newsman), and other soldiers of the U.S. 7th Calvary travelled to Viet Nam in October 1993 to meet with their PAVN counterparts at the scene of the battle. There are pictures of them standing together and shaking hands.

There is something wonderful and even beautiful about such a moment. Men who once tried to kill each other in fierce battle now wisely shake hands and share memories. But there is something also deeply disturbing about it, and what is disturbing is not the shaking of hands and the smiles in the group photos. The disturbing part is that these friendly gatherings betray the utter purposelessness of Ia Drang, and every other battle of the Viet Nam War and almost every other war. In the truest sense of the word, the soldiers at Ia Drang were absurd.

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JAGged Little Pill

According to the New York Times (March 31, 2002), the television program “JAG” (I’ve never watched it) has become a mouthpiece for the Pentagon, lovingly rendering noble soldiers and officers wisely and bravely enacting foreign policy on behalf of an adoring citizenry.

Star David Elliot says, “we send our scripts to our liaison and they weigh in on it,” he said, referring to Paul Strub, the Pentagon’s liaison with the entertainment industry. Mr. Elliott said the show hesitated to anger its Pentagon contacts, “because they certainly lend a great deal of production value that we couldn’t buy.” That “production value” is government funded military installations and equipment that are used in the series.

“JAG” reflects the pro-military sensibility of Mr. Bellisario, 66, a former staff sergeant in the Marines. He said that he believed military tribunals, not an international court, were the best way to mete out justice to terrorists, and that he wanted to show that such tribunals would not be kangaroo courts.

“I want to show people that the tribunals are not what many people feared they would be, which is that they would be nothing more than a necktie party, that they would have no foundation in law, that this was a way of taking these people and killing them,” Mr. Bellisario said. “I wanted to show that we still have a system of justice.” Personally, though, he said he believed “they should all be taken out and blown up.”

The JAG episode thrills viewers with a tribunal lynching party of a real Qaeda implicated in the WTC bombing. In real life, we haven’t caught a single suspect yet. Not one. Most of them, apparently, escaped into Pakistan where General Musharraf (98% approval rating in the latest “poll”) pretends to be trying to round them up, while testing nuclear missiles to use on India.

At $62 billion, the most expensive fruitless prosecution in history.

But what really concerns me is this. Bush is the Republican President, a member of the party that believes that welfare is a corrosive handout that increases lassitude and dependency, and that the government should stay out of business let the free enterprise system work it’s magic unencumbered.

So why are they subsidizing Hollywood movies and television programs like JAG? It’s a bailout. It’s propaganda. It’s a government handout. It’s created dependencies and laziness and lassitude. Make those entertainment moguls get off their fat butts and build their own sets and special effects! Stop these massive government hand-outs and subsidies immediately, so that the taxpayer’s money can be used for legitimate purposes. Like building more prisons.

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War With Iraq: Quagmire Awaits

Do you think George Bush is smart? No, you don’t. Even his conservative, Republican, oil executive supporters don’t think he is smart. But that’s okay. He is surrounded by smart people and he relies on their judgment.

That is logically ridiculous of course. Americans are suspicious of intellect– we know. They somehow think that a down-home country guy with a little cunning surrounded by competent managers is the ideal leader. He won’t get confused by details or messed up by the subtleties or ambiguities of complex realities. He’ll just go with his instincts. Instincts are always better than closely reasoned judgments. Aren’t they? They are in the movies.

Well, actually, less than 50% of the voters seemed to think that Bush was smart enough to be President. And, of course, a decisive majority of all the conservative Republicans on the Supreme Court, including the acute Clarence Thomas.

The trouble is, if you aren’t very smart yourself, how do you know your managers and advisors are smart? And when they give you conflicting advice, as surely Colin Powell and Donald Rumsveld and John Ashcroft have been doing, how do you sort out who is right? You kind of feel for it, right?

Is that good enough in 2002? Is that good enough for the world’s only remaining superpower, other than Europe, China, or India?

So you have this fixation on Iraq. Iraq is a crisis point for America right now because, well, George Bush Jr. decided Iraq is a dangerous threat. He seems to have made up his mind that he must invade Iraq and kill Saddam Hussein and set up a new government, so that oil can be extracted and sold by large American corporations, or democracy can be restored, or Americans can feel safe once again from all those Iraqi Scud missile attacks we’ve been experiencing lately.

Dick Cheney was so prescient about Iraq that while he was in charge of Halliburton, as recently as 1998-99, he did more than $23 million of business with Iraq. Didn’t he know that Saddam was a monster? Not until George Bush Jr. announced the “axis of evil”, apparently.

Do you think these men in charge of the White House have given thoughtful, intelligent consideration to these issues:

  • what if the Kurds, who are already itching to join the attack, decide, as they are likely to, to set up their own little country in Northern Iraq, right on the Turkish border? How would Turkey like that? Or Iran, which also has a substantial Kurd population that it is struggling to keep in check. Neither Turkey nor Iran would tolerate a breakaway Kurd republic on their borders.

Bush has extracted promises from the Kurds not to seek an independent state. And these guys are smart enough to believe them….

  • what if the hardline Moslems react to the war by tossing President Pervez Musharraf and setting up a hardline Islamic republic? With a bomb. And with an incendiary situation in Kashmir?
  • what if the same thing happens in Saudi Arabia or Yemen? What if hard-liners in Iran come to believe that the U.S. won’t be satisfied with deposing just one pole of the “axis of evil”?
  • what if the Shiite Moslems in the South of Iraq decide they would be happier united with their brethren in Iran than with Baghdad’s Sunni minority, whatever form that leadership might take in a post-Saddam Iraq?
  • what if the overthrow of Saddam doesn’t stop terrorism? (It won’t– it will probably increase it.) Who’s next?
  • can the officials of this administration name a single instance in which concerted military action (as opposed to negotiation and compromise) put an end to terrorist activities, anywhere in the world?

After Iraq, terrorists hiding out in Yemen, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere will continue to target U.S. military installations, diplomatic buildings, and the U.S. itself.

Since the U.S. seems incapable of actually tracking down and capturing real terrorists, it will have to find someone else readily available for a good bashing. Iran? North Korea? Somalia?

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Dick Cheney’s Monkey Business

`This is the highlight of my trip, and I can’t think of a better way to spend this day,” Cheney told sailors Friday after watching jets roar off on bombing runs to Afghanistan.

The vice president was spotted Sunday carrying a Vietnam War novel, “Once an Eagle,” which an aide said was a favorite he was rereading. The book’s cover bore a blurb from U.S. Gulf war commander General Norman Schwarzkopf calling it “a classic novel of war and warriors.”

I keep thinking of Lon Chaney, playing the Wolfman. Why do Republicans always pick such ridiculous vice-presidents? From Nixon to Agnew to Ford to Quayle to Bush to Cheney– they are a regular gaggle of cold war gumshoes or bumbling functionaries.

What’s scary is that three of the four previous Republican vice-presidents (Ford, Bush, Nixon) went on to become president.

 

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Give Peace a Chance

There was a moment a few years ago when some Republican leaders in Florida came to a startling realization.

As Republicans they held two cardinal values. Well, “cardinal” to Republicans. Firstly, they were in favor of small government, efficient, and free of wasteful extravagance. Secondly, they were strongly in favor of an effective, strict criminal justice system that promoted law and order and reduced crime.

The realization that they came to was that the same strict law-and-order platform they espoused was at odds with their first goal– small and efficient government. They realized that throwing hundreds and thousands of teenaged hoodlums into jail for long sentences without possibility of early parole or rehabilitation was actually costing the government a lot more money than… gasp… prevention programs.

What they realized was that a relatively small amount of money invested in youth programs in the inner city would actually have the effect of reducing the number of youths that would proceed into a life of crime and violence. It would also thereby reduce the costs of policing, criminal prosecution, and incarceration, by a very substantial amount. They came to this conclusion on the basis of solid research conducted by– gasp– intellectuals with college degrees.

So these Republicans found themselves in the odd position of advocating greater spending on social programs and prevention– Democrat icons– in order to further their goal of smaller, more efficient government.

They were far-sighted and wise. They foresaw a win-win situation: less crime, and more opportunity for the poor in their community. They were willing to re-examine dogmatic belief in the light of scientific evidence.

National governments today spend over $800 billion on defense. They spend about $10 billion on the primary tool of averting wars, the United Nations.

The Republicans have worked very hard to demonize the United Nations over the past few years. They claim that it is a bloated bureaucracy–which it is–and that it is inefficient and works against the interests of the United States.

What they really see is that the United Nations tries to work in the interests of all peoples of the planet, and that sometimes means that the U.S. is called upon to share, and Republicans don’t want to share. They don’t want to share the fish in the sea, or the profits of pharmaceutical corporations or the responsibility of reducing global warming. They do want to share in the profits to be made by selling weapons to antagonists in local conflicts. They don’t even hesitate to sell land-mines which, more often than not, end up harming civilians rather than soldiers. Thousands and thousands of children. Children with missing limbs. Bill Clinton wanted to sign the International Land Mine Treaty. The Republicans, with a majority in Congress, blocked him.

But these Republicans in Miami realized that their long-range goals are best served with foresight and planning, and with consideration of the causes of the problems they mean to address.

Why is this lesson so hard to absorb on a national level? These terrorists are global thugs and our immediate reaction is to demand death, or long prison sentences. We launch a military attack which, in substance if not formal organization, is similar to the action that provoked it. We bomb the hell out of them.

If we keep waiting for more terrorist attacks and then simply retaliate and punish, not only will we have the very thing we are trying to stamp out– as every retaliation provides righteous fodder for the next generation of suicide bombers– but we will increase it, and it will cost us more and more to deal with.

The United Nations is the world’s inner-city program. It should be funded. It’s not perfect, but it does better than most people think it does. We don’t keep statistics on wars prevented but the truth is that the world is a far more peaceful place today than it used to be. The United Nations should be empowered. It should be employed to resolve the issues that give rise to terrorism. The U.S. will have to change it’s tack from “how can we directly benefit” to “how can we reduce the global tensions and economic disparities that give rise to insurgencies and terrorist acts”.

Redneck America scoffs: what we need to do is kill them all. If you want Ireland or the Middle East, you shall have it. But if the real goal is to reduce terrorism, to reduce death and destruction and violence, we have to follow the path of the British, who decided 20 years ago that the only way to bring an end to violence in Northern Ireland was to end the cycle of attack and retaliation and bring the interested parties to the negotiating table.

And every cop knows that the first step to preventing trouble is to win the trust and respect of the people who might or might not eventually go on to make trouble. The U.S. has to show Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and Egypt that it can develop new policies in the region that are principled and fair, and that don’t always only benefit themselves. Step #1 is that Israel must be dragged kicking and screaming to the negotiating table, not because they are wrong or because they are at fault or because they are bullies– they might or might not be all of these– but because it is the only way to begin to resolve the Palestinian issue, and the Palestinian issue is at the heart of most conflicts between Islamic fundamentalists and the west.

The U.S. must also review it’s relationships with Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. Those nations need to gradually incorporate more democratic elements into their governments or they will eventually be over-thrown by militant Islamic fundamentalists, as Iran was. Most of the September 11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. There is serious resentment in the Moslem world over the conspicuous U.S. presence in this nation that is custodian to the holiest sites in Islam, Mecca and Medina.

The sanctions against Iraq should end. Saddam Hussein, though vilified by the U.S. media, is really no better or worse than most of the other leaders of nations in the region, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria.