Just How Did It Happen?

Often decisions in government – and I presume elsewhere – are made on the “I’ve made up my mind. Don’t confuse me with facts,” system.

My GUESS is that this tried and true method got us into the situation in Iraq. Let me make it perfectly clear; this posting is no more than conjecture.

For all of the reasons enumerated in the press, on television, and on numerous blogs, including this one, we wanted to go to war against and to topple the Saddam regime in Iraq. This hypothetical case does not address arguments of preemption and preventive action that I and many others have raised numerous times.

Before the final decision was made, there were some uncomfortable issues on the table concerning Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The U.N. inspection teams operating in the country had been unable to find any, and there some folks – certainly not including me – who doubted elements of the intelligence, for example that involving alleged purchases of yellow cake uranium.

The decision makers, including high ranking officers preparing to invade, military and civilian leaders at the Pentagon, other high ranking executives at the CIA and other intelligence agencies, at the State Department and elsewhere, as well as the Vice President and, ultimately, the President had to weigh the inability of the U.N. inspectors to locate caches and protestations of the Iraqis that there weren’t any forbidden weapons.

Our own intelligence and that of our allies indicated to almost a certainty that there were such weapons or programs to develop them in Iraq. So, if WMDs were the rationale for the war, why not go ahead and cause regime change? What could be the downside?

Under those conditions, based on my own government experience, if the big boys wanted war, most of the bureaucrats I’ve known and the political leaders would have attacked in a heart beat. The underlying thought was almost certainly that Saddam just wouldn’t have given up these weapons; it’s as simple as that. Our leaders – not just the people in this administration whom I’ve beaten about the head and shoulders for so long – but virtually all of them are rather cynical when it comes to the motives and actions of the leaders of other nations, especially petty third world tyrants.

We constantly ascribe completely cynical motives to them and believe that they maintain power through the unsentimental use of power to crush their enemies and in lying about it to the world at large. Therefore, in my view, it would have been incomprehensible to almost any high level appointee that I ever knew that someone like Saddam wasn’t telling bald faced lies when he denied having such weapons that he did in fact once have.

Therefore, without trying to slander some very fine public servants I’ve known, I’m convinced that virtually no one in the advisory or decision making chain ever dreamed that we wouldn’t find enough WMDs, such as canisters of poison gas, to be able to point to when the dust settled and say, “See, told you so.”

So while opponents of the war like me rant and rave about the lack of WMD evidence, at least in my case, I’m shocked to this day that we didn’t find them.

In my mind, the argument about WMDs was never essential; it was the lack of threat to us and our allies, the terrible precedent of preemption, and our failure to secure U.N. approval for the war.

As Saddam tends his flowers at the Baghdad International Airport Hilton, I wonder whether his action to dispose of the chemical, biological and radiological programs was made in case such an attack would come, a decision that was made by others without his knowledge, or just dumb luck.

In any case, the failure to locate these weapons gave the U.S. a huge black eye. Had I been in the chain, I'd be sporting one too.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Inauguration Day 2005

President Bush’s second inaugural speech clearly places him in the neoconservative intellectual camp.

Even as war clouds gathered over Iraq, I gave him the benefit of the doubt about the policy of military preemption and laid the blame (that is my loaded word for it) for the policy on such people as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pearl, the Kristols, and other neocons. I was wrong.

Clearly, Mr. Bush stepped front and center and declared himself a neocon rather than a member of the realist camp that virtually all previous presidents, but especially Republicans, have espoused since the Democrat Woodrow Wilson.

In his speech the president threw down the gauntlet to Americans, its allies and its opponents and enemies that we would be on the side of activists for democracy and freedom. The clear inference must be drawn that China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Sudan, North Korea, Iran and dozens of other nations that are not democracies are on notice that their relations with the U.S. will no longer be the same as they have been in recent decades.

What this means for major trading partners such as China and Saudi Arabia has yet to be defined, but his speech was a clear message of, “in your face,” to these and other nations not classified as democracies. We shall see.

There will be no blaming of others for Iraq. If it turns out well, George W. Bush will be exonerated by time. A bad outcome will consign his presidency to the dustbin of history. His ability to define success and stay on message is as great or greater than any of his predecessors, so we may have to wait for some time after he leaves office to find the answer.

I look forward to learning the outcome of this ambitious program and wish my readers the same good fortune in determining the result. On this day I step away from my anger and hope for the sake of the nation that the president is right.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Racism in High Places

This Saturday the National Football Conference Championship Game will feature two African American quarterbacks. Michael Wilbon in a column in the Washington Post describes this as the culmination of a great effort to root out racism from the sport. There can be no doubt that Michael Vick and Donovan McNabb are among the elite in the ranks of NFL players and quarterbacks, despite the protestations of Loudmouth Limbaugh, and this game represents a watershed in race relations.

Wilbon describes a conversation he had years ago with Warren Moon – a pioneering Black quarterback – about when Black QBs would no longer be a big deal in the league. Moon’s answer, ”…when Blacks could be backups at quarterback, hold clipboards, get traded and released, picked up by coaches with whom they had become friends at previous stops.” That’s happened and Blacks can make it and be fired based on their performance. The same pretty much goes – or is soon going to go - for coaches.

Racism and sexism are receding, however glacially, in our society. It’s unfortunate that the same goes for the United States Senate – a glacial pace of improvement in race, sex and ethnic relations. Two of President Bush’s major proposed appointees, Attorney General Designate Alberto Gonzales and the Secretary of State Designee Condoleezza Rice were treated by the Justice and Foreign Affairs Committee’s of the Senate with kid gloves because of race, ethnicity, and gender.

Gonzales was the architect of the tortured logic of the torture policy that gave this nation a huge black eye in the Islamic world. He was probed only gently by the senators and allowed to get away with what no one should have been in refusing to be drawn out on his role in the scandal.

Rice was given virtually a free pass on the contradictions in her prior statements about the Iraq War. She bristled when Senator Boxer probed these conflicting statements and for her troubles the Senator was curbed about coming close to questioning the designee’s integrity, which of course she was and should have been doing. Only because Boxer was a woman was she allowed an escape route on a charge of racism or sexism.

There can be no doubt that these two designees did what was only hinted at, yet because the Senators are indeed still in the dark ages of racism and sexism these two people who should have been exposed for what they did escaped scrutiny and will be appointed to two of the highest offices in the land.

Clearly, we have a long way to go in this country before people will be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. It’s too bad the United States Senate is not the equal of the National Football League in this important area of human relations.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Winner Take All

There is a new meaning for the word election. Election: a referendum on your policy positions. If you win all of your positions are approved by the voters.

Last week in an interview with the Washington Post, President Bush claimed that because he won the election his policy on Iraq was approved by the voters and no longer a subject of concern to the majority of voters.

By that logic, I don’t see why we bother with a long debate on Social Security. He ran on platform that would change the program. He should just send up his proposals and Congress should adopt them - without debate.

Naturally, the same goes for such issues as a Constitutional Amendment prohibiting Same Sex Marriage, another Amendment prohibiting abortion, approving his program for Homeland Security, and everything else he supported in the campaign.

Am I the only person shocked by this absurdity?

Blog on!

Wild Bill

George Washington on Iraq

“…it is well known, that when one side only of a Story is heard, and often repeated, the human mind becomes impressed with it, insensibly.” George Washington understood that the repetition of a great untruth would inevitably lead to `brain washing.’ Forgive me for inserting this modern term into the great man’s thought process. On page 214 of his new biography of our first president, His Excellency: George Washington, Joseph J. Ellis sums up Washington’s view of the big lie in government, indeed in all human activities.

It was saddening to learn yesterday that President George W. Bush asserted, after having to acknowledge under pressure of the revealed facts and truth that our hegemonic venture into Iraq based on that country’s possession of and threats to use `weapons of mass destruction’ against us or our allies was without foundation, that our War in Iraq, was still a good thing.

Either President Bush is scandalously out of touch with reality or he is in the process of redefining reality. It is one thing to have taken this nation to war based on flawed intelligence. He (and I hope most of our citizens, including me) may be forgiven for believing that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons and was in the process of seeking to restart its nuclear weapons program. It is quite another to, in the face of his own government’s findings to the contrary, to assert, despite no evidence to support our attack, that what we did to that nation and ours was the best policy.

In effect, we attacked a stable nation whose government we despised, toppled that government, and inserted ourselves into a civil war on the side of the largest ethnic and religious faction. Regardless of the outcome of the election – almost certainly a Shiite victory – we have alienated Sunnis everywhere. The likely result will be an Iraqi government friendly to its traditional enemy, Iran, that calls into question the balance of power in the region.

It is possible, even likely, that we have destroyed a secular government in favor of one that will be controlled by a theocracy that is even more opposed to us and our presence in the central Civilization than was Saddam. It is difficult to imagine a worse outcome to this act of hubris that has cost us the lives and health of thousands of young men and women, destroyed the lives of thousands of Iraqis who admired us, poured our treasure to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars into the desert, alienated a civilization with more than a billion adherents, and cost us the respect of the nations of our own civilization, including Canada, Mexico, France, Germany and many more.

Repetition of obviously false assertions can work for only so long. The American people see what is going on and, more importantly, believe their eyes rather than the propaganda emanating from the president’s mouth. If Mr. Bush loses complete credibility on this vital issue, his presidency will be a total failure. If he cannot separate himself from those neoconservatives who took him down this terrible path, he will join them in being wrong on the single issue that will define his presidency in history.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

No Weapons of Mass Destruction

Today it was announced that the U.S. had recently abandoned its efforts to locate weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The failure of the United States to find these weapons or programs for their development troubles me not nearly such much as the post war revelation that differences between CIA and Department of Energy analysts over the possible uses for the aluminum tubes that became the basis for the administration charge that a nuclear weapons program was being reestablished by the Iraqi government were not shared with the Congress. This is especially damning as all of the key players in the administration were aware of the withholding of this information while the Congress was being asked to back the attack.

For months after the war was instigated and prior to the revelation, Members of Congress were repeatedly castigated by the president and other key officials for complaining about the war after authorizing it based on the same information the administration had used to seek Congressional authority for the venture.

Based on everything I’ve read and heard, the President, the CIA, the Department of Defense and most of our allies believed that weapons of mass destruction were in the hands of the Iraqi military. Based on the limited public information, I held these same beliefs about Iraq’s weapons, and I see no reason to condemn the administration on this one point even though it is the most important item of intelligence failure by the government during the prewar period.

My complaint before the attack had little to do with weapons intelligence. Rather, it was based on our failure to permit U.N. weapons inspectors to complete their program prior to going to war. I also did not believe that the administration had made its case that Iraq was an immediate threat to us or to our allies in the region. And our naked bullying of the Security Council members and our clear intent to attack Iraq without such inspection program and without a grand coalition summed up my problems.

It was also my deeply held belief that that the prattle that our military would be welcomed as liberators and that we could deliver Western style democracy and freedom to the people of Iraq was incorrect – at least in anything resembling a reasonable time frame.

That I believe I was right on these points gives me no comfort. But I do not believe that we can castigate the president about our inability to find evidence of weapons or programs to develop them.

Wild Bill

Goodbye John

I voted for John Kerry, but I’m no longer crying over the loss.

This President Bush 43 and his handlers are so obdurate and stay so relentlessly on message that is virtually impossible for them to acknowledge reality. Surely, had Senator Kerry won, the long knives of the reactionary right and the neocons would be out for him with regard to his plan to disengage from Iraq.

That the Iraq War and its aftermath is one of the great foreign policy blunders in American history is becoming more evident to the American people each day, and President Bush is going to have to redefine all of his goals and definitions of success in order to disengage our forces from this quagmire.

Had Senator Kerry won, these very steps would likely have been cause for the radical right to call for his impeachment. Surely his actions would have been labeled a stab in the back to our men and women in the military and a cowardly retreat in the War on Terror. So we must suffer through as many months and years as it takes for President Bush to explain that his disastrous folly in Iraq is in actuality a great success and that the Iraqis will now and forever more enjoy freedom and the American way.

The neocons and their drum beaters on the radical right like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, and Oliver North are going to have to put their stream of consciousness baloney machines into overdrive to talk their way out of this mess. Their constant upbeat messages about the true situation in that troubled land are going to have to be finessed over the balance of 2005 and probably long after.

I’ve said about everything I can or care to on this matter and will try to avoid writing about this tragedy any more. Let's hope I succeed.

The Republicans have clearly overreached, and I look forward to a safely divided government. My hope is that never again in my lifetime will we have both houses of Congress and the White House in the hands of either party at the same time. I look to 2008 with great hope and optimism.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Who is Losing Iraq?

“He who does not learn from history is doomed to repeat it.” George Santayana’s oft stated observation is as reviled as it is relevant.

Who lost China? When the Cold War was ramping up and China’s civil war ended badly for our side, scapegoats had to be dredged up to satisfy the mob’s need for blood. In that case, a generation of `Old China Hands’ was condemned to take the fall for something that was inevitable given the nature of the corrupt regime we were backing. Great Americans, including President Harry Truman, General George C. Marshall and General Joseph Stilwell, were badly tarnished because ardent anticommunists such as Senator Joseph McCarthy could not accept the reality of the situation.

When great ventures end badly, someone must pay. That World War I ended badly for Germany could not possibly have been the fault of the Kaiser’s great military machine. It had to have been because of `the stab in the back’ of politicians back in Berlin. The leader of the American Expeditionary Force, General John J. Pershing, was against the Armistice in 1918. Pershing argued that if the German army was perceived by the German people not to have lost, the conflict would have to be reopened and fought to the finish. He was overruled and a quarter of a century and sixty million deaths later, it was settled.

Who is to blame for the situation in Iraq? Already as the adventure proceeds to a bad outcome, those who led us into it thrash about for scapegoats. Liberals, the media, France, a few bad apples in abu Ghraib – were it not for them, democracy and freedom would be flourishing among the Iraqi people.

Unfortunately for the small group of leaders who made this war, scapegoats while under slight temporary pressure as the situation deteriorated will not have to take the fall for this debacle. President George W. Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, their immediate aids and small number of advisors in and out of government together with those who beat the drums for them are responsible for this failed mission. The focus will not change.

We’ve learned that our military can beat any foe that stands up to it. Of this there was no doubt before we attacked Iraq.

We’ve learned that the administration cooked the books on the mission. We know, for instance, that internal debate among intelligence analysts over the potential uses of aluminum tubes was not brought to the attention of the Congress, the media or the public. We realize that the dazzling display put on for the U.N. Security Council by Secretary of State Colin Powell was vastly overstated. We’ve learned that charges that Saddam’s government conspired with terrorists have yet to be shown to have any merit.

We’ve learned that while our military is capable of defeating any enemy, it is not sufficiently staffed to occupy even a middle sized country. We know that the Army advised the top leaders that the force proposed to pacify Iraq was insufficient to do the job. For that assessment, we know that the Army Chief of Staff lost the confidence of the top leaders in the country.

We know that the stated reasons for the war: Saddam’s weapons programs that threatened us and our allies and the conspiracy between Iraq and al Qaeda have yet to be found or proved.

We were told by the President, the Vice President, their advisors and their media drum beaters that our forces would be welcomed as liberators. Not even fools continue to hold that mad view. As the election nears, most Americans are aware that the result will not satisfy the Iraqi nation. The winners will be viewed as American puppets and only force of arms – ours now and theirs as soon as possible – will hold the country together long enough for us to retreat.

The War on Terror has almost disappeared from the media and public attention. Iraq, the terrible Tsunami, and the false crises on the domestic front have driven the focus from our true enemies, international terrorists. American lives and treasure are being spent while our defenses against terrorists on the home front are being starved for lack of funds. A deficit created by tax cuts made while the nation was, according to our president, at war limits our ability to defend our ports and cities.

What to do? Borrow two billion dollars to fix Social Security; hey, it’s a start.

Wild Bill

Mom? Dad?

A few questions for Moms and Dads living in the heartland - and elsewhere.

Does the Iraq War make you and your little Dick and Jane feel safer from terrorists? Have you abandoned the cloth coat conservatism of your own parents? As you drive young Dick and Jane around, are you aware that much of your gasoline is refined from crude oil from Saudi Arabia and other sources that may not be secure or guaranteed? If California, New York and Massachusetts seceded – without bloodshed, of course – would America be a better country?

Are you aware that many blue states, including the three named above, have a net transfer of tax dollars to red states? Are you and your neighbors dependent on dollars from the Left or Right Coasts? Those good old conservative values - do they include imposing U.S. national will on a worldwide economic empire? Are you aware that you live in a country with five or six percent of the world's people? That we gobble up about 30% of the resources that are consumed on the planet's each year? That our consumption is underwritten by economic competitors, some of whom really don't like our policies?

Are you aware that every day American men and women are dying in Iraq to protect you from terrorists? Are you aware that the reasons given before attacking that country had no basis in fact? Are you aware that tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis have died because of the deception the drove us into their midst? You know that Saddam gassed 5,000 of his own people, but what multiplier of that number have been killed by our forces in your name?

Did your own Moms and Dads want America to be an aggressor nation? Did they believe in collective security based on strong international alliances? Do you remember when America was the last best hope for democracy? Do you remember when America was both respected and loved by the vast majority of the world’s peoples and nations? Is it possible that even young Dick and Jane remember when the answer to that question was `yes'?

Are you aware that many of the nations that our leaders admonish for failure to support us in Iraq are fighting with us in Afghanistan where the national government actually supported those who attacked us on September 11?

After reading these questions, are you still convinced that you’re doing right by young Dick and Jane? Are you really conservative? Sen. Chuck Hagel from Nebraska is a conservative who voted to support the Iraq War; why is he questioning our strategy? Does he know something you don't?

Are we really going in the right direction in the world? Should you be writing your representatives in Washington?

Wild Bill

George I, Sportsman

In keeping with the Bloggers' pledge of occasionally writing about the serious, pitchers and catchers report in just a few weeks. Sure, the football playoffs have yet to kickoff, but in Florida and Arizona baseball diamonds are already being groomed.

As we all know, this will be the happiest spring training in eighty-four season for the Boston Red Sox. The weight of the world is off their shoulders but, of course, some of those responsible for the joy won’t be there to celebrate. For example, Pedro will be back with the pack of losers from Gotham, but with the low class way he said goodbye few in Southie will be weeping.

George Steinbrenner, the Boss, is a fierce competitor, one who’ll do most anything to win, especially by writing mega checks. But he’s a good sport too. That commercial in which he signs one too many and sprains his arm is hilarious. I’ll bet he’s thought about a secret surprise for the Red Sox fans that will cement his place in the hearts of New Englanders.

When the Yankees and Red Sox meet in Grapefruit League play this spring, wouldn’t it be great if George brought those American League Championship trophies that the Yankees won over the past several years when powered by a juiced up slugger and forfeited them to Red Sox Nation as token of gentlemanly sportsmanship. He can’t help but have thought about it and, given his warm and cuddly feelings about the Sox, wouldn’t that just be the icing on the cake as a way to kick off a new era in New York / Boston relations. So don't wait for Bud Selig to make the ruling, George, just do it! You'll feel so good.

If The Boss does that by opening day, I pledge that Wild Bill will never again describe the Yanks as the Evil Empire. I know that my legion of friends and readers who live for the empire are, in reality, intent on equity and will read these lines and see the wisdom of this proposal.

Deal? Done! Love you, Georgie,

Wild Bill

Ghosts in the White House

Where have you gone, Franklin Roosevelt?

About a decade ago before becoming painfully aware of my limitations as a scholar, I decided to write the definitive biography of Roosevelt that would capture the human essence of my political hero. None of the efforts by others satisfied me, and there was no doubt that such a work was needed. It would be simple matter of reading what had been done, reviewing the obligatory files in Hyde Park and sitting before the keyboard.

How could a man of perhaps sixty be so silly? The bibliography on Roosevelt and his administration is almost without end and growing, so, true to my youthful M.O. when faced with the very daunting, I didn’t try.

Instead, after reading literally dozens of biographies and histories on FDR and the greatest generation, I determined to approach the `Sphinx’ via fiction. That would be far easier, and I would permit my imagination to fill in the blanks. My notes on the protagonist’s character and events soon ran to hundreds of pages and covered everything from his boyhood birding on the banks of the Hudson to his death in Georgia just prior to victory in World War II.

Ready, the book already written in my mind, I began typing. Fifty pages into the novel, I reviewed what was done with a critical eye. It was awful, an unmitigated disaster. There was no choice but to abandon the effort. The great man had eluded me. Defeat was complete, and I surrendered unconditionally - almost.

Since then, I have written two novels about the first half of the twentieth century, and the ghost of Roosevelt is in the background. My present efforts are devoted to a novel about the internment of the Japanese aliens and citizens residing on the West Coast when the war broke out. The ghost is closer here because of the direct role played by the man. He comes off, of course, as less of hero; regardless, he still resists being drawn from the shadows.

A Christmas present, Joseph Ellis’s biography, His Excellency, George Washington, joined the reading list and is being devoured as part of a buffet of books piled high by my chair. Early on, Ellis complains that his subject did everything in his power to hide from him. From this and my own experience, I began to theorize. Many presidents are charged with deception by their biographers. Among presidents, a few simple men like Grant and Truman seem to defy the tradition but they may be the exceptions that prove the rule.

My theorizing led to this: the vast majority of humans, heroes or not, spend their lives altering, revising, embellishing, and erasing their pasts. The difference between them and the Roosevelts, Washingtons, and Lincolns is that no one cares. The nature of the beast is not revealed by the Grants but by those who would deceive us.

Paul Simon cries out for Joe DiMaggio but his lament is for all of our heroes. We thought they were different from the rest of us, but they too suffer the defect of being human – only grander. As they obfuscated their pasts, they were confident that we would seek them out. They were right. As the rest hide, the error is that no one seeks.

To the Barricades of the Mind!

I was opposed to the Vietnam War and took to the streets of Washington in protest. My act of moral courage in some small way helped to stop the carnage. Wasn't I great?

When that war began, like most Americans I went along. Hey, dominoes made as much sense as anything else in the Cold War. Soon, however, the pictures coming into my home were horrific and the casualty numbers extremely troubling.

The early protests didn't seem like much, and I solved the problems of the pictures and sounds of war by shutting off the TV and by not reading the coverage of the conflict.

It was only when President Johnson escalated the war that I began to pay closer attention. Still I was not ready to abandon the government's rationale for continuing to pour human and material treasure into the fray.

But as the months became years, something changed, and I prepared to act, to take to the streets and move on the barricades. Enlightenment? An epiphany? Goodness? All three but not of the kind that makes me proud today. I had been raising three boys, mere babies when the war came to my attention. It dawned on me that the madness would soon engulf me and mine.

My sons were growing up and would have to choose between the draft and defiance. I was focusing. Quickly my choice was made, I would work to stop the war. I, like millions of others, had lost confidence in the government. To the streets we turned. But the enlightenment, the epiphany and the goodness were far from altruistic. I only acted when my self interest became clear.

Now we are in a war in Iraq that does not create fear in the guts of middle class parents. In fact many of them are pleased with the way this is going. Somehow the killing and the propaganda make them feel safer from the terrorists. I don't know a single enlisted man serving in Iraq. The dead and wounded are total strangers to me. Who will demand a stop to the mad neocon dream of empire? If we do not turn the ship of state, forces from beyond our shores will do it for us, but only after a tragedy that could wreck the nation on rocky shoals.

We must fight those who attacked us. Of this there can be no doubt, but we must review the policies that have brought us to this juncture, not only this crazy Iraqi adventure but our entire foreign policy to determine if some of the complaints of the jihadists have merit. The baloney that they hate because we're free sickens the stomach.

Clearly, the Central Civilization with but a single major commodity, oil, is in crisis. Anything we would recognize as a renaissance that would elevate man is, at least at this point, nowhere in sight. The screwball notion that we will impose democracy and freedom on its peoples and make them better for it is more suited for after midnight musings in bars and psychiatric couches than for serious discussion among rational adults.

The future of the United States and its people is at stake. Spread the word. There will be no middle class parents carrying placards to save their young. This time those without personal interest must muster and maintain the courage on their own.

Enough of that Mild Bill bull crap,

Wild Bill

BLOG ON!

Live the Life You've Imagined

Aim high! Live the life you’ve imagined! Simplify! These, of course, are the lessons Thoreau intended to impart in Walden. Do many people act on these maxims? Certainly, and many who do so have no idea that these are Henry’s directions and they may in fact have come to them from other equally positive sources, especially from within their own hearts and minds.

Not all who aim high, live fully realized and authentic lives, and simplify are seeking fame and fortune. Some very private beings have done it all in tiny hamlets in which they delivered all of the babies for two generations or married the town's youth and buried it's dead or served as selectmen or emergency medical technicians. Others own local businesses that enrich the town and employ their neighbors. These lives can be just as rich and fulfilling as those whose visions were as bright as comets streaking across the heavens.

Bill Clinton dreamed of becoming president. Warren Beatty was bound to make movies. Picasso seemed born to paint. And Mother Teresa was determined to ease the pain and suffering of the dying. Did they ever aim high and live the lives they imagined. Simplify? Except for Mother Teresa, perhaps this group might have been a little light on that count.

Henry’s notion that, “In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high,” says nothing about failing and quitting. Perhaps that first dream wasn’t quite right. Bill Frist set out to be a surgeon but today finds himself the U.S. Senate Majority leader, and it’s rumored that he aspires to the White House. And Mark Twain might have lived out his life as the steamboat captain Sam Clemens were it not for the choice to act on his dreams.

Some are late bloomers. Cesar Chavez was impelled by the animal like conditions in the fields to organize his union and seek justice for his lettuce picking followers.

Just because you aimed high and failed doesn’t mean that you can’t still dream or dream again or dream anew and follow it. America is the land of second – and third, fourth and fifth – chances.

Instead of resolving for 2005 to lose twenty pounds, to curse less often or to cure some other perceived personal flaw or fault, why not aim high and live the life you’ve imagined?

It’s never too late. You can do it! Happy New Year!

Mild Bill

BLOG ON!

From the Mouthes of Babes

“…you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want.” From the mouths of babes – and Secretaries of Defense. Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was roundly criticized for making this far too snappy answer to an enlisted man on his way to Iraq. Initially, I, like most of you – including the press and members of Congress, thought that this was a terrible answer to the young man’s question. On reflection, while the answer was not satisfactory politically, there was something far deeper and more meaningful in the response that when coupled with earlier comments by the secretary is very revealing.

When we went into Afghanistan after 9/11, I recall that Mr. Rumsfeld, in the salad days of his modernization program for the military – particularly the army, was unhappy with the nature of the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda. He wanted a far more mobile army to deal with the nature of this novel enemy and the terrain we had to deal with. Somewhere along the way, he was reported to have favored Iraq as a proving ground since it offered much better targets than the barren and sparsely populated Afghan mountains.

Mr. Rumsfeld saw that our forces, however outmoded, were better suited to deal with the likes of Saddam Hussein’s army than the horrible conditions of Eastern Afghanistan and Western Pakistan. Mr. Rumsfeld and the neoconservatives had an answer: knock off Saddam as a demonstration to the heads of other Islamic states could conceivably support al Qaeda and other international terrorist organizations to show that such action could have dire consequences for their own regimes. Notwithstanding the problems we have created for ourselves in Iraq, you must consider this is a positive outcome of the Iraq War.

Had not the proposition that if you broke the pottery, you own it arisen, the neocon dream of empire might have succeeded – at least for another short while. After the anarchy and nihilism, we could have informed the survivors running the country that they too could join Saddam in the admiral’s lounge at Baghdad International if they didn’t play ball with us and agree to our strategic bases in the Western part of the country.

Sadly for the neocons, it didn’t play out that way. Their dreams of facing Iran from a position of strength and of threatening the other bad boys like Syria have gone awry. American and international politics being what they are, we’re stuck with the B.S. of nation building and spreading Western style democracy and freedom and not the position of checking the Persian mullahs and everyone else who might play footsie with Osama bin Laden.

But as I rail against the stupidity of the War in Iraq, I have to admit this positive, and, while I doubt that Libya coughed up its nuclear program solely as a result of Saddam’s being stuck at the Baghdad airport, it had to play a part in the Libyan decision. Teheran while mighty angry at us is still unlikely to risk Mr. Bush’s wrath by getting caught aiding Osama.

The administration has overreached. The president, Rumsfeld and the neocons are stuck with what they wrought. They played fast and loose with the facts and must suffer for their hubris.

But think about Rumsfeld’s comment in Kuwait. Perhaps he may well have been far more forthcoming than we gave him credit for.

In support of moderation and sanity, I’m no longer signing my pieces with my old moniker, Wild Bill. From now on – or at least until the Holiday Season is past - it’s Mild Bill, ever the voice of reason.

Happy New Year,

Mild Bill

Blog On

Not so very long ago – by my old man’s reckoning anyway – heads of state were limited in their ability to persuade and coerce through propaganda. Beginning, I suppose, with Roman and Inca runners, the state has worked incessantly to spread the word and sought to centralize its power. My guess is, however, that a Spanish farmer at the height of the Empire intent on living his life as he saw fit probably had little to fear from Rome for the act of wrong thinking. He might even be able to share his views with his neighbors without dread of retribution.

Obviously, the state progressed in its ability to spread policy much more rapidly than did our Spanish farmer, and his descendants working that same land in the time of Franco who loosed comments on the folly of the state might have heard a knock on the door in the middle of the night.

Historically, the Church served as a counter to the state and it too constantly improved in its ability to convey and enforce doctrine and to counter the state. Over time, devices such as the printing press decentralized the power to communicate still farther afield.

In the lifetimes of many of us, states have been captured by outlaws who – be they on the right or left – corrupted the communication systems of their nations and suppressed both the media and the churches and gained a monopoly on what the citizens could read, hear (radio), and see (television) and think.

Technology has made it possible even for governments with no particular intent on such monopoly to gain such overwhelming power of persuasion that coercion is not even considered a necessary part of their arsenals. This is particularly true when the plutocracy is well organized.

Churches now spread mixed messages and work against each other as much as in a concerted fashion for what was once called the body of the church. The media is divided, and the people selected by them to opine are chosen not only for their ability to think and communicate but often from within a pool with a narrow band of views. They also seem to be selected from these same elite schools dear to the hearts of the plutocrats from which the political elite also often arises.

What are we Lilliputians to do? How can we possibly hope to influence the state when the elites have decided on a given course with which we disagree? In most instances, it doesn’t matter much and from that we can take heart. Most policies and laws proposed and enacted in the United States have winners and losers, but usually the stakes are low enough that it isn’t that important. And if the losers scream loudly enough, payback can be expected shortly.

But what of war and peace? Gulliver is in our living room each night explaining why we must have war with a particular nation or collection of states or why we must act in the crisis of the day, and there is no one we can turn to for an independent evaluation. In the most dangerous period in the planet’s history, the president of the United States recognizing full well the peril had to contort our laws and policies to make ready for a war he knew was coming. Still, he had to wait until we were attacked in order to seek a declaration of war.

Our presidency has grown greatly in power since 1941. Precedents have changed and our representatives in Congress have ceded much of their power to the executive. In Vietnam, the nature of the world conflict and the bipartisan support needed to prosecute the Cold War involved us in a conflict almost without end. Only the citizens through direct action could tell our leaders that they had lost confidence in the policy of waging the war. The divisions caused by that crisis will be evident in our society until the last of the generation that fought has abandoned its power positions in our society and largely died off – a long time still to come.

The megaphone available to today’s presidents is far louder than ever before. And President Bush persuaded the people that we had to make war in Iraq. Many of us, certainly a minority, disagreed. The clarity of why we went to war and the focus on the small number of opinion makers and political leaders beating the drums made it far easier to fix responsibility for our course in Iraq. This is the war sponsored by a small group of elitists. President Bush cannot cite previous generations of leaders nor can he name allies who have been threatened by Iraq as it was posited on the day of the attack.

Yet in short order, public opinion has exposed the emperor as a man without raiment as it relates to this adventure. He and his small number of advisors – and the somewhat larger group of drummers outside the government - have had the spotlight directed on them. How did this come to be?

Clearly, the war had few fathers, and the reasons for it have been shown to be badly flawed. Much of the media served us well, but the people too spoke – clearly, moderately, and without having to take to the streets.

Regardless of his mouthings, the president is moving rapidly to extricate us from the battlefield, rebuild cracked alliances, and minimize the power of the neoconservatives who steered him into this mess.

In Vietnam, the Lilliputians had no way of communicating and had to take to the streets.

But a new day has dawned in which we tiny folk can share our views beyond our circle of friends. We can BLOG. In the Vietnam War, our voices were heard only by our closest friends and neighbors. Today, the same technology that permits the largest and loudest megaphone to be centralized can be used by the people to cry out. We Lilliputians can spread our opinions far beyond the small circle that just months ago was so restricted.

As we prepared to move on Baghdad, my circle of friends – certainly fewer than ten of us - spoke and emailed our concerns back and forth. Today, several dozens of people across the country read this message and realize that they are not alone among a tiny grouping. And they blog away, sharing messages and writing farther and farther afield. Columnists in leading newspapers cite bloggers and daily the bloggers become more powerful. Lilliputians threads constrain Gulliver and force him to recognize that he is (like victorious Roman generals of old) but a man.

Blog on! Power to the Lilliputians!

Through the Looking Glass

My last posting on President Bush and his herring on Social Security that was designed to keep our eyes off the problems in Iraq, the War on Terror, the trade and budget deficits, and our foreign relations was pretty snappy. It mixed a few metaphors and shot a few zingers. This entry is an expansion on my basic thesis that the office of the president is too powerful and dominates the media and the lives of the citizens too greatly.

Blogs are difficult. The writer has to make his points breezy and entertaining yet must be close enough to the truth and facts as to be reasonable and pursuasive.

The modern presidency is too powerful, not just this president but any and all that will succeed Mr. Bush. George Washington had few means to sway the hearts and minds of his countrymen beyond those to whom he could display himself and project his voice – damn few given those wooden teeth. None of this changed greatly until possibly Lincoln and the newspapers that championed or vilified him.

Theodore Roosevelt understood the power of the press and spoke above the heads of office holders and party officials through clever manipulation of the paper medium and by means of speaking to thousands from rail cars in dozens of venues.

TR’s distant cousin was the first to master the radio which permitted entry into almost all homes in the republic. FDR became our first modern media president and those who followed have piggy backed on his gains. Certainly, John Kennedy mastered television and the news conference and achieved and aura of near sainthood that lingers to this day. Ronald Reagan could talk the birds out of the trees and his mastery of all modes of mass communication was nearly perfect. And of course Bill Clinton raised presidential sophistry to an art form. Just what is the meaning of is?

No longer is the presidency in need of such geniuses as these to master the swaying of the masses. The techniques are well known and the successors of the presidents named above are able to sustain what has been codified in the bible of mass communication.

George W. Bush has been derided as an intellectual midget. This is far from true. He has a way with the media that is unique and which gives him power equal to the best communicators of the past. I’d call it a through the looking glass power. Here we have a leader able to redefine issues right before our eyes so effectively that what is important on one day is irrelevant the next and vice versa.

This president defined himself as a wartime president. After the events of September 11, 2001, he rallied the people and drove his approval ratings through the stratosphere by declaring a war on terror in general and al Qaeda in particular. He called upon the Taliban to expel al Qaeda, and when they refused, he sent a force to do it and to capture or kill members of both organizations.

Before this expedition had completed its mission, he decided that Iraq would become the center piece of the war on terror. The drums of war were beaten continuously and demands were made on the United Nations to enforce its resolutions. Failure of the U.N. to acquiesce to U.S. demands would force us to form our own coalition and enforce them in spite of the wishes of other member states to pursue less draconian courses.

We know that our Secretary of State on a world stage was able to show definitively to the tens of millions across the globe who saw his performance that Iraq had active programs of chemical and biological weapons development. Other intelligence available from U.S. and friendly governments confirmed these programs and either an active program to develop nuclear weapons or an intention to pursue one aggressively in the very near term.

We all know that the Security Council, despite such proof - slam dunk quality - failed to enforce its own resolutions and that in order to save the U.N. as a viable world body, America and its coalition of the willing attacked Iraq with the intent of toppling Saddam and stopping these programs. The United States acted preemptively to defend itself and its friends.

Within weeks, the president landed on an aircraft carrier off of San Diego and declared the war had been won. Casualties were minimal and the Iraqis, in addition to happily welcoming our forces as liberators, would soon be members of a democracy espousing Western style government.

The president welcomed the small insurgency that met our forces and urged these foreign fighters “to bring it on.” They did.

That weapons of mass destruction or even programs to develop them were not found was immaterial. Saddam was a vicious tyrant who deserved toppling. That we had acted not preemptively to defend ourselves but rather preventively – an illegal act under international conventions – was immaterial. He was bad and it was done.

The president ran his successful reelection campaign on a three fold strategy: he was war time president and the man to handle the war on terror and the Iraq War; second, he was the candidate of values – the defender of marriage, the foe of abortion, and champion of religion in the country, and he was for cutting taxes and the size of the federal government. He also mentioned – VERY MUCH UNDER HIS BREATH – that he would propose changes in Social Security.

He was reelected by a margin sufficient for him to claim a mandate to do all of those things. Polling and common sense would indicate that some of these issues were far more critical to his victory than others. That he was a wartime leader and the best man to pursue the war on terrorists was by far the one that I drew as the one leading to his win. Obviously, others may differ on this point.

Now within weeks of the election, the president has declared a national crisis in Social Security and is beating the drum for its reform and overhaul. Raising the payroll tax which funds the program is the only alternative that Mr. Bush will not consider – this in advance of the summit of experts on the program that will consider all options except that one.

The war ended when Saddam’s army was disbanded - the occupation in support of the Iraqi interim government will end when the elections are held next month. Our troops will remain as guests of the new Iraqi government for only as long as they are needed.

The war was a success – ending in three weeks. The successful support of the Iraqi interim establishment is about over. We’ve given the Medals of Freedom that attest to the end of all problems. And we look forward to withdrawing our support troops as soon as the new government can maintain its own safety and security. Were it not for gaffes by people such as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, the Iraq War and indeed the War on Terror itself would be banished from the media and from our homes.

So now our election is past and the conquest and liberation just about complete, Mr. Bush is the president of the poor Baby Boomers whose parents are in the process of robbing their offspring blind and of Xgeners who will get nothing.

This is a national crisis, we have only eighteen years until the Social Security fund will begin paying out more than it takes in and some forty to fifty years before it will be unable to meet its obligations. Clearly, we must act in the next session of Congress or the nation will perish in half a century. Thank God we won the Iraq War. Otherwise one might think it imprudent to take on the additional two trillion dollars in debt that the president’s program will require.

I could go on but you get my point. Lewis Carroll could not have dreamed up anything more bizarre. The president has successfully led a red herring across the path to victory in the war on terror, and millions of citizens are beating the drums to assist him solve tomorrow’s crisis today. All the while Osama bin Laden is calling on disaffected Islamists everywhere to kill me - and you.

America is a conservative country, and communicators from outlets like Fox and individuals like Rush Limbaugh have been able to convince a gigantic portion of the population that good investigative journalism is simply a euphemism for Liberalism.

I moved from being a liberal Democrat in my youth to become a moderately conservative Republican by the time of this president’s first campaign in 2000. In view of the excessive power of the presidency to redefine all issues and policies, I now classify myself simply as an out and intend – at least at this minute - to vote for divided government to check this outsize source of power.

Name That Tune

Social Security? Solving a problem that will not become a crisis for forty-two years while Baghdad burns? What gives? Sounds like a Stradivarius to me.

We’re stuck in a quagmire that can be traced directly to one man – and it’s not Osama bin Laden – that is costing Iraqi lives beyond count, troop deaths mounting toward the two thousand mark, tens of thousands of broken American bodies and minds, hundreds of billions in national treasure that could be applied to chasing down and destroying the organization that has already killed three thousand Americans, created – along with a wartime tax cut - a national budget deficit approaching half a trillion dollars, and the solution: it’s two fold – extend the tax cuts and borrow trillions so that we can save Social Security which will be in a crisis situation at the half century.

What is George on? I want some of that. My two beers at Happy Hour just don’t hack it. This is real juice that this guy’s found.

Let me get this straight. He wants to divert only a small portion of young workers’ contributions – just two percent by the administration’s reckoning – to be put in private accounts that will save them and America forty years from now? Really? By my reckoning that two percent of one hundred percent is really almost a third of the individual Social Security contribution of six and a half percent of gross income.

Our trade deficit is being financed by some of our world competitors, including China which is doing everything possible to become our military equal. What happens if they decided to stop supporting the dollar? I’ll tell you - chaos in our financial markets and our economy. Oh, are those Social Security accounts that George is pushing for insured against that eventuality? What’s that tune he’s playing on the fiddle?

This ploy on Social Security is the biggest red herring in the history of the country. We’re mired in a war of George’s own making – against a nation that did not threaten us, and all of the excuses for the war have blown up in our faces. We’ve cut taxes in a time of true crisis and created deficits that could break our economy, and he proposes to completely reform the third rail of American politics at cost of trillions.

Keep your eyes on both his hands. While George is dazzling you with changes to the greatest social safety net ever created in this land that he says are vital to our future, our present is in grave danger. And he’s saying look over here – not over there. This guy can fiddle.

I voted for this guy in 2000 thinking we were getting a uniter not a divider. But instead of Cal Coolidge, we get Chauncey Gardiner from Being There. This stuff that’s emanating from the White House is not as profound as it sounds. These are the musings of a rancher if not a gardener.

This is madness, and half the yahoos who voted for him are screaming for more. This guy doesn’t know what to do so he’s shouting to get your attention away from the debacle he’s created in our relations with other nations and a war that is bleeding us dry. All the while the people who really attacked us are gaining recruits for a jihad against us and are issuing regular calls to have their martyrs kill as many Americans as possible. Chance the gardener likes to watch, but you better watch him as he baits and switches us all.

Wildbill944

Yin and Yang in Fiction and in Life

Conflict makes fiction interesting. Without stress there are but boring stories. Yin and Yang, Men and Women, Reason and Faith, Secular and Religious and on and on – apparently there is no end to the possibilities for creating powerful conflicted fiction – and real lives.

My primary source of conflict in fiction stems from reason and faith. Obviously this is not unique since throughout history many others have identified the same possibility. Recently, I read an article quoting Mathew Arnold’s analysis of the problem in which he – again almost certainly not uniquely – saw the roots of this conflict in Western Civilization deriving from Greek and Hebrew sources. He wrote the Greeks were guided by right thinking and the ancient Hebrews by right behavior - thought v. morality.

In our time in America, this conflict is playing out again and, rightly or wrongly, the Democrats have been singled out as champions of the secular and the Republicans as paladins of the religious. Sadly, Arnold saw this as a never ending battle between the two. When religion and demands for conformity and adherence to a morality based civic structure are pushed too far, the adherents of reason leap into the breach and beat back what they see as the forces of darkness. Sadly, the struggle seems always to go too far.

Similarly we see in the Muslim world today an even more powerful struggle between these forces is in flux with no winner guaranteed. For example, in Iran the struggle between the theocrats and secularists plays out dangerously before our eyes. Clearly, this is but one such conflict in the Central Civilization, and each of them has the potential to impact and even harm the rest of the world’s peoples

In writing two novels, I sought out such conflicts but was not nearly as conscious of the formality of the struggle as at this time as I am attempting manage such a battle in my latest book. Only in the last several years have have I become able to define the conflict in my own being.

Recently, I prepared a blog posting about Thoreau. Since first reading Walden more than fifty years ago, Transcendentalism has become a major element of my personal belief system, and in the last few years, I have tried to insert that outlook into my writing. Unfortunately, I’m neither a very good Transcendentalist nor much of a philosopher, so my level of understanding of the movement is limited, but, from what I gather, the men and women who developed the concept had an equally hard time agreeing among themselves.

Just as important to this posting, I have been influenced for a number of years by Existentialism. No big deal, except of course in my mind they are just about polar opposites. Thus as I and a number of my characters move confidently in the direction of our dreams, so do I and they recognize the abyss of nothingness.

Obviously, Transcendentalism is faith based – although it is far enough from mainstream Christianity to be roundly condemned by dogmatists as Godless. On the other hand Existentialism is clearly reason and secular in origin, although it’s clear that one can be both an Existentialist and a faithful Christian.

This posting seeks neither advice nor consolation. It simply highlights one more set of possible conflicts facing us as we experience the human condition. How is the dialectic of this conflict to be settled? Which is our thesis and which the antithesis? How can we come to our synthesis? My guess would be that both Thoreau and Sartre, perhaps the best exponent of modern Existentialism, would suggest that we live authentically. But that’s difficult in both life and fiction.

So as we living beings and our near and dear fictional characters struggle with yin and yang or Transcendentalism and Existentialism or any other opposites how are we to get to resolution? Not very easily I’d say, but that’s what makes life and fiction so interesting.

I Remember Pearl Harbor

Sixty-three years ago today, planes of the Japanese Imperial Navy attacked Pearl Harbor. The next day, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, addressing a joint session of the Senate and House of Representatives described it as, “- a date which will live in infamy -…”

I was eight years old. My widowed mother had taken me to see a movie – I’ve long forgotten which one, and afterwards we climbed the stairs to our favorite Chinese Restaurant, the Nanking, in our hometown, Brockton, Massachusetts.

As was normal for a Sunday evening, there were few customers in the restaurant but we found it odd that a radio was being played loudly – sufficiently loud for everyone in the establishment to hear. We sat down and, despite the blaring radio, an old waiter served us as if nothing had happened. We had orders of our favorite Chinese Chop Suey. To this day, I have never encountered a recipe that was its equal.

Soon my mother began to listen carefully to the radio announcers and she ordered me to pay attention too. Most of the words meant little, but one phrase was repeated over and over again, “This means war.” Even then I had enough understanding of the language that those words coupled with my mother’s reaction, caused me to become a little alarmed.

After eating, we left for home. How we covered the mile and half escapes me. We often walked and sometimes we rode the bus. I remember vividly entering my uncle’s apartment on the first floor of our house. He was very agitated, and I solemnly told him there could be no doubt after the attack that, “This means war,” as if I understood the magnitude of my pronouncement.

In those days, my mother worked in the Brockton Public Market as a cashier. I often went in to the food store and, as a matter of course, took a long look at the “Jap” who was preparing some form of hot Oriental food. To the everlasting credit of the owner of the market – I believe he was Stanton Davis – no retribution was ever taken against this man.

Our lives were changed after December 7, 1941. My relatives and neighbors went off to war. More than a few of them never came home. By the time the conflict ended, I was almost twelve years old and had some real understanding of what had gone on.

Over the course of my life, I came to be acquainted with numerous Japanese and Americans of Japanese descent. I am pleased that the awful propaganda that I absorbed as a child left little lingering affect, and my relations with all of these people was harmonious.

Today, I am in the midst of writing a novel that I hope will shed new light and understanding on the events that occurred in the months following Pearl Harbor when Japanese aliens and their American descendants were forced from their homes on the West Coast and interned for years. This story was given little publicity when it took place.

I am pleased with the way the book is progressing and hope that it is as good as these unbelievable events deserve.

Good Guys / Bad Guys

DISCLAIMER: I was opposed to the War in Iraq from the beginning, but this paper raises an issue that has little to do with my original position and that is as much a question as an assertion.

As any nation prepares for war, a fundamental decision must be made, a decision that usually gets lost after the hostilities end. The nation must determine how it will treat the enemy population in its propaganda war. In the case of the War in Iraq, a conscious decision was made by the administration in Washington to demonize the regime and to portray the Iraqi citizens as victims of the government. The Kurds and Shiites were oppressed by Saddam and many Sunnis were as well. But today long after formal war related hostilities ceased and we are in the midst of a major insurgency, I wonder if our initial decision in the propaganda war was the correct one.

Just who are our enemies in Iraq? In the run up to war, the president and his surrogates went to great lengths to separate the Saddam’s Baathist regime from the Iraqi people as our enemies on the War on Terror. This approach has been used in other wars in our history, but when it suited American interests and purposes, presidents took the opposite tack. Thus, in Iraq, the general population was not the enemy while in Germany in W.W.II it was.

In thinking about this, it must be acknowledged that millions of Iraqis not in the government were opposed to American policy and supportive of the Saddam regime. Based on our own propaganda, it appears that they were probably – indeed almost certainly – a minority of the people. While in Hitler’s Germany millions – almost certainly a majority – favored the regime’s expansionist adventurism.

Why did we not define all Iraqis as the enemy or the German people as victims of a tyrannical regime and not our enemy? It was a matter of policy for our leaders. From afar it would appear that either approach could have been taken – at least before we knew all of the facts about the cruelties and abuses in Germany that had to have raised suspicions in that country’s general population.

Those of us old enough to remember W.W.II understand that the nation’s propaganda machine must gear up the population for what is coming and that clearly includes how we are expected to view our enemies. The German people in the run up to conflict were the enemy but they were spared the worst of our vilification which was reserved for their Nazis masters.

Quite the opposite, the Japanese people were closely linked to their leaders and all kinds of racial overtones were included in readying the Americans to fight them. Prior to Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, we were conditioned to think negatively about the Russian communists but when Hitler turned on them we were encouraged to think about them more positively since it was likely that they would soon be our allies against the Nazis. I won’t carry that on past 1945 when we had reverse course on them once again, but it’s clear that basic government policy gets translated when we begin to treat nations or governments as adversaries.

Movies made during W.W.II about the Japanese were as crude as possible in the depiction of our enemy. On the other hand, our Chinese allies were portrayed in the kindest possible light. This heavy duality must have been confusing to members of other Oriental ethnic groups.

The basic decision of how the population will be conditioned to view the enemy is made by all warring entities. Thus, under the very cruel regime of Stalin, significant numbers Western Soviets (Ukrainians and others) were more than willing to welcome the German invaders. Hitler’s mad policies on race and ethnicity made this an impossible gesture and the Germans greeted the potential collaborators savagely.

Conversely, the Russian people who had been treated far more cruelly than even Iraqis under Saddam rallied to the cause of the motherland and repelled the Germans. Even today after the all of the exposes on the terror of the Stalin regime, older Russians look back with nostalgia to Uncle Joe, a proven monster. Should not the Russian experience have been a guide for how a repressed population might react to invaders? No matter how cruel the regime, when the country is being attacked will not the citizens react adversely to an invading or occupying force?

How does a national administration make the decision? How do they determine that when they fight a nation its people will be defined as good or bad or willing participants or victims of their leaders? It seems to me that this is a judgment call based on all kinds of factors that include the breadth of perceived popular support for the government, how that decision will influence the outcome or duration of the war, the prospects for an easier settlement when hostilities end, and so on and so forth.

A basic question to be resolved in making the call on defining the population of the likely enemy is its general support for the regime, discounting the difficulties and conflicts that are leading to the war. Another way of determining this is asking whether the regime has the `consent of the governed.’ This concept underlies the basic question and purpose of government. Clearly, while there are deep divisions within democracies such as ours, the social compact is based on such consent.

The United States by its election last month ratified the Iraq War as having the consent of the governed. Many - even most - of us may disapprove of the war. We may see it as a mistake. We may feel it hurts us in the larger War on Terror. But while the Administration knows that there is much unhappiness with this war it is also cognizant that we are backing the government and recognize that we’re all in it together. The government of the Unites States is a government of, by and for the people and operates with the consent of the governed.

The Administration and the Republican majorities in both Houses of Congress know well that the War in Iraq has only nominal support and must be resolved sometime in the not too distant future or they are likely to be kicked of office as no longer having the confidence of or the consent of the citizenry.

I have not seen this debated about any war, but it must be done at some level of the government in every conflict. Obviously, its importance varies greatly, depending on the circumstances. After the war is won or lost, the question becomes a minor one since as in a losing effort such as in Germany in W.W.II the regime is destroyed and the question of how they thought about people such as the Russians is no longer material. In a winning effort, an immoral or cruel view of a defeated enemy population also gets lost in the euphoria and to history.

In Iraq, the decision by the Bush Administration was that we would define Saddam and his regime as evil and the people of the country as victims of the government. This, like every other decision was based on intelligence. There was a large Iraqi expatriate community providing input and our own and allied sources were also used. Most important was the idea that we were going to war for a wide variety of purposes, including the noble one of liberating long suffering victims of Saddam.

The decision was made and the propaganda war was set in motion. My guess, based on reading many articles and listening to many interviews was that the regime would collapse and the people of Iraq would welcome us and fall in line with the overthrow and establishment of a regime friendly to America.

In retrospect, this seems to be one of the gravest errors of the war, not because the Iraqis were not victims, not because Saddam did not have the consent of the governed, and not because we weren’t initially hated but because we were soon to be occupiers in another civilization. And in that context we are unable to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to friends and enemies walking the streets of Baghdad..

Our troops are now in the position of not being able to find insurgents who have blended in with the general population. And, of course, since we’ve defined the vast majority of Iraqis as welcoming allies. We’ve exposed our men and women in the military to what may well be an unacceptable risk. Had we gone to war with Iraq instead of just the regime, it would be incumbent upon innocent Iraqis to self identify themselves as our friends instead of placing our troops in the unenviable position of having to pick out the enemy insurgents from the general population.

My reaction is that instead of laughing at the stupidity of the decision which almost all Americans, including late night comedians, do we should be calling for an independent investigation on whether that basic decision was properly made in good faith and not a ploy to garner public support for an ill conceived war. If the latter was the finding, then just how badly has the decision affected our pacification of Iraq and how has it endangered our troops.

Had we defined Iraq as the enemy, we could approach the centers of insurgency in a far more aggressive fashion, and it would be up to far more of the good guys to show their white hats.

I’m no expert but I’d sure like to see an examination of this question and the need to hold people accountable for making a bad decision that may be costing us more in casualties and treasure than the opposite decision would..