Thursday, June 26, 2008

The Dream Team: Barack & Bubba (Not The Slickster)!

No wonder Senator James Webb was insulted by The Dubster's arrogance in asking about Webb's "boy," serving in Iraq at the time. The Dubster is not fit to kiss Senator Webb's shoes (or the younger Webb's combat boots). Senator Webb's boxing record at the Naval Academy was besmirched by a loss to the likes of Oliver North (Webb's despised classmate), but Webb redeemed himself by working for the reelection of Senator Charles Robb to deny Oliver North a U.S. Senate seat. Then, Webb achieved an upset of another Dubster-wannabe when he defeated George Allen, Jr. for the U.S. Senate in 2006. Put The Dubster, Ollie, and Allen, Jr. in a bag and shake it. Reach in and pull out any of the three and you'd have a handful of loser. James Webb will very likely not be The Hopester's running mate. Webb is a man of principle and a man of strong beliefs. Webb does not turn with the prevailing wind. Also note that Webb, a warrior, urged diplomacy (without conditions) as a first response to Iran. James Webb was a real hero in Vietnam. The Geezer was shot down and captured in North Viet Nam because The Geezer disobeyed orders and flew at a lower altitude and was shot down by enemy missiles. Even worse, The Geezer's arrogance resulted in the death of The Geezer's wingman on that ill-fated mission. Give me James Webb over 10,000 Geezers. if this is (fair & balanced) appreciation of genuine heroism, so be it.

[x Rolling Stone]
Virginia Senator James Webb: Washington's Most Unlikely Revolutionary
By Jeff Sharlet

As night settles between the mountain ridges that rise on either side of Lebanon, Virginia, a rough little strip of a town in the state's southwestern corner, Sen. James Webb's people assemble in the Russell County Courthouse. They're coal miners and miners' wives, a third of them in the camouflage strike gear of the United Mine Workers, many of them wearing ball caps declaring them veterans of Korea, Vietnam or Iraq. A leather-skinned veteran named Eldridge tells me in a raspy whisper that he voted for Webb because Webb, a novelist and historian, had gotten these people, mountain people, right in his most recent book, a best-selling history of the Scots-Irish in America called Born Fighting. "We've got our own ghosts and goblins," Eldridge says, and he thinks Webb sees them. "He has the Second Sight."

Eldridge is the third person this evening to cite the supernatural — a kind of cultural memory, maybe — as a reason for supporting Webb, a fact that doesn't surprise Virginia's new Democratic senator. "My grandmother taught me my ghosts," he tells me, his voice a low, considered rumble.

The miners file into the courtroom, and Webb takes his place at the front, his hands in the pockets of his jeans. His natural expression is one of restrained anger, his ruddy face tucked into a bull neck as if to emphasize the glower of his foggy blue eyes. He's handsome like Jimmy Cagney, but with a jaw that would dent an anvil. For years he kept a punching bag close to his desk, and at sixty-one he still looks like he could, and gladly would, hold his own in a bar brawl. Earlier that day, he'd donned a headlamp for a quarter-mile descent into Laurel Mountain Deep Mine, and at the courthouse his neck is still gray with coal dust from his trip underground.

A local politico, ballooning out of a Kelly green blazer, asks the Russell County Democratic Committee to stand. Up rise the miners in their labor fatigues. "We're all claiming cousins with you now," says green blazer, and Webb blushes and smiles; three of his actual cousins, including a small-town big named Jimmy Webb, are in the crowd.

Webb's family — his "blood," he says — has lived in the hollows of Big Moccasin Gap, as the area is called, for more than 200 years, but Webb grew up on military bases all over the country. When he entered the U.S. Naval Academy in 1964, he listed thirty-three home addresses on his application. His father was an Air Force officer and a veteran of World War II; Webb was a Marine officer in Vietnam; and his son, Jimmy, is a Marine just returned from Iraq, where he fought in Ramadi. Last year Webb campaigned wearing a pair of Jimmy's combat boots to remind himself why he was running: to end the war. He refuses to talk to the public about his son. When asked about the boots, he'd say that was the wrong question: "It's not why I'm wearing the boots, it's why I'm wearing the necktie."

When he ran for public office, Webb didn't campaign on his military record, he simply offered himself as a fighter. In Fields of Fire, Webb's first novel and one of the best depictions of combat in Vietnam, the protagonist, Lt. Robert E. Lee Hodges, sums up his approach to confrontation: "I fight," the character declares, "because we have always fought. It doesn't matter who." In Vietnam, Webb became the most highly decorated Marine from his Naval Academy class: two Purple Hearts, two Bronze Stars, the Silver Star and the Navy Cross, second only to the Medal of Honor. He's enamored of what he calls the "warrior aristocracy" tradition of the Scots-Irish, and he made captain at age twenty-three, though he thinks of himself as an enlisted man — one soldier among many.

Webb loves war. He's been studying military history as long as he can read. He loves war so much he can't stand to see one bungled as badly as Bush has the one in Iraq. In place of a plan, Bush offers a posture; where there should have been a strategy, there was only ideology. That's what makes Webb so angry about Iraq. It's not a fight, it's a cause, either a wonk's dream or an oilman's conspiracy, depending on how worked up Webb is when you ask him. There's only the cause driving this stupidity into the sand, not the needs of a nation. It's the work of the elites Webb has always hated. "America's top tier . . . are literally living in a different country," Webb charges. "Few among them send their children to public schools; fewer still send their loved ones to war."

Just a few years ago, Webb described America's elites in terms that might be familiar to the fans of Fox News. Liberals were "cultural Marxists," and "the upper crust of academia and the pampered salons of Hollywood" were a fifth column waging war on American traditions. But Iraq has refocused his views. Now when he speaks of the elites he more often means "the military-industrial complex," and "the Cheney factor," the corporate chieftains he describes as the new robber barons. The war and the crimes of class -- sending Americans to Iraq and their jobs to China -- are becoming interwoven in his mind. Iraq has aligned his angers.

For years Webb worked for Republicans, a career that culminated in a stint as Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Navy. But when his old nemesis Oliver North, a Naval Academy classmate whom he has despised for decades, ran for Senate in 1994, Webb campaigned for Democrat Chuck Robb just to stop him, and he started identifying himself as an independent. For his own campaign in 2006, he billed himself as a Reagan Democrat. Barely a year later, he's a "Jacksonian Democrat," after Andrew Jackson — another man of war who went to Washington at the head of a populist crusade. His authorial "James" shortened now to a folksy "Jim," Captain Webb is marching leftward, and he's taking many of his old views with him: his dedication to military power, the chip he carries on his shoulder on behalf of the Southern white man he believes is the "whipping boy" for American racism, and most of all, the populism that hates both the Democratic and Republican upper classes.

In Lebanon, Webb starts his speech perfunctorily, talking about bipartisanship and finding common ground on the war, but then he seems to hear himself going Beltway. His voice jumps up a note; in creeps scorn for his own compromises. "This isn't about bipartisanship," he says. "It's not about Iraq." He glares around the room. "It's about 9,000 votes in Virginia." Fuck, yes, nod the miners and their wives. It's about the people who put Webb over the top by less than one half of one percent.

Webb shouldn't have won — he started with no money and no support, not even from the Democrats, who backed a telecommunications lobbyist named Harris Miller. He upset Miller in the primary only to face Republican Senator George Allen, then considered one of the front-runners for the 2008 presidential nomination. But he beat Allen, too, and the men and women in this room were the reason: Conventional wisdom held that Webb, as an anti-war Democrat, would take Northern Virginia and get slaughtered in the rest of the state. Webb did win the North, but he also won more of the Southern vote than anyone expected. They didn't elect Webb to compromise; they sent him to fight. Not for the Democratic Party, for them. Webb campaigned on two main themes, foreign policy and "economic fairness," a term he's still defining. To him it means an increased minimum wage, which the new Democratic Senate promptly passed; a commitment to health insurance for all, if not a plan to make it happen; the conviction that "free trade" is not "fair trade," even if he hasn't decided what constitutes the latter; and most of all, a simmering fury that CEOs make on average 400 times more than the typical worker.

"After 9/11," Webb tells the miners, "the old labels don't apply. The country is just a different place. And now we can remake the party system in these United States if we can get Reagan Democrats — or whatever you want to call 'em — if we can bring them back, we will remake politics. You don't measure the health of a society from the top down, but from the bottom up."

Before Born Fighting, Webb's books were animated by a critique of cultural snobbery, not capitalism. Then the war in Iraq revealed a new enemy to Webb: the system itself, the distortion of democracy that makes the poor fight wars from which only the wealthy benefit. "Class law," he calls it, is "a disguise that allowed certain privileges to flow to a few dominant groups at the expense of the many." The system, he concluded, needs to be turned upside down. "That's economic fairness," he tells the miners. "We have lost the formula. But this is the place, here in Virginia, this is the place where we are going to remake it."

It's time for questions. Several are about Iraq. One man has three sons in the Marines and worries about the health care they'll receive when — not if, in his mind — they are wounded. A mother with a son overseas wants to know if we're going to fight Iran. Another man's son's tour has been extended, which seems to him akin to the bullying the miners get from the coal companies.

"That's right," is the sum of Webb's answers. He wants more money for vets, and he's introduced a bill to stop Bush — or Hillary — from rushing into Iran without congressional approval, and he's fighting for a cap on deployments; beyond that, answers are lacking. Webb the novelist sees the problem: This story doesn't have a happy ending. But Webb the politician toes the Democratic line, declaring Iraq "solvable," as if it were a crossword, while Webb the warrior's plan for Iraq is diplomacy. He's been quietly meeting with Condoleezza Rice, he'll tell me later, urging talks with the Iranians. Meanwhile, the bodies are piling up, there and here: "We got people dying in the mines," says one woman. Dozens every year in preventable accidents and 1,500 every year of black lung, more than the annual U.S. death toll in Iraq. "That's right," says Webb again, and that seems to please the miners and their wives. They know they're right, but it's been a long time since a U.S. senator said so.

"We've got people in desperate need right here," announces one woman. "I'm talking about water." Towns like Lebanon used to get federal grants for basic services, but under Bush they're offered only loans. Their pipes are rusting, their kids are getting sick from dirty water. Another woman speaks up about oxygen concentrators, a crucial piece of medical equipment in coal country. The Bush administration slashed federal aid for the machines, says the woman, and people will die gasping for breath in their own beds. What will Webb do for them?

"I can look into that," he says, then checks himself. These are his people, and now "looking into that" will not be enough. This is the paradox Webb faces: He's been elected as an old-school populist in a two-party system that has little room for or interest in his crusade. And here are Webb's troops: Men in need of oxygen concentrators, women who can't pay their bills, miners in union-issue camouflage leaning hard on canes or on big, sturdy wives who pretend for their broken husbands' sakes that it's they who cling. The last big strike by the United Mine Workers is nearly two decades past, which was when they took up the faded fatigues that some of them are wearing tonight.

One of the strike's leaders is in the courtroom, a man named Jackie Stump. I ask if he thinks Webb will help the union push back against the bosses. He shrugs. He doesn't expect another big labor fight in his lifetime. The union won that strike — preserving health benefits for disabled miners — but lost the war, not on the picket line but in the courtrooms, where what Webb now calls "class law" crippled the union with fines in retribution for its revolt.

The mine into which Webb descended is one of the last three union coal operations in Virginia. The sons and daughters of Lebanon leave Russell County, some for Iraq, and at least one didn't come back: a former valedictorian and all-region defensive end from Lebanon High named Donald Ryan McGlothlin, who was killed November 16th, 2005, in Al-Anbar province. McGlothlin's father had already decided to support Webb's campaign when he learned that, like him, the candidate was wearing his son's combat boots in tribute. Ryan didn't believe in the war in Iraq, feeling the real war was to be fought in Afghanistan, but he felt a powerful duty to his mission.

"I would never vote for George Bush," he told his father, "but I'd take a bullet for him." Bush recruited the fallen Marine's memory for a speech "to scotch up support for the war," his father says. The family gave Bush's speechwriters their consent. "The person was not who you owed your loyalty to," McGlothlin says, recounting his son's view. "It was the leader in the abstract."

There is the war over there, and a different kind of war over here. What will happen in coal country, Jackie Stump predicts, is that the union will get weaker and weaker until someday some kids who've never heard of organized labor will look around at their working conditions and say to each other, 'We'd better get together and do something about this.' And when they do, the bosses will try to knock them down. "If they're hungry enough," says Stump, "they'll hit back."

That's why he likes Webb, he says. Webb understands the fight must continue, even if you're not sure what you're fighting for.

Democracy in Iraq, or clean water in Virginia?

Old men in jungle fatigues, or young soldiers in desert camouflage?

Body armor? Or oxygen machines?

In February of 2006, Webb called the Democratic political strategist Dave Saunders, and together they plotted to end the career of Senator George Allen, a handsome dunce in the model of George W. who stood to be re-elected by thirty-three points. The Democrats planned to run Harris Miller, an anti-labor lobbyist dedicated to outsourcing IT jobs overseas. Saunders, his drawl as deep and wide as his connections in the tough little Dixie towns where most Democrats fear to tread, persuaded Webb that he was the man to take out first Miller -- who outspent Webb three to one -- then Allen. Saunders, known as "Mudcat" throughout the state, has for years been working on rebuilding Democratic strength in the South through an alliance of African-Americans and the Southern white men he calls "Bubbas." "We were in the same place in terms of 'How do you help people down here?' " says Webb. "How do you get the good out of this culture? At the end of this conversation, I said, 'I'll do this. Let's test the theory.' "

Webb is so white he wrote a book about it; Saunders quickly realized Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America could become the rare campaign book voters might actually read, one that doesn't pull punches. In its opening pages, Webb lists the slurs by which his people are known: "Rednecks. Trailer-park trash. Racists. Cannon fodder." The Scots-Irish — Protestant Scots who fought the British in Scotland, then in Ireland, then in America — have indeed died disproportionately in America's wars. But the Bubbas, Webb argues, were and are not so much cannon fodder as a warrior caste. He considers poor white Southerners victims of the "monstrous mousetrap" they themselves built for African-Americans. "The Southern redneck" he writes, has become the "veritable poster child of liberal hatred and disgust . . . the emblem of everything that had kept the black man down. No matter that the country-club whites had always held the key to the Big House . . . at the expense of disadvantaged blacks and whites alike."

Why did liberals ignore class? In part because Bubbas so often played the role assigned to them, but also because the poor whites, "Jacksonian populists," as Webb likes to call them, "are the greatest obstacles to what might be called the collectivist taming of America, symbolized by the edicts of political correctness."

It's not that Webb is racist, he'd just like to afford poor whites the status of victim too. In fact, he descends from a line of Southern whites at odds with the region's racist traditions, and he's especially proud of his fight in 1982 to get a representation of a black soldier added to the statue at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. "I put a black man on the Mall," he said in 1991, "and they" — bigots and the art snobs who preferred Maya Lin's abstract wall — "can kiss my ass."

Webb believes that a re-energized army of Bubbas will remake American politics, restoring gun lovers, hunters and NASCAR fans to the place they once held at the heart of American populism. "Fight. Sing. Drink. Pray," he titled one chapter in Born Fighting, describing a culture that at its best created country music and at its worst invented the lynch mob.

But Webb is as aware of the dangers of populism as he is of its potential. "On the one hand," he says, "populism created American politics. On the other it created a formula that's been continuously abused from that time forward. The notions that went into Jacksonian democracy are so commonly turned into rhetoric rather than substance. You know, the log cabin, 'We're for the little people.' " Webb rolls his eyes. "The emotional buttons."

When Webb decided to run, no one but Mudcat Saunders and his friend the writer Tom Wolfe (who insists Webb will be president one day) thought he could wage more than a symbolic fight. Sometimes it seemed he wouldn't even manage that. When Mudcat arranged for a band to play for the campaign, Webb overheard him telling the musicians to learn the Marine Corps hymn. "Jim never screamed at me," Mudcat remembers. "He just takes me outside and he stares at me and he says, 'One thing I want to make very clear to you. In no way, shape or form is the Marine Corps hymn to be used in my campaign. I will never use that song for political gain.' " Yessir, said Mudcat: "I thought, 'Well, fuck, we just gave up our own best ace card.' "

They didn't need it; George Allen charted his own demise. Re-election to the Senate seemed like such a sure thing that he began smirking during his speeches, as if aping Bush's worst qualities would make him the president's heir. He called an Indian-American Webb volunteer "macaca," and then he took offense at the news that his mother had been born Jewish, defiantly proclaiming his determination to eat a ham sandwich to prove his Christian bona fides.

Webb isn't a natural campaigner; he didn't have to be. When he defeated Allen in one of the slimmest, and certainly the most unexpected, Democratic victory of 2006, pundits didn't declare him a giant-killer. Instead, they ruled it victory by default — curmudgeon beats boob.

A few weeks into his term, though, those same pundits were beginning to see in Webb what Mudcat and Wolfe recognize: the politician, yes, but also the soldier and the storyteller to whom voters thrill. In January, the Democratic Party tapped him to respond to Bush's State of the Union address. Halfway through his speech, he pulled out an old black-and-white photograph and held it before the camera as if politics were show-and-tell. "This is my father," he said, pointing at a barely discernible figure in the center, "when he was a young Air Force captain, flying cargo planes during the Berlin Airlift. He sent us the picture from Germany as we waited for him back here at home. When I was a small boy, I used to take the picture to bed with me every night, because for more than three years my father was deployed, unable to live with us full-time, serving overseas or in bases where there was no family housing. I still keep it, to remind me of the sacrifices that my mother and others had to make, over and over again, as my father gladly served our country."

It was brilliant, and it had the added advantage of being true. "I was proud to follow in his footsteps," he continued, grabbing hold of every macho American man within earshot of a television, "serving as a Marine in Vietnam. My brother did as well, serving as a Marine helicopter pilot. My son has joined the tradition, now serving as an infantry Marine in Iraq." Webb's fighting family had trusted America's elected leaders, he said. "We owed them our loyalty," he said, "but they owed us sound judgment."

Webb was almost shaking with his sense of betrayal. Here was the synthesis of his three identities -- warrior, poet and politician -- bound up in one angry man voted up to the big house by Bubbas with guns, pissed off about losing their jobs to China and their children to Iraq. Lest the lesson be lost, he closed with a warning, recalling a time a hundred years ago when "the dispossessed workers at the bottom were threatening revolt." Once again, he seemed to be saying, such a time is at hand.

[Jeff Sharlet is a journalist and author best known for writing about religious subcultures in the United States. He is a contributing editor for Harper's and Rolling Stone. His work has also appeared in The Washington Post, Mother Jones, New York, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia Journalism Review, Oxford American, New Statesman, Forward, Nerve, and The Baffler.]

Copyright © 2007 Rolling Stone


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How To Talk To The Dubster, Jarhead-Style

James Webb was a member of the Naval Academy's boxing team. What a dream. The Marine veteran gives The Dubster what Patty gave the drum: a first-rate beating. The smartass Idiot in Chief wouldn't understand anything else. If only The Dubster had tried out one of his frat-boy nicknames on Senator Webb. Wham! Bam! Get the smelling salts! What a delicious mental image. If this is (fair & balanced) woolgathering, so be it.

[x Wahington Post]
In Following His Own Script, Webb May Test Senate's Limits
By Michael D. Shear

At a recent (2006) White House reception for freshman members of Congress, Virginia's newest senator tried to avoid President Bush. Democrat James Webb declined to stand in a presidential receiving line or to have his picture taken with the man he had often criticized on the stump this fall. But it wasn't long before Bush found him.

"How's your boy?" Bush asked, referring to Webb's son, a Marine serving in Iraq.

"I'd like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President," Webb responded, echoing a campaign theme.

"That's not what I asked you," Bush said. "How's your boy?"

"That's between me and my boy, Mr. President," Webb said coldly, ending the conversation on the State Floor of the East Wing of the White House.

Webb was narrowly elected to the U.S. Senate this month with a brash, unpolished style that helped win over independent voters in Virginia and earned him support from national party leaders. Now, his Democratic colleagues in the Senate are getting a close-up view of the former boxer, military officer and Republican who is joining their ranks.

If the exchange with Bush two weeks ago is any indication, Webb won't be a wallflower, especially when it comes to the war in Iraq. And he won't stick to a script drafted by top Democrats.

"I'm not particularly interested in having a picture of me and George W. Bush on my wall," Webb said in an interview yesterday in which he confirmed the exchange between him and Bush. "No offense to the institution of the presidency, and I'm certainly looking forward to working with him and his administration. [But] leaders do some symbolic things to try to convey who they are and what the message is."

In the days after the election, Webb's Democratic colleagues on Capitol Hill went out of their way to make nice with Bush and be seen by his side. House Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) sat down for a lunch and photo opportunity with Bush, as did Democratic leaders in the Senate.

Not Webb, who said he tried to avoid a confrontation with Bush at the White House reception but did not shy away from one when the president approached.

The White House declined to discuss the encounter. "As a general matter, we do not comment on private receptions hosted by the president at the White House," said White House spokeswoman Dana M. Perino.

Webb said he has "strong ideas," but he also insisted that — as a former Marine in Vietnam — he knows how to work in a place such as the Senate, where being part of a team is important.

He plans to push for a new GI bill for soldiers who have served in the days since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but not as a freshman senator. He has approached the Democratic leadership about getting senior legislators to sponsor the bill when the 110th Congress convenes in January.

A strong backer of gun rights, Webb may find himself at odds with many in his party. He expressed support during the campaign for a bill by his opponent, Sen. George Allen (R-Va.), that would allow concealed weapons in national parks. But an aide said this week that Webb will review Allen's legislation.

"There are going to be times when I've got some strong ideas, but I'm not looking to simply be a renegade," he said. "I think people in the Democratic Party leadership have already begun to understand that I know how to work inside a structure."

His party's leaders hope that he means it.

Top Democratic senators, including incoming Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), had invested their money and prestige in Webb before he won the party primary in June. His victory was also theirs, but now they have to make sure he's not a liability.

"He's not a typical politician. He really has deep convictions," said Schumer, who headed the Senate Democrats' campaign arm. "We saw this in the campaign. We would have disagreements. But when you made a persuasive argument, he would say, 'You're right.' I am truly not worried about it. He understands the need to be part of a team."

One senior Democratic staff member on Capitol Hill, who spoke on condition that he not be identified so he could speak freely about the new senator, said that Webb's lack of political polish was part of his charm as a candidate but could be a problem as a senator.

"I think he's going to be a total pain. He is going to do things his own way. That's a good thing and a bad thing," the staff member said. But he said that Webb's personality may be just what the Senate needs. "You need a little of everything. Some element of that personality is helpful."

Webb has started to put himself out front. On "Meet the Press" last week, he dispensed with the normal banter with host Tim Russert to talk seriously about Iraq and the need for economic justice in the United States.

He announced yesterday that he has hired Paul J. Reagan, a communications director for former governor Mark R. Warner (D) and a former chief of staff for U.S. Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.). It will be Reagan's job to help his boss navigate the intricacies of Washington and Capitol Hill without losing the essence of his personality.

"The relationships he has built over his long career will serve me well," Webb said in a statement yesterday.

Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D), who campaigned hard to get Webb elected, said yesterday that the first-time officeholder doesn't have the finesse of most experienced politicians.

"He is not a backslapper," Kaine said. "There are different models that succeed in politics. There's the hail-fellow-well-met model of backslapping. That's not his style."

But Kaine said that Webb's background, including a stint as Ronald Reagan's Navy secretary, will make him an important — if unpredictable — voice on the war in Iraq.

"There are no senators who have that everyday anxiety that he has as a dad with a youngster on the front lines. That gives him gravitas and credibility on this issue," Kaine said. "People in the Senate, I'm sure, will agree with him or disagree with him on issue to issue. But they won't doubt that he's coming at it from a real sense of duty."

[Michael D. Shear is the Washington Post National Political Reporter. Post staff writer Peter Baker contributed to this report.]

Copyright © 2006 The Washington Post Company


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William Broyles Is Not A Chickenhawk And He Can Pronounce "Nuclear" Correctly

NPR is running in the background thanks to the marvel of Internet radio and a blurb of The Dubster played as background to the breaking story that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North) had blinked in the standoff over North Korea's nuclear weapons program. The Idiot in Chief babbled about "new-cue-ler" weapons and I nearly hit the power button on the computer to shut him up. The Dubster is a buffoon and a shameful blot on our national honor. Texas Monthly's founding editor, William Broyles, wrote an editorial in the TM July issue and it clearly states what damage The Dubster and his war criminal gang have done to the United States and to Iraq. The bill of indictment is devastating. Out Now! If this is a (fair & balanced) appeal to genuine patriotism, so be it.

[x Texas Monthly]
Mission Impossible: Why We Should End The War In Iraq — Now
By William Broyles

My grandfather served in World War I, my father in World War II. I was a Marine in Vietnam. The longest love affair of my life is with the United States Marine Corps. I believe in its values, its commitment, its ethic of sacrifice and excellence. In a soft world of self-indulgence, there’s no fat in the Marine Corps soul. I’m so proud of my service that forty years later tears still come to my eyes when I hear the first words of the Marine Corps hymn: “From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli.”

Shortly after 9/11, my son David, who had just graduated from the University of Texas with a degree in English, enlisted with great idealism. He endured grueling training to become an Air Force pararescueman (which is like a Navy SEAL) and served three tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan with elite Special Operations troops. When he was in the war zone, I couldn’t answer the phone at night. I couldn’t watch the news. I couldn’t understand how the rest of the country was acting as if there weren’t a war on. And I was one of the lucky ones. My son came home.

With each tour in Iraq, my son’s idealism eroded. He no longer believed the war was crucial to America’s security. He still served with pride and dedication, but his dedication was no longer to the elusive goals of the war—it was to his own honor, to the men in his unit, and to its lifesaving mission. His team members were some of the finest Americans I’ve ever met. They did their duty and then some. But they deserved better. Everyone who has served and sacrificed in Iraq does.

When David finished his enlistment, he dedicated himself to helping wounded American veterans. He started a nonprofit and swam the Strait of Gibraltar with another military buddy to raise money. Matt Cook, whose story of his own service in Iraq appears in this issue (“Soldier”), produced Swim, a documentary about their effort. The film features real men and women who were terribly injured and disfigured. They are among thousands of Iraq war veterans whose faces look like melted wax, who can’t see or hear or walk, whose disability benefits were delayed or denied, whose spouses lost their jobs trying to take care of them, who’ve lost their homes and been forgotten. More than a thousand a month attempt suicide. Twenty percent are affected with post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injuries, including David’s best friend.

When you send men and women to war, you don’t just ask them to risk their lives. You ask them to do what every fiber of their being and every value tells them not to do: You ask them to kill. There’d better be a good reason. You’d better be willing to use overwhelming force, and you’d better have clear objectives and a sound exit strategy. You’d better not run the war with such incompetence that many of its former military leaders believe it’s been botched (Texas Monthly Talks). Because if you abuse the patriotism and the sacrifice of the men and women you send to war, you create a hole in their souls—and in the soul of America.

When I see friends from the National Guard or the Reserves called up, then called up again, then called up yet again; when I see former troops who served multiple tours in the war zone pulled out of civilian life and sent back to the war; when I see talk show hosts and politicians cheerleading for a war they wouldn’t dream of serving in themselves, I take it personally. When the remains of dead young Americans are brought home in secret and some are cremated in pet cemeteries; when we’ve created nearly 5 million refugees in Iraq and taken in just 692; when we cage people without trials for years and treat them like animals; when supporters of the war oppose a new GI Bill that would give enough money for veterans like my son to go to college—when they say the men and women who served three and four war tours deserve only enough to cover a fraction of their college education, even though they gave 100 percent of their service—that’s personal too.

I’ve had enough of this war. I’ve had enough of the pictures of good American families, the mom with her arms around her children and the caption saying she’d just celebrated her wedding anniversary when she was killed in Iraq. I’ve had enough of the pictures of wounded Americans trying to learn to walk or talk or eat again. I’ve had enough of the pictures they won’t let us see but which I can too vividly imagine. Of the Iraqi children dead in our bombings, their homes destroyed, their families blown away. Of the millions of Iraqi refugees without homes or jobs. Of the return of Islamic fundamentalism to Iraq in our wake, with women murdered for not being married or not wearing a head scarf.

I’ve had enough of throwing billions of our hard-earned dollars down a rat hole of corruption. Fifteen billion unaccounted for by the Pentagon. Nine billion unaccounted for by the Coalition Provisional Authority. Another $1.8 billion in seized Iraqi assets that simply disappeared. When I’d finished my year in Vietnam, I couldn’t wait to get on that freedom bird and go home, but they wouldn’t let me leave. You know why? Because I’d signed out a shovel and hadn’t returned it. A shovel! The supply sergeant told me the taxpayers had paid for that shovel and I’d better bring it back or he wouldn’t sign my departure papers. I had to buy one for five bucks on the black market and turn it in before I got my ticket home. That’s how America used to do things.

How much will this war cost, all in? Three trillion dollars? Four (the current long-term estimate)? Think of what we could do with that. We could provide universal health care, fix Social Security, rebuild America’s crumbling dams and bridges, fund an energy policy to free us from foreign oil, and on and on. We could truly invest in our security and prosperity before it’s too late. Instead, we’re squandering our precious blood and resources in Iraq, a country the size of California, trying to determine the destiny of 27 million people who are riven by tribal and religious differences we can’t fathom and who speak languages we don’t understand.

Our brave American troops can overthrow Saddam Hussein, they can “surge” to provide temporary security in selected areas, they can train and advise the Iraqis. They’ve done all that, and done it well. But they can’t control the destiny of Iraq. We’ve been fighting there longer than we fought in World War I and World War II put together. That’s long enough. It’s time for the Iraqis to step up and take over their own country. It’s time for us to get out and let them.

Every day we stay we spend lives and treasure we can’t afford to lose. Every day we stay we strengthen our adversaries. Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah are all far stronger today than when the war began. The president of  Iran tours Baghdad and is greeted with the flowers Dick Cheney promised us. Our leaders visit in secret and seldom dare leave the Green Zone. The main Shiite leader forbids his millions of followers to sell Americans a single grain of rice. Our allies today are the same Sunni warlords we fought yesterday, who support us for the same reason Osama bin Laden once supported us against the Russians in Afghanistan—because it’s good for them, for now.

Once we’re gone, we won’t continue to fuel the hatred of the Muslim world. We won’t make more terrorists with each bomb we drop and each carful of civilians we blast apart, and we won’t alienate people around the world who used to look to us for moral leadership. The president warns that if we were to leave tomorrow, the terrorists would be emboldened, those bent on genocide would be empowered, and our prestige would plummet. But our presence has already done that. If we stay five or ten more years, the same things could happen the day we leave.

The truth is, no one can predict what’s going to happen when we get out. In 1968 presidential candidate Richard Nixon said he had a plan to end the Vietnam War. He changed his mind after he was elected. He said we couldn’t settle for defeat. We had to win. If we got out right away, he told us, our mortal enemies would win. The Soviet Union would be strengthened around the world, and Chinese Communists would establish a beachhead in Southeast Asia. America would be on the road to disaster. Sound familiar? Nixon kept the war going another five years. Some 22,000 more Americans died, and so did as many as a million more Vietnamese.

Was Nixon right? Was that terrible carnage worth it? Well, four years after the last American helicopter left Saigon, the Vietnamese went to war against . . . guess who? The Chinese Communists. And fourteen years after America pulled out, the Berlin Wall fell. It was the Soviet Union that collapsed, not America. Everything that Nixon had predicted was wrong. We were stronger after we got out of Vietnam, not weaker. The same could happen when we get out of Iraq.

Yes, everyone wants freedom. But they also want to be safe in their homes. They want their children to be safe in their schools. And they love their countries the same way we do. They don’t want foreigners telling them how to run their country, kicking down their doors, and dropping bombs on their villages any more than we would. Because even if we believe that we’re doing it for them, that we’re America and we’re the good guys, their children are still dead, their parents are still buried in the rubble, and they will still hate us—until the day we leave.

So let’s bring our troops home now. Let’s give them parades and take care of them and their families. They deserve it. Let’s give the Iraqis economic, technical, and diplomatic support to help them stand up for themselves. Let’s play the Marine Corps hymn and call a whole new generation of Americans to the honor of military service, and this time let’s give them the leadership they deserve.

[William Broyles attended Rice University, earning a B.A. in History in 1966. After graduating from Rice, Broyles studied as a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University where he earned an M.A. in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics in 1968. William Broyles was the founding editor (1973) of Texas Monthly. Broyles later edited Newsweek and is the author of Brothers in Arms, an account of his return to Vietnam as a journalist 15 years after leading a platoon there as a young Marine lieutenant. He has since become a highly regarded screenwriter with credits for "Apollo 13," "Cast Away," "Entrapment," "Planet of the Apes" (remake), "Unfaithful," "The Polar Express," and "Jarhead."]

Copyright © 2008 Texas Monthly, Inc.


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