Tag: Iraq War

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Editorial Opinion

Done Deal

Chancellor Kenny Armstrong’s ruling last Friday permitting the Shelby County Commission to proceed on the establishment of a second Juvenile Court judgeship was a no-brainer. Whatever one thought of the politics of the commission’s near-party-line vote in the wake of last year’s election or of the often needlessly confrontational tactics of the majority Democrats, it seemed obvious that the right to establish the

judgeship was accounted for explicitly by legislative act years ago.

Indeed, the General Assembly, as Armstrong correctly observed, had already created the additional court in embryo. It merely remained for the commission to exercise its discretion in completing the establishment of the court. It has now, somewhat belatedly, chosen to do so, and though Judge Curtis Person insists he will appeal, it is hard to see how the explicit language of the enabling legislation can be gotten around.

The commission almost let the opportunity pass to take a further decisive step at its regular monthly meeting, but Commissioner Steve Mulroy raised the issue of following up on Armstrong’s ruling. And it fell to a Republican commissioner, David Lillard, to actually make the motion for the commission to set a date — Wednesday, May 30th — as a time to begin what will probably be a quick two-step process (interviews of candidates, followed by an interim appointment of a second judge). In 2008, it would seem, the new judgeship will come before the voters in the regular countywide election.

What we have here is a done deal, and the virtual absence of further impassioned debate, coupled with the near-unanimity of the vote for Lillard’s motion, amounts to a demonstration that the commission has accepted a reality that we presume Person will ultimately have to accommodate himself to as well.

Telling It

The presidential-candidate debates have barely gotten under way, and already the pundits have taken it upon themselves to tell us who should presume to take part in them and who should not.

It was just barely tenable that they should have turned thumbs down on the entertaining if politically over-the-hill Democrat Mike Gravel, a former U.S. senator from Alaska who hasn’t held office in a quarter-century. Eccentric he may be, but his proposal for a universal national heath-care plan based on vouchers was intriguing, and his warnings about the perils of nuclear poker-playing and his fellow Democrats’ ostrich-like attitude toward the Iraq fiasco were on point. “These people scare me!” he said about his party’s frontrunners. Us, too, Mike.

But the real travesty was the Beltway gang’s decision to pile on against Republican congressman Ron Paul, who, whatever the oddities of his sincere and systematic libertarianism, has made the most intelligent and complete case against the Iraq venture of anybody anywhere this year, actually daring to point out that the 9/11 attacks were in significant measure “blowback,” a response to our own blunderbuss military interventions in the Middle East.

Dissed by journalists Howard Kurtz and Gloria Borger, who demanded his exclusion from future debates, Paul made more sense in his two TV appearances than either of them has in their lifetimes.

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Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: AP Photo/Rick Bowmer

It’s been said often that while everyone is entitled

to his own opinion, no one is entitled to his own facts. Today, we

hear misstatements all the time. Some of them are deliberate lies. Some of them are

just mistakes.

A House committee has just exposed the terrible fact that Army officials fabricated a story about the death of Pat Tillman and lied through their teeth. The Army knew from day one that Tillman died from so-called friendly fire, but it was five weeks before Army officials got around to telling the family.

In the meantime, the Army falsified a citation to give him a Silver Star at his memorial service, which was turned into a media event — conveniently timed, his family now believes, to distract attention from the scandal of Abu Ghraib prison.

Tillman did not die fighting the enemy. He died from American bullets. The girl from West Virginia, Jessica Lynch, hailed as a female Rambo, in fact was knocked unconscious in a vehicle wreck before she ever had a chance to fire a shot. She woke up in an Iraqi hospital. To her credit, as soon as she recovered from her serious injuries, she always told the truth. The story had been spread by a “government source” that she had fought heroically until the last bullet.

Lies and faulty memories (Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified under oath 71 times that he could not recall or recollect) should not be tolerated even by this pathologically tolerant society. Mistakes can be forgiven, but deliberate lies are hostile acts. The liar is trying to subvert your mind and manipulate you into a position favorable to him. Calling a man a liar was once an act that would prompt a duel, but today people seem to shrug it off.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina recently misstated some information about Saddam Hussein in his attempt to defend the president’s position. He said, for example, that Saddam fired “at our planes every day in defiance of U.N. resolutions.” Not true. The no-fly zones were never authorized or approved by the Security Council. They were imposed by George H.W. Bush.

After the end of Gulf War I, the CIA grossly miscalculated the damage done to Saddam’s army. Consequently, the CIA urged the Shiites and the Kurds to rise up in rebellion and finish off Saddam’s government. When Saddam’s army began to slaughter both the Shiites and the Kurds, an embarrassed U.S. hurriedly imposed the no-fly zones.

Graham said Hussein sent checks to the families of suicide bombers in Palestine. This is a partial truth. Saddam had been sending checks to the families of all Palestinians killed in the struggle for independence before the suicide-bombing tactic was taken up. He was not subsidizing terror. He was subsidizing the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation.

The members of the House and Senate have great resources available to them. Not only do they have large staffs, but there are also the Congressional Research Service, the Government Accountability Office, the great Library of Congress, and the Congressional Budget Office. It seems they should have no excuse for not getting their facts straight.

The problem is that most of them, most of the time, concentrate on getting reelected. In the 18th and 19th centuries, a contemptuous description of such people was “officeholders.” Seems mild, but it was meant to separate the statesmen from the politicians with no agenda but their own political welfare.

It’s impossible to have a legitimate debate about anything if the participants lie, don’t know the basic facts of the issue, or deliberately distort their opponents’ position. Self-government is the most difficult of all the forms of government, and it requires honesty on everyone’s part to function.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Let’s be clear on something: The Democrats did not get elected because they had a better plan or were more trusted. They got elected because they were not Republicans. And time will tell if, as the Republicans did, they squander their opportunity. It does not look like a great start, however. After promising an amazing five-day work week to pass their “100-hour agenda,” the Democrats took off the first Monday of the session because Florida played Ohio State in the BCS national championship game (the Swing State Bowl). I must remind you that the game was at 8:30 p.m. — you know, at night. Clearly the Democrats had to paint their faces and get to a tailgate party earlier that day, so they called off work for themselves.

It looks as if Bush has not gotten the election message either. He is doubling down on the bad hand he dealt himself in Iraq by sending 21,000 more troops. I am not sure where they are going to get the soldiers. He has gotten our nation down to very few fighting men left, so an ex-military friend of mine imagined that at this point he will have to enlist the Salvation Army and some Civil War reenactors to get to the number of uniformed soldiers that he wants to “surge” in Iraq.

Bush did rearrange the deck chairs on his Titanic by reassigning some key Iraq officials. He demoted the director of intelligence (which is like being principal of summer school) to serve as deputy secretary of state under Condoleezza Rice. Seeing the need for a man under Rice, Bush moved swiftly to reassign John Negroponte, or, as Bush calls him, “Hey there, Sport.”

It’s funny to watch the old Democratic senators gin up outrage at the Iraq war and Bush (whose approval ratings by the American people are currently somewhere between a skin rash and Durham, North Carolina, district attorney Mike Nifong). If you think the old-guard Democratic senators are acting mad now, just think back on how mad they did not act three years ago, when most of them voted for the war.

Neither party has any credibility on the issue at this point. As I have long said, it is this bloated, inefficient, and egoistic government that led us into this war. It has gotten so bad now that congressmen might actually read the Iraq Study Group report to see what they have been doing for the last three years. Ready, fire, aim, then blame is their motto.

I am not an expert on war. My last official uniformed service was with the Boy Scouts, so I make no pretenses about knowing what we should do. I do know, however, that huge mistakes have been made, and it makes no sense to keep digging this hole. The role of our military is to protect our country. If it is depleted and demoralized with an ill-thought-out war, then it can’t do that.

Democrats have to fight the label of the “tax and spend” party; then, and only then, will they succeed. I am not sure what “rich” is these days in their view. Perhaps it is anyone with a flat-screen TV or who sleeps on 300-count sheets, but I’m convinced they will soon identify them and chase them from the village, killing the golden geese they have long loved to tax.

Still, it’s the GOP that needs to get the message. Evidence that they have not is the fact that they demoted one of my favorite congressmen, Arizona Republican Jeff Flake, who is the only person who stands up and challenges those sneaky earmarks attached to bills to provide pork for congressmen. In the new congress, GOP leadership punished Flake by not giving him a committee assignment that he clearly should have gotten. If this continues, the exile of the GOP, “the party of less government and less spending,” will be a long one.

Ron Hart is a satire columnist and investor in Atlanta. He worked for Goldman Sachs and was appointed to the Tennessee Board of Regents by Lamar Alexander. E-mail: RevRon10@aol.com.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter from the Editor: Say No to “the Surge”

Remember the “Coalition of the Willing”? It was all the rage back in 2003. President Bush managed — by coercion, sweet-talk, bullshit, or a combination thereof — to convince 25 countries that sending troops to invade Iraq alongside American forces was a good idea.

The coalition’s forces once totaled 50,000 soldiers. Almost four years later, that number is down to around 15,000 — and falling fast. Italy pulled out its remaining 3,000 troops last month. South Korea is down to 2,300 troops and is considering withdrawing all of its forces by the end of the year. Even Great Britain, our staunchest ally with 7,000 troops, is planning to cut its forces in half in the next few months. The bottom line is clear: The Coalition is no longer Willing.

And neither is the American public. In November, they voted the Republicans in Congress who enabled this fiasco out of power. Every recent opinion poll indicates that almost 70 percent of Americans think putting more troops in Iraq is a bad idea. And this is after Bush’s dead-eyed speech to “rally” the country last week.

At least nine Republican senators have said the surge is a bad idea. Many conservatives, including George Will, Joe Scarborough, and Bush syncophant Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal have come out against it. The bipartisan Iraq Study Group is against it. The former generals on the ground are against it. The Iraqi government is against it.

They all understand that sending 20,000 more Americans into a four-sided (and counting) civil war where every enemy fighter looks the same makes no sense. It’s too little, too late. That’s why other countries are pulling troops out. That’s why the American public is deadset against the surge.

But the Decider hears no one. He listens only to his “heart.” He says he won’t change his mind, even if the only people who support him are “Laura and Mrs. Beasley [his dog].”

Now is the time, friends, to write letters to your congressman, to be loud and vociferous, to make sure we stop this fool before he kills again. Those are our precious troops, not his playthings. This is our country, not his.

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com