Tag: Iraq

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Back to the Future in the Middle East

2019: “Wow, what a year I was! Y’all will never see the likes of me again. Twelve months of impulsive Trump tweets, GOP campaign aides going to prison, the Ukraine brouhaha blowing up, wacky Rudy going nuts on television, wild hearings in the House of Representatives, and finally, impeachment! Boom! Top that!”

2020: “Here, hold my beer. How about war in the Middle East, as a starter?”

Ah, the Middle East, home to so many great American foreign policy decisions. Remember those weapons of mass destruction that were hidden all over Iraq in 2003? The ones that the Bush administration (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Powell, et al.) used as “evidence” to start a war that got 4,400 Americans killed and 31,000 wounded in action; the war that also resulted in an estimated 500,000 or so Iraqi deaths?

Turned out, of course, that there weren’t actually any weapons of mass destruction to speak of. Oops. Sorry, dead people. But at least the Bushies had to go through the process of trying to convince Congress that a dire threat existed before launching missiles and a subsequent invasion.

With the Trump administration, such Constitutional niceties are being ignored. Trust us, they say. We knew about some nasty plots to kill Americans that were about to be carried out by Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, so we assassinated his ass at the Baghdad airport. Ironically, the evidence — which we’ll probably never see — was provided by the same “deep-state” intelligence agencies that have been demonized for months by the president and his supporters. Guess they cleaned up their act.

In lieu of consulting with Congress or even the Gang of Eight, the president let a few friends at Mar-a-Lago in on the news in advance, so they could adjust their stock portfolios, plus Senator Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, his children, Vladimir Putin, and others in his inner circle. After the strike, the president tweeted a message to Congress that he stated would “serve as notification” of his right to do whatever he wanted in the Middle East. Trump followed that with a tweeted threat to Iranian leaders that the U.S. had a list of 52 “cultural sites” that would be targeted if the Iranians dared to respond. Sure, that’s a war crime, but so what? The president then, literally, returned to the golf course and continued to tweet, presumably between shots.

On Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper told the media that the Pentagon would not target cultural sites, despite the president’s continued insistence — live and via tweet — that we would.

All this caused me to wonder what would happen if for some reason Twitter went out of business. How would the president communicate with Congress or the American people or foreign friends and adversaries? Facebook? Instagram? Tik-Tok? The importance of Trump’s favorite social media platform will be a subject future historians will be mulling over for years, I suspect. But I digress.

So, here we are, seven days into the new year, the new decade, on the brink of conflict in the world’s most volatile region — home to Israel, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran. Oh, and Afghanistan, just on the other side of Iran, lest we forget. What a complex stewpot of hideous outcomes could be concocted within the confines of this tortured hunk of planetary real estate.

Does anyone think there’s a plan or a strategy here? Does anyone have confidence that this president would shrink from using nuclear weapons if Iran responds in a way that threatens his fragile ego? More important, does anyone have confidence that anyone around this president would or could stop him? It’s a “no” from me, on all counts. A Republican congressman told CNN on background this week that when Trump gets ready to act, “You can’t out-escalate him.” How reassuring.

2020 is upping the ante.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Sect Appeal

The two main sects within Islam are not at all like the various sects within Christianity, or, for that matter, within Judaism. Sunnis hate Shiites and Shiites hate Sunnis. Since the middle 7th century, each side has taught and preached that the other side is practicing a corrupt form of Islam. It is because the other side is practicing corrupted Islam that the true followers (whichever side that is) believe it is their obligation to teach about the denial and the destruction of the other. 

It began with the death of Muhammad in 632. Muhammad failed to declare a successor. That decision caused a divide among his followers. Sunnis believed that the best successor should emerge from among the students of Muhammad. Shiites believed that Muhammad’s mantle of leadership should be passed down through the family. 

Sunni is the larger sect, comprising about 85 percent of Muslims. Shiites comprise the remaining 15 percent. There are other, smaller sects but their numbers worldwide are dwarfed by these two groups. The largest country with a Shiite majority is Iran. Iraq also has a majority of Shiites, about 60 percent. 

Every once in a while, Sunni or Shiite leaders announce their intention to unite the factions in order to confront a common enemy. The pitch always sounds good, but almost always falls flat. The common enemy they most often speak of is the West — specifically Israel and the United States.

If these two Muslim sects were to stop their conflict, the Middle East would be a different place. Not a peaceful place, but a place with differently focused conflict. For instance, much of the tension in Syria is Shiite versus Sunni. The conflict in Yemen is Shiite versus Sunni. And the power struggle engaging Iran and Saudi Arabia is, of course, Shiite versus Sunni. 

And yet, despite the conflict, every Friday over the past few weeks, Shiites and Sunnis in some Iraqi cities have come together in major squares. By the tens of thousands, sometimes even by the hundreds of thousands, they have gathered united, as one voice, in protest over the current divisive situation. The slogans they are shouting and the placards they are raising say, “Sectarianism is dead” and “Stop stealing from us in the name of religion.”

Iraqis are coming together in main squares in Baghdad and Basra to call upon their politicians to stop quarreling and quibbling. The protesters want services — education, water and electricity. For years, their politicians have told the citizens of Iraq that the problem in government is religious sectarianism — Shiites versus Sunnis — and now many young people in Iraq are saying that they aren’t buying it any more. 

Young Sunnis and young Shiites want accountability. More crucially, they want to know why ISIS has succeeded in taking over huge swathes of Iraq. In today’s world, if anything is to unite Sunnis and Shiites, it will be ISIS. To put it succinctly, other than the West, right now, the only thing that Shiites hate more than Sunnis and Sunnis hate more than Shiites is ISIS. The Iraqi people want unity among conventional Muslims to fight and rid Iraq of extremist ISIS. 

Shiite militias are operating under an umbrella called Popular Mobilization Units (PMUs), while Sunni tribes are much more loosely aligned in their fight and are against ISIS more independently — tribe by tribe. In the end, through unity of forces, they could possibly be successful and turn their country around. But it is a long shot. 

The fear of ISIS brutality is everywhere in Iraq. While gathering in town squares as a way of protest is empowering, the fear of beheading at the hands of ISIS is still, understandably, a major disincentive to organizing, fighting, and resisting. When 800 ISIS members marched into Mosul in June of last year, 55,000 Iraqi police and soldiers ran away. A city of two million people collapsed into the hands of 800 ISIS members. 

So, while Shiite-Sunni unity is the only real chance for success in fighting ISIS, given their ancient hatred for each other, coupled with ISIS intimidation, I don’t see Muslim unity in Iraq’s immediate future.

Micah D. Halpern’s latest book is Thugs: How History’s Most Notorious Despots Transformed the World through Terror, Tyranny, and Mass Murder.

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Opinion The Last Word

The Rant (September 18, 2014)

A few months ago, no one outside of the defense establishment had ever heard of ISIS, but now that the president has offered a strategy to combat these barbaric psychopaths, the right-wing geniuses in Congress and every talking blonde-head on Fox News has suddenly become an expert on Middle East foreign policy.

It’s clear that the terrorist organization has become an existential threat to the U.S. Recently, an ISIS leader paraphrased George W. Bush, saying, “You are either with us or we will kill you.” Their savagery has again taken this nation back into a sectarian war, and if that is the case, the reactionary Obama haters need to sit down and shut up. When the criminal Bush invaded Iraq under false pretenses, he was at least given the courtesy of bipartisan support before his lies were exposed. No such support for Obama.

An editorial appeared in the New York Times, composed by John McCain and Lindsey Graham, the Abbott and Costello of war-mongers. It attempted to goad the president into stronger action, including more American troops on the ground. After Obama’s televised address outlining plans for assembling a coalition to join the fight, a speech, by the way, which could easily have been given by G. Dubya, Graham ran to Fox News Sunday and said, “Our strategy will fail yet again. The president needs to rise to the occasion before we all get killed here at home.”

The ‘Bama-bashers first took issue with the president for using the term ISIL, instead if ISIS. I was baffled too and had to Google it for myself. So, ISIS means the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; ISIL stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Which raises another question: Levant is an antiquated term used mainly by archaeologists, meaning the area currently in conflict, but also including Palestine and Israel. The apocalyptic conspiratorialists went blotto, claiming Obama had a hidden agenda. One end-of-times website said, “When Obama refers to the Islamic State as ISIL, he is sending a message to Muslims all over the Middle East that he personally does not recognize Israel as a sovereign nation, but as territory belonging to the Islamic State… Obama’s ultimate goal is the destruction of Israel.”

Really? Another article credited to the Fox News staff joined the argument over the president’s choice of words. A massive mob of jihadist maniacs are running wild in Iraq and Syria, committing mass killings, public executions, beheadings, and crucifixions, and the conservative crazies over at Fox are arguing over semantics. Meanwhile, Obama has killed more terrorists than sand fleas and crotch rot.

These three gruesome videos of a knife-wielding, British-sounding ISIS terrorist, who will soon be known as “ashes in a keffiyeh,” are meant to goad the West into sending in ground troops as targets. Aside from our Special Forces who, to no one’s surprise, are already there, these savages aren’t worth sacrificing a single soldier for. In this case, Obama’s strategy is correct — use air strikes and drone the hell out of them. Recently, I viewed a video online that was either leaked or classified because it was quickly taken down. It showed the view from a U.S. helicopter warship over a camp of ISIS killers, scurrying like rats in a barn while being targeted and blown to hell by our military. I must admit, it was the most engrossing thing I’ve seen online in a while.

We have the technology to halt the advances of this group of disaffected men without women, but the need for ground troops is the subject of the current Paris Conference. Muslim countries need to combat this threat directly, but the cavalry isn’t coming — not from our dear friends the Saudis, or the Turks, or the United Arab Emirates — the “Coalition of the Threatened.” Our military claims that an army of Shiite Muslims is necessary to fight the Sunni dominated ISIS militia.

Y’all know me. I’m a leftist peace-nic. There hasn’t been a war since Vietnam that I haven’t opposed. But these thrill-killers are a different animal. This is a moral issue. Remember the first Gulf War after Iraq invaded Kuwait and Poppy Bush drew a line in the sand? You could question the motives for the war, but not the conduct of the operation. Under the direction of General “Stormin’ Norman” Schwarzkopf, a force of 675,000 troops from 28 countries was assembled to fight Hussein’s brutally loyal Republican Guard. After getting their asses kicked out of Kuwait, the Iraqi army retreated in a single-file column, making it easy for U.S. fighter jets to transform them into one long smoking strip of bacon in the desert. I’ve noticed the same single-file progression of ISIS through Iraq. Perhaps the Schwarzkopf strategy can be dusted off one more time and air strikes could be used to create even more lines of crispy critters in the sand. Better still, the CIA could start a blood feud between ISIS and Al Qaeda and let them shoot it out among themselves. There is no negotiating with someone missing their soul. It may come as a surprise, but this pacifist says, “Smoke ’em.” Nothing deters a terrorist quite like death.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Foreign Affairs Should Move to the Front Burner in Congressional Races

Former University of Memphis law professor Larry Pivnick, whose underdog candidacy for Congress in the 8th District is discussed in this issue, turned up at a meeting of the Germantown Democratic Club last week with copies of

a broadside he intended to pass out in support of his campaign. On a single sheet of paper were crowded 12 bullet points, dealing with foreign policy issues relating to Israel/Hamas, eastern Ukraine, and other potential flashpoints on most of the continents of the known world.

Another subject, that of the amount of attention, which the media owe a candidate like himself, a certifiable longshot, came to occupy Pivnick, however — to the point that, when his time came to say a few words, he ditched his intended subject and discoursed instead on the problems that political neophytes like himself have in transcending anonymity.

“Discoursed” is something of a euphemism; the (usually) mild-mannered ex-academic, who normally lectures in what might be considered a professorial style, was hot under the collar and, as a result, was making his points sharply, concisely, and directly — in a mode, in other words, that might work for him out on the hustings.

As for the discarded 12-point position paper, it is highly doubtful that there were — or are — any votes in it, however Pivnick might choose to deliver it. It has been a long time since foreign policy played a major role in determining the outcome of American political contests, and the further down the power chain you go — to the level of congressional candidates, say — the more minute is the impact of such matters on the electorate. That’s the bottom line — especially so, one might conjecture, in the mainly rural and agriculture-oriented 8th District, despite the inclusion of a hunk of eastern Shelby County in the redistricting that followed the census of 2010.

Even more to the point, freshly elected congressmen have almost no say on which committees they’re assigned to (Foreign Affairs is a plum for the well-tenured) and not much post-assignment influence in them for years to come. The more’s the pity. The fact is that rarely have so many global issues posed such direct import on the future of domestic circumstances in the United States — perhaps not since the end of the Cold War.

Or should we say the original Cold War. There may be further surprises to come from the hand of Vladimir Putin, but there is no great mystery as to what he is up to — a wholesale revision of the adverse circumstances imposed on Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union under the terms of what former President George H.W. Bush used to call “the New World Order.”

That “order” is now under enormous strain and may not last. Clearly, the Middle East is undergoing unprecedented jihadist ferment virtually everywhere, and the decades-long standoff between Israelis and Palestinians is igniting disastrously, once again. There are multitudes of other such issues, and there would be worse things indeed than having a few more foreign policy mavens on hand in Washington, where they might find that their concerns have jumped all the way to the front burner.

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News The Fly-By

Q&A: William Scott Ritter,

More than five years after the war in Iraq began, opponents of the war are plentiful, but most have never set foot in the Middle East. As a former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, William Scott Ritter has. And he’s been opposed to the U.S. occupation since the beginning.

As an intelligence officer in the Marine Corps for more than a decade, Ritter was trained in weapons inspection. Beginning in 1991, he worked as a U.N. weapons inspector and says he saw firsthand how the United States government was more concerned with getting rid of Saddam Hussein than disarming Iraq.

Ritter eventually resigned from the U.N. in 1998 and evolved into a popular anti-war figure and talk-show commentator. Ritter will address the current situation in Iraq and in Iran at Christian Brothers University on Thursday, May 1st, at 7 p.m. — by Bianca Phillips

Flyer: Did you find evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

Ritter: There’s never been a debate whether Iraq had WMD. They did have it. Some of it, they declared to us and we destroyed. Some of it, they tried to hide.

When we were close [to] finding what they tried to hide, the Iraqis panicked and destroyed it. That was done in a similar fashion to how a drug dealer would flush drugs down the toilet before the cops came in on a drug raid. And then they would deny there were any drugs.

Through our forensic investigations, we were able to compel them to acknowledge that they had these secret WMD.

what role did the U.S. play in U.N. weapons inspections?

The U.S. used the inspection process and the unique access the inspectors had to gather intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s security. That process exposed a link between U.S. intelligence-gathering activities and the work of the inspectors. That made the Iraqis very distrustful of the inspection process.

In 1998, I protested to the United States that their interference was destroying the credibility of this operation. In the last year of my work, 14 of my inspections were stopped, not by the Iraqis but by the United States government. That’s why I resigned.

Why did you choose to go public with these concerns?

I wasn’t just an academic or somebody with a chip on my shoulder. I was somebody who worked on the inside at a very high level and had firsthand experience.

What should the United States have done after 9/11?

The first thing to recognize is that there was no link whatsoever between Iraq and the events of 9/11. So right off the bat, we chose to make Iraq part of the problem.

I think one of the biggest mistakes was to treat [the events of 9/11] as an act of war. The last time I checked U.S. laws, hijacking was a crime. Murder is a crime. Nineteen criminals hijacked four airplanes and committed horrific crimes.

The international community rallied behind us. We should have taken full advantage of this, not to pursue a global war on terror, which is a horrific title, but rather a global struggle for justice. If we had taken that path, I have high confidence that the entire al-Qaeda organization would have been plucked from the vine and destroyed.

What should we do about Iraq?

As a former Marine, I’d say get [the troops] out now. Some people use the Pottery Barn rule: We broke it, we own it. That’s fine if you’re a law-abiding citizen in a store and you accidentally bump into a shelf and break something. What we did in Iraq was no accident.

The better analogy is the elephant in the china shop. Is the appropriate policy simply to keep buying new china for the elephant to break? Maybe we should be talking about getting the elephant out of the china shop.

What are your thoughts on the situation in Iran?

Iran poses no threat whatsoever to the United States. We have policy differences with Iran, and these can be resolved peacefully. We need to take the military option off the table and speak solely about a diplomatic solution.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Surgin’ General

General David H. Petraeus, commander of the American forces in Iraq, is more candid than his publicists in the media and on Capitol Hill. Unlike the senators and editorial writers who claim that the glorious “surge” should be hailed as one of the most successful military campaigns in history, he warns that the escalation’s achievements are mixed at best — or as he put it, progress on the ground is “uneven,” “fragile,” and “reversible,” with “innumerable challenges” remaining to be addressed.

His caveats cannot dampen the enthusiasm of the politicians and pundits who would maintain the occupation of Iraq and even expand our aggressive presence in the Middle East. Selling that policy requires propaganda proving that the surge is succeeding and that if we only stay long enough, spend enough money, and sacrifice enough young men and women, then someday we will achieve a great victory. We’re “closer,” says the general, carefully.

Yes, everything is getting better and better every day in Iraq, and it will always be getting better and better, even if we have to stay for a hundred or a thousand years.

To promote these illusions, Senator John McCain and his sidekicks, Senators Lindsay Graham and Joe Lieberman, repeatedly cite statistics showing violence has fallen since last summer, a trend that was real, while neglecting to mention the more ominous recent toll, which is equally real. Both American and Iraqi casualties have been rising since the low point in December 2007 and with greater velocity over the past several weeks. A dozen American troops died within the few days before Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker appeared on Capitol Hill to report, an average that harks back to the war’s most lethal months.

The worsening casualties reflect the Iraqi government’s blundering assault on the militias and strongholds of Moktada al-Sadr, which exposed its own military deficiencies just in time for the Petraeus-Crocker show. To McCain and his cohorts, the aborted battle of Basra showed the “progress made by the Iraqi security forces,” as he wrote in the right-wing weekly Human Events, blithely ignoring mass desertions by thousands of Iraqi officers and troops.

With that kind of progress, victory must be only decades away.

Meanwhile, the lives of ordinary Iraqis are hellish, despite the billions of dollars flowing into the government treasury every day from rising oil revenues. Despite the enormous budget surplus enjoyed by the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the United Nations humanitarian agency recently reported that between 4 and 9 percent of Iraqi children under age 5 suffer from malnutrition. More than five years after the invasion, most Iraqis still have no reliable electricity, medical care, employment, or even clean water.

Yet New York Times columnist David Brooks eagerly tells us that the Iraqi people are more optimistic than they were last year, quoting an ABC News poll conducted in March. And nearly half say the U.S. was right to overthrow Saddam, he announced with an air of triumph. He omits the less comforting findings of the poll, which showed that 42 percent of Iraqis still also consider it “acceptable” to attack American troops, 61 percent believe the presence of our troops is making security worse rather than better, and only 26 percent support the occupation.

What the ABC News survey actually reveals is that Iraqis remain profoundly divided along sectarian and ethnic lines. Despite the “awakening” of tribal opposition to al-Qaeda among the Sunni, for example, they remain extremely hostile to the U.S. and the Shia-dominated government, as do the Shia masses loyal to the Sadrist movement.

Those persistent divisions — and the irresistible impulse of every faction to manipulate us to their advantage — have blocked the political reconciliation that was supposed to be the ultimate objective of the surge. Lieberman and Graham praise “benchmark legislation” passed by the Iraqi parliament on amnesty, provincial elections, and other issues. But a recent report issued by the United States Institute for Peace, an official nonpartisan institution funded by Congress, disparaged the supposed advances by the Iraqi government, which it described as “tactical horse-trading” designed to acknowledge those benchmarks as minimally as possible.

The proponents of war and occupation gladly accept this benchmarks charade along with all the other deceptions and corruption because their eyes are fixed on the eastern horizon. McCain and his friends constantly proclaim that our fight in Iraq “cannot be separated from our larger struggle to prevent the emergence of an Iranian-dominated Middle East.” In other words, their remedy for the destructive consequences of this war is a wider and even more dangerous conflict.

Joe Conason writes for Salon.com and The New York Observer.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Tanner’s Prescription

One of the most enduring presences on the Tennessee political scene has been 8th District congressman John Tanner of Union City, a Democrat who, since his first election to the office as a state legislator in 1988, has never been seriously tested by an opponent, Republican or Democratic.

One of the reasons is that Tanner, though a leader of the Democrats’ conservative “Blue Dog” faction, faithfully attempts to strike a balance between competing points of view as well as to propitiate the expressed will of his constituents. Better than most faced with such a task, he avoids the “on the one hand/on the other hand” mode of temporizing, though the final result of his thinking doesn’t necessarily please everybody.

Such might be the case with his answer to a question posed to him last Friday night, when Tanner, something of a foreign-policy maven, was the featured speaker at the culminating “Frontline Politics” event sponsored by the Greater Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce at the East Memphis Hilton.

Whom should we side with in the ongoing confrontation in Pakistan between the autocratic government of Pervez Musharraf and ostensible democratic reformer Benazir Bhutto, a former prime minister freshly returned from exile? Not an easy question, and Tanner, after ruminating out loud over the pros and cons of the matter, finally came down, reluctantly but decisively, on the side of the status quo. What’s at stake in the region is stability, the congressman said, and that’s especially needful in the case of Pakistan, not only a de facto ally in the so-called war on terror but a country in possession of a decent-sized nuclear arsenal.

Not everybody will be satisfied with Tanner’s conclusion, especially those who see the issue posed in Pakistan to be the simple one of tyranny versus democracy. And who, after all, can fail to be inspired by the spectacle of all those protesting lawyers in business suits who let themselves be carted off to jail by the current regime’s police?

Even so, there are good reasons to heed Tanner’s caveat, especially since one of Musharraf’s accomplishments in office, through fair means or foul, has been to repress the ever-present minions of al-Qaeda, who are well represented in Pakistan and who are thought to be providing a haven there for Osama bin Laden. How certain can we be that Bhutto, who had tendencies toward authoritarianism (and corruption) herself before being thrown out of office in 1996, would be able to keep the lid on the problem?

Beyond that, our experience in Iraq has surely taught us something about the dangers of overthrowing dictators. Saddam Hussein was no paragon, to say the least. But he was A) secular and B) strong enough to hold the festering parts of that country together against potential (now long since actualized) religious anarchy. Much the same can be said of Musharraf, and it has to be considered, as Tanner indicated, whether the cure for authoritarian regimes (which are surely to be preferred to totalitarian ones) can be worse than the illness.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

Letters to the Editor

Aquarius Revisited

Bianca Phillips’ article about the hippie commune, the Farm (“The Old Age of Aquarius,” November 22nd issue), showed that despite declining numbers of people, the 1960s countercultural ethic is still thriving in Tennessee.

What is more amazing is that many of the 1960s’ revolutionary, radical ideas are now mainstream, including solar energy, soy products, natural childbirth, recycling, spirituality, earth consciousness, and a healthy mistrust of the government’s immense power. All of these are now a part of the fabric of society.

If mainstream society would whole-heartedly embrace the guiding principles of the Farm — love and compassion — in all of its endeavors, then the 1960s cultural upheaval will not have been futile.

Randy Norwood

Memphis

The Shelter

Thanks to the Flyer and Bianca Phillips for highlighting one of the malfunctions associated with our city-run animal-disposal facility, aka the Memphis Animal Shelter (“Sheltered Life,” November 22nd issue).  

Unfortunately, the shelter’s euthanasia policies are just the tip of the iceberg. As a foster-home provider for rescued animals, I have been repeatedly let down by our city’s shelter policies. First, they do not respond to injured or loose animal reports consistently or in a timely manner. Second, animals may be adopted to whoever is willing to pay the small fee, without regard for eligibility. Third, owner-surrendered animals are immediately destroyed. (Shelter spokespeople say they must assume something is wrong with the animal since the owner is relinquishing it, so it is never made available for adoption.)

I realize that the shelter is overrun with animals and lacks resources (including but not limited to leadership and the support of the city government). But the fact that over 1,000 animals are killed per month in that facility is a shameful reflection of our city’s crime, poverty, and low education levels. A high percentage of dogs that are euthanized are bully breeds used for fighting operations. Until tougher penalties for dog fighting are instituted and spay/neuter is encouraged citywide, the Memphis Animal Shelter will continue to serve as a death-trap for thousands of animals each year.  

In the meantime, Memphians have a social and civil responsibility to adopt homeless animals and donate money they might have spent on designer dogs to one of the city’s volunteer-run rescue organizations.   

Jessica Leu
Memphis

The Surge

I believe all Americans want the surge in Iraq to be a success. If it succeeds, Iraq can stand on its own and our brave military men and women can come home. Unfortunately, the more we learn about what the president is planning, the more obvious it is that we are headed toward an open-ended commitment to Iraq. 

President Bush initially failed to deploy enough troops to ensure a victory. Now we learn our tax dollars are going to pay more than 70,000 Sunnis to patrol their neighborhoods. The Iraqi government was supposed to do this, but they fear arming so many who oppose the current government — and who might use the weapons to attack the Shiites who are in charge.  

The invasion has created two hostile opposing forces in Iraq, and we are arming and training both sides! It appears that Bush has not learned the lesson he should have learned from his father. When the first Bush administration armed the Taliban, they created a monster that finally turned on us. It was the Taliban who protected and assisted bin Laden. Now, more than six years after 9/11, that monster is still alive and making propaganda tapes for the world to hear.

After a million Iraqis and thousands of Americans have been killed and maimed in Iraq and after close to a trillion dollars of American treasure has been spent, the real mastermind of 9/11 is still alive and planning more attacks.

The president claims he is spreading democracy. I say he is spreading something else. How does he explain the hundreds of Saudis in Iraq who are terrorists? He has called the Saudi princes friends for years. These same friends are silent when a Saudi woman who was raped is punished with 200 lashes. I fear democracy is far from the minds of those Bush has befriended in our name. Saudi princes and Shiite politicians are only interested in power, not freedom and democracy.     

Jack Bishop

Cordova

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

You Can Make This Stuff Up

It isn’t easy to put George Wallace, the Neshoba County Fair, and “why we are in Iraq” in the same column space, but here goes.

I literally could not believe my eyes last week when I read in a column by Wall Street Journal deputy editor Daniel Henninger that George Wallace was “shot dead” while running for president in 1972.

As everyone apparently doesn’t know, the former governor of Alabama was shot and wounded in 1972 but lived until 1998. The gunshot paralyzed Wallace, and images of him in a wheelchair are icons of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s when, to put it mildly, he remained politically active and, in his later years, often apologized for his racist past.

It is a cardinal sin of journalism to point at someone else’s errors. I have made my own share and will doubtless make another one very soon as cosmic punishment for writing this. But Henninger’s column, which is unfortunately headlined “Wonder Land,” seems to me to explain, in a way, something about The Wall Street Journal editorial page and even why we are in Iraq.

The headline on the column is “1968: The Long Goodbye.” The thrust of it is familiar to regular readers of the Journal such as me: Many of America’s problems can be traced back to the permissiveness of the 1960s. Along with denunciations of the Clintons and Mississippi tort lawyers, this is one of the touchstones of the Journal‘s editorial page.

The year 1968, when I was 19 years old and in college, was particularly traumatic: President Lyndon Johnson’s announcement that he would not seek reelection; the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy; the violence outside the Democratic Party national convention in Chicago, to name a few.

Wallace got roughly 13 percent of the vote as a third-party candidate for president in 1968. Richard Nixon won. Wallace was indeed shot but not shot dead four years later when his political appeal was perhaps even stronger.

The error was corrected in the online version of the Journal on Friday and in the print newspaper on Saturday. How it got in the column in the first place is as baffling as why. You would think that one of the greatest newspapers in the world would have copy editors for even the best opinion writers. It’s hard to think of an innocent explanation for “shot dead.” Maybe the copy desk did it. It isn’t very likely that Henninger meant to say “not shot dead” or “almost shot dead” or simply “shot” but wrote it as “shot dead.” I guess if you believe the Sixties and the hippies ruined America, it makes a better story if George Wallace was not just shot but “shot dead” even if it is tantamount to saying the civil rights movement was never the same after King was “wounded” in Memphis in 1968.

It was my second “say what?” reaction to a national columnist in two weeks. David Brooks of The New York Times wrote that Ronald Reagan was not appealing to Southern racists to bolster the Republican Party when he defended “states’ rights” at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980.

Three civil rights workers were killed in Neshoba County in 1964. I covered the annual fair for UPI in 1980 and got a first-hand look at Cecil Price, the deputy who turned the young men over to their killers. Another mainstay of the event was racist former Mississippi governor Ross Barnett, who played and sang “Are You From Dixie?” Reagan knew perfectly well what he was doing.

So here’s my theory. Ideologues, left or right, sometimes blind themselves to facts that don’t fit their view of the world or make up new ones that fit it better. Here comes the great leap — you might say this is what the Bush administration and its mouthpiece, the Journal’s editorial page, did on the war in Iraq.

That’s enough. Like I said, my own howler of an error is probably right around the next corner. It won’t do any good to say I have been a faithful reader of The Wall Street Journal for 30 years, always praise it extravagantly when I talk to would-be journalists, and admire its disdain for on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand commentary. My goose is cooked.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Time To Get Out

The pro-war crowd has been emphasizing the recent drop in American casualties in Iraq, measured by the month, but the fact remains that 2007 has been the most lethal year of war for Americans, and it’s not over yet.

At this writing, 853 Americans have died in 2007, which tops the previous record of 849 in 2004. Altogether, 3,858 Americans have lost their lives in Iraq. The sad thing is that they are dying for nothing, because the cowardly Congress refuses to stop the war by cutting off the funds.

The administration defines “winning” as a stable, democratic Iraq able to defend itself. That’s really a definition of a no-win war. The only way to establish stability with Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites at each other’s throats is to find another dictator ruthless enough to force stability at the point of a gun. In other words, you can have stability with no democracy or democracy with no stability. Take your choice.

Either way, it is not worth the life of a single American.

It’s time for the American people to face the question, “What’s in it for us?” That’s not being selfish. It’s our blood and our treasure, so surely the American people have a right to expect some gain for this sacrifice. So what is it?

The answer is nothing. The corporate friends of the Bush-Cheney gang have gained plenty of profits, but they haven’t shared them with the dead soldiers — or with the American people, for that matter. Whether Iraq has a new dictator or becomes an Islamic republic aligned with Iran, Americans will have no friends in a country we wrecked while killing at least 100,000 Iraqis and displacing 2 million more. It will be a long time before any nonsuicidal Americans put Iraq on their places-to-visit list.

The Bush administration has been the most secretive and deceptive bunch to occupy the White House in history. The truth is, nobody knows for sure what the motive for going to war against Iraq really was. I read one theory that the neocons, the chief proponents and pushers of the war, envisioned the convicted embezzler and exile Ahmad Chalabi running the country and making peace with Israel. If it’s true, it was a pipe dream based on ignorance. Nobody in Iraq who had suffered through Saddam Hussein’s rule was going to turn the country over to some corrupt exile who had been living the high life in London and Washington.

Regardless of why we went in, it’s past time for us to get out. The Iraqi people don’t want us. As long as we stay, we will be looked upon as occupiers, and the insurgents will keep whittling away at our forces. Occupation cannot be sustained in a hostile environment, and bribery won’t change the way the Iraqis feel. We have done the people of Iraq way too much harm for them to forgive us.

There is no reasoning with President Bush. He’s as likely to attack Iran as he is to withdraw troops from Iraq. The only answer is to pressure Congress to find the nerve to cut the purse strings. There will be enough money in the pipeline to safely withdraw the troops. Keeping young Americans in harm’s way when their lives and limbs will be lost for no gains is not by any stretch supporting the troops. You support the troops by getting them out of harm’s way, just as Ronald Reagan did after we lost the Marines in Lebanon.

Iraq may or may not have a bloody war after we leave. That’s up to the Iraqis. It’s no skin off our nose whether they reconcile or draw their knives. It’s their country. Let them fight over it if that’s what they want to do. The Bush administration has not done one single thing right in the Middle East, and the situation in the whole area is worse and more dangerous because of these blunders.

America’s withdrawal would be a blessing to everyone concerned.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 50 years.