Author: Charley Reese

This is the last Charley Reese column, as the author is retiring.

Years ago, the first time I saw my friend Brother Dave Gardner after he had survived a plane crash, the comedian smiled and said, “The devil like to got me.” That’s a good explanation for my last trip to the hospital.

I’ve been running a footrace with piled-up years and bad living habits, and they have pulled even and will soon be ahead. I know it may not seem to normal people that writing three columns a week requires any hard work, but it does require energy to do the research and an alertness of the mind that I can no longer muster. Hence, this will be my last column.

It’s been a difficult decision to make. In one sense, I’m not sure there even is a Charley Reese without the column, but I would rather quit now than reach a point where editors and readers know that I should quit. Those of you who have read my column have made me a sort of guest in your home, and I don’t want to overstay my welcome.

I don’t intend to croak, but that’s not something we can control. I have some tidying up to do. One of the things I have to do is to say a heartfelt thanks to the readers and to the editors. I’ve stirred my share of controversy, and the easiest solution to controversy is to simply drop the column. I greatly admire those editors who stuck with me. I deeply appreciate the loyalty of my readers. The sales reps and the staff at King Features are the best in the business. I feel honored to have been associated with them. To them, freedom of the press is not a slogan.

I’ve had a good run. In 1955, when I started as a reporter, newspaper city rooms were full of tobacco smoke, alcoholics, glue pots, steel rulers, copy pencils, and typewriters. There was a lot of profanity and an occasional fistfight. Editors excelled in sarcasm. But they taught me how to write clear sentences.

One afternoon when I reported in, I asked an editor if he would like to get a cup of coffee. He glared at me and said, “Reese, I just spent $15 getting a buzz on, and I ain’t about to ruin it with a [expletive] 10-cent cup of coffee.”

Today’s newsrooms look more like insurance offices. Computer keyboards don’t make much noise. If the reporters smoke anything at all, it’s not tobacco. Instead of greasy grills, most newspapers have salad bars. I’m sure H.L. Mencken would have seen salad bars as a sure sign of decline.

John McCain can have the last laugh, since I’ve said several times that he’s too old to be the president. He is, even if he is more durable than I am. There are some who will celebrate my going, and it galls me to give them that pleasure. I was never ambitious, but I’ve always been competitive and pugnacious.

At any rate, it’s a great time to be an American. George W. Bush, who turned out to be a gift to comedians but a blunderer of the first order, will soon be out of office. It is historic and a good sign that a black man, Barack Obama, can win the nomination of a major party. When I started in the business, the South was still segregated, and blacks were invisible both as employees and as subjects of news stories, with the exception of crime stories.

The great advantage of a free society is the capacity to self-correct itself. You’d think dictators would have figured that out, but if they are not paranoid when they seize power, they become so trying to hang on to power.

Well, enough random thoughts. My goal as a columnist has always been to stimulate and, if necessary, provoke people into thinking for themselves. If we fail to do that, a free society won’t last. I wish you all a fond farewell.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years.

The International Herald Tribune recently published an article about a new Army medical book on trauma wounds. The reporter said that “the gruesome photographs illustrate the grim nature of today’s wars, in which more are hurt by explosions than by bullets, and body armor leaves many alive but maimed.”

That’s a naive statement. Probably since World War I, and certainly since World War II, explosions have killed more people than bullets in most wars. As for the maimed, since time began there have been more people wounded than killed in wars. In the War of Northern Aggression, 140,415 Yankees were killed in battle, and 281,881 were wounded. More than 200,000 died of “other causes,” which usually was disease.

Body armor is about as old as war itself, and the bureaucratic label “improvised explosive device” is government-bull language for booby trap. Booby traps also are old. The only thing new is the bureaucratic language, which the press, like a parrot, repeats.

I’m not knocking the reporter. His story about the medical manual was well-written. It just struck me that every generation seems to go through the ritual of discovering sin for the first time. The present younger generation is seeing war for the first time in Iraq and Afghanistan. As wars go, they aren’t much. In five years, we’ve lost a little more than 4,000 souls. The single battle of Okinawa killed 7,600 Americans on land, and another 5,000 were killed at sea by Japanese suicide bombers. Nor should we forget Hiroshima, where 80,000 people died in about 10 seconds.

Altogether, some 55 million people died in World War II, and that war, at least for us, lasted only four years.

War indeed is grim and horrible, and it’s no surprise that nearly all governments try to hide the horror from the civilians back home. As long as war is a parade with flags and bands and bumper stickers, it doesn’t seem so bad. On the field of battle, strewn with body parts, excrement, blood, and the smell of burned flesh, it becomes a pretty hard sell for the military public-relations types.

The human species being what it is, pacifism is suicide, but every single American should be against war except as the last extreme resort. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein was not worth 4,000 American dead and another 29,000 wounded. He had no weapons of mass destruction, and he was definitely not an imminent threat to the United States. The Iraq war is one for which George W. Bush and Dick Cheney should not be forgiven. There was no excuse for ordering it. The American troops didn’t die for freedom; they died because Bush didn’t like Saddam or because the American establishment wants permanent military bases on a big pool of oil.

I said during the buildup to the war that it’s too bad we couldn’t stage an old-fashioned duel, strip Bush and Saddam down to their shorts, give them each a bowie knife, and lock them in a dark room. Politicians have become more reckless as they have become less accountable for their sins. At least Saddam has paid for his.

Harry Truman was fond of saying that the only surprises are the history you don’t know. Though these latest photographs of torn bodies shocked the reporter, wars always have torn-up bodies. I recall the photographs in an older Army medical book that you wouldn’t want to look at over lunch. I expect every battlefield presents a grim picture — men hacked to death with swords and axes no doubt were not pretty to look at. Or, for that matter, people stepped on by elephants or eaten by lions.

I’ve noticed one thing about all the dead bodies I’ve seen: It’s obvious the person who once inhabited the body is no longer there. It’s a good argument that there is such a thing as a soul. Whatever the mystery of life is, you can tell when it departs by the change in the appearance of what’s left behind.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 50 years.

If Barack Obama’s idea of ending the occupation

in Iraq is to transfer most of the troops to Afghanistan, he won’t

have accomplished much. He’s right that we should not be in Iraq, but we also shouldn’t be in Afghanistan.

Our sole interest in Afghanistan should be to get Osama bin Laden. After that, we should bring our guys home. It’s none of our business what kind of government Afghanistan has or if it even has a government.

In case you’ve forgotten, the northern warlords seized Kabul after the Russians left. Their looting and brutality caused many Afghans to look with favor on the young men of the Taliban. The Taliban whipped the warlords and began to rule the country with their iron-fisted version of Islam.

It’s no mystery why they extended a welcome to bin Laden. He had played a prominent part in the fight against the Soviets. He was a wealthy young man and could easily have spent his time in the world’s best resorts. But he picked up a rifle and his checkbook and fought against the Russians.

So when the Bush administration demanded that they hand over bin Laden, the Taliban refused. It was in part a matter of hospitality. The laws of hospitality in that part of the world obligate you to defend your guests. The Taliban didn’t have a chance. The country had been in a state of war for nearly two decades, and much of it was just rubble salted with land mines.

We bribed the warlords to provide the ground troops while our air power, guided by Green Beret or Seal spotters, bombed the bejeebers out of them. The Taliban had no air defense. It was all over pretty quickly, except for two big flubs.

The leader of the Taliban escaped, as did bin Laden. By then, the Bush administration had turned its attention to Iraq and Saddam Hussein, who had no truck with terrorists or with the attack on the U.S. Saddam supported the Palestinians in their struggle for independence, but he disliked the Syrian government and hated the Iranians.

Nevertheless, the Bushies were determined to invade Iraq, and consequently both the Taliban leader and bin Laden remained free. And they are still free. The kernel of this nut is that the people who planned the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were inconvenienced but not punished. In the meantime, President Bush’s obsession with Saddam cost 4,000 Americans lives and landed us in a quagmire.

Now, five years later, the Bush people are wringing their little hands that the situation in Afghanistan has gone to Hades, and in typical American fashion, both Bush and Obama seem to think the only answer is more troops. It’s funny, in a morbid sort of way. Bush was wood-post ignorant of Iraq, and apparently Obama is wood-post ignorant of Afghanistan.

The Afghans are a people who rather enjoy fighting. It’s been said that if they run out of foreigners to fight, they will fight each other. It would take more troops than we have to occupy Afghanistan, which is about the size of Texas. It is run by the warlords and is a major producer of opium. Corruption is rampant.

Obama needs to be forced to come clean and spell out in specific detail exactly what he wishes to accomplish in Afghanistan and how much blood and treasure he’s willing for the American people to spend to get it. He needs to be forced to tell the American people what, if any, benefits they will get in exchange for the lost lives and tax dollars.

Obama is younger, smarter, and better educated than John McCain, but that said, he is your standard political liberal and opportunist. Swapping one quagmire for another is hardly a brilliant foreign policy.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years.

One gets the impression that there are some

people in Washington who believe that Israel or the U.S. can bomb Iran’s nuclear reactors, fly home, and it will be mission complete.

It makes you wonder if perhaps there is a virus going around that is gradually making people stupid. If we or

Israel attack Iran, we will have a new war on our hands. The Iranians are not going to shrug off an attack and say, “You naughty boys, you.”

Consider how much trouble Iraq has given us. Some 4,000 dead and 29,000 wounded, half-a-trillion dollars in cost and still climbing, and five years later, we cannot say that the country is pacified.

Iraq is a small country compared with Iran. Iran has about 70 million people. Its western mountains border the Persian Gulf. In other words, its missiles and guns look down on the U.S. ships below it. And it has lots of missiles, from short-range to intermediate-range (around 2,200 kilometers).

More to the point, it has been equipped by Russia with the fastest anti-ship missile on the planet. The SS-N-22 Sunburn can travel at Mach 3 at high altitude and at Mach 2.2 at low altitude. That is faster than anything in our arsenal.

Iran’s conventional forces include an army of 540,000 men and 300,000 reserves, including 120,000 Iranian Guards especially trained in unconventional warfare. It has more than 1,600 main battle tanks and 21,000 other armored combat vehicles. It has 3,200 artillery pieces, three submarines, 59 surface warships, and 10 amphibious ships.

It’s been receiving help in arming itself from China, North Korea, and Russia. Unlike Iraq, Iran’s forces have not been worn down with bombing, wars, and sanctions. It also has a new anti-aircraft defense system from Russia that I’ve heard is pretty snazzy.

So, if you think we or Israel can attack Iran and not expect retaliation, I’d have to say with regret that you are a moron. If you think we could easily handle Iran in an all-out war, I’d have to promote you to idiot.

Attacking Iran would be folly, but we seem to be living in the Age of Folly. Morons and idiots took us into an unjustified war against Iraq before we had finished the job in Afghanistan. Now we have troops tied down in both countries.

China has a tremendous investment and interest in Iran and would likely see an attack as a threat to its national interests. China could strike a large blow against the U.S. just by dumping the financial paper we have foolishly allowed the Chinese to pile up, thanks to the trade deficit.

For some years now, I’ve worried that we seem to be more and more like Colonial England: arrogant, racist, overestimating our own capacity, and underestimating that of our enemies. As the fate of the British Empire demonstrates, that is a fatal flaw.

The British never dreamed that the “little yellow people” could come ashore by land and take Singapore from the rear or that they would sink the pride of the British fleet, but they did both.

I suppose no one in Washington can imagine the Iranians sinking one of our carriers in the Persian Gulf. How’d you like to be the president who has to tell the American people that we’ve lost a carrier for the first time since World War II?

Exactly how the Iranians will respond to an attack, I don’t know, but they will respond. In keeping with our present policy, our attack on Iran would be illegal, since under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has the right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.

Who would have thought that we would become the rogue nation committing acts of aggression around the globe?

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 50 years.

Let’s assume there are two lesbians living in Santa Monica, California. We don’t know them. We’ve never seen them. For all practical purposes, they don’t exist for us. Now let’s assume that they decide to get married, and they tie the knot in California. We still don’t know them. We still have never seen them. So far as we know, they still don’t even exist. Whether they just live together or get married, neither their existence nor their marital status affects us.

That being the case, what the heck business is it of ours what they do? It is a confounded mystery to me why some people get all excited about homosexuals and lesbians getting married. As I’ve said before, if you are against gay marriage, then don’t marry a gay person. That strikes me as a simple solution to the problem some people seem to have.

You would think to hear some people complain about gay marriage that heterosexual couples would start dropping dead or become impotent as soon as some state approved a gay-marriage law. Whether gays get married or not, it has no effect on the rest of the population. Except for gays, it’s meaningless. It’s a non-issue.

In the meantime, there are plenty of issues that do affect all of us — the devalued dollar, high energy costs, loss of manufacturing jobs, wars overseas, and ballooning debt, both public and private.

As a heterosexual, I personally don’t give a hoot one way or the other about gay marriage. If gays wish to provide more business for divorce lawyers, it’s no skin off my nose. If they think making the state a third party to their marriage is desirable, it’s okay with me. It’s one of those legal matters I don’t have to worry about, and I like those kinds of legal matters a lot.

What irritates me is busybodies who want to stick their nose in other people’s business. For God’s sake, let us all mind our own business. The world will be a better place if we do.

Most people believe that homophobes are in fact latent homosexuals and what they really hate are their own secret urges. So under no circumstances should any child be driven to despair and suicide because someone disapproves of his or her sexual preference. Whether homosexuality is a matter of nature or nurture, I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. It simply is not important enough to cost the life of any child.

Furthermore, if the state recognizes a contract — which is all marriage amounts to, in secular terms — it by no means sanctifies anything. No one accuses the state of sanctifying sales contracts.

The religious aspect of marriage is separate and apart from the state’s involvement. In fact, I don’t think the state should be involved, but it has involved itself. But whatever is holy and sacred about marriage is a matter of religion, not a state marriage license, which is no different from a plumber’s license.

If you wish to worry about marriage, it is better to worry about the all-too-many marriages that fail. It is better to worry about all the single mothers struggling to raise children without a father. It is better to worry about a sleazy culture that disdains the necessity of marriage and treats a relationship as nothing more than a sleepover.

There are a lot of legal and moral issues that need to be addressed in our society, but gay marriage isn’t one of them. It’s an issue only for a small minority of the population. If they wish to live together in a state-licensed relationship, it’s nobody’s business but their own.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 50 years.