“We need a new success strategy in Iraq. What do we do now? We decide what constitutes success.”
-General Wesley Clark

“As Americans start to come home, will we leave Iraq with our fundamental security interests intact or will we have traded a dictator for chaos? To preserve our…security interests…will require the Administration not to stay the course, but to change course and do it now.”
-Democratic Senator Joe Biden

“We owe it to those risking their lives to speak truth to power. Asking tough questions isn’t pessimism. It’s patriotism.”
-Democratic Senator John Kerry

“Consider the facts: global terrorist attacks classified as ‘significant’ by the State Department have TRIPLED under George W. Bush’s watch…Iraq has become a new haven for global terrorists, and moved closer to the brink of all-out sectarian civil war…In the absence of fresh ideas, the American public has had to settle for a simplistic debate centered on a false choice—should US forces ‘stay the course’ in Iraq or ‘cut and run’?”
-Center for American Progress


Since my son is a Marine on his second deployment to the deadly Sunni triangle of Iraq (and his cousin already there with his third Marine deployment; other cousin soon to follow with the U.S. Army Special Forces), and since I come from a family of distinguished combat veterans, I write frequently about my fears and frustrations regarding the war in Iraq.

And several times, readers have commented that the Democrats don’t have a plan and that all anybody ever does is “rant” and launch “personal attacks” on the president without putting forth any ideas as to what can be done to improve the situation in Iraq.

This is a myth.

It is also a myth that most all Democrats simply want to pull our troops out now, helter-skelter—and let Iraq take care of its own problems, that Democrats are weak on matters of national security and modern warfare and cannot be trusted to protect Americans during the global war on terror.

Several days ago I promised to put together a post on what kinds of ideas and strategies that thinking Democrats have put forth in the public arena that address those concerns. I have done so.

Contrary to political sloganizing, name-calling, and broad-brushing (on both sides), this issue is understandably complex. There are a number of levels that need to be—and have been—addressed by the Democrats. Because I know that a number of my readers are other Marine and Army parents, I owe it to them—if not to myself and all my readers—to do as thorough a treatment on this issue as I can. However, I also understand that the very nature of a blog is necessarily brief.

So what I’m going to do is divide the information into a sort of five-pronged fork, if you will. Each prong represents an area that needs serious attention in coming months if we’re going to salvage anything out of this near-debacle: Political, Diplomatic, Military, Reconstruction, and the War at Home.

Each one of the sources I’m using has addressed each of these issues. What I’m going to do is present a sort of round-table discussion. In this post, I’ll introduce you to my “speakers,” give their qualifications, and explain where they first put forth these ideas.

You may notice a few trends. One, these ideas have been proposed in highly public arenas, and yet have somehow not become common public knowledge. Partly it is because of the simplistic mythology-slogans thrown around, and partly it is because the Democrats have not, well, shouted as loudly as their opponents. And, as pointed out earlier, the Democrats do not have a commander-in-chief and are not the majority party in congress. It’s easy for them to be drowned out in all the pomp and circumstance.

And another thing: sometimes as I was reading, I’d read something that I know has recently been implemented by the Administration, which led me to believe that they were coming up with the same ideas, which is fine as long as they work. But then I started looking at the dates. Many times, an idea put forth by a Democrat and soundly ignored by the media…would suddenly turn up on a press release and “announced” by the Administration several months later.

You can draw your own conclusions as to whether the Administration deserves all the credit for them.

You can read all the posts at once and get an arc for the whole thing, or scan down and pick out the segments that most interest you—but I must say that a fork doesn’t work very well with just one prong. The point is for all of them to be working together at once.


As an aside, I’d like to add that in all my research and reading, I did not hear one of the Democratic sources use the word VICTORY once, and I only found a couple of references to WIN or WINNING.

Instead, they talked about STRATEGY for SUCCESS. They understand that you can’t fight an unconventional war with conventional means, and that “winning” and “losing” aren’t always as clear in real life as they are in the movies. When you reach the point to where men and women are risking their lives just to cast a vote, then the time has come for much more thoughtful consideration of a complicated and complex situation.

One of my readers commented on my “rage” about this war. Well, one of the reasons I keep getting so angry at this Administration is their habitual tendency to slap easy slogans on complicated debates and try to force the American people to see something as an EITHER/OR situation.

As the Center for American Progress puts it: “In the absence of fresh ideas, the American public has had to settle for a simplistic debate centered on a FALSE CHOICE: stay the course or cut and run.”

The source of my rage is not that I’m an “extremist liberal,”—again, simplistic labeling.

It is that I see this president and his Administration handling this war like a POLITICAL CAMPAIGN and not like a life or death struggle.

Another source of my frustration is the Administration’s sunny-side-up, patronizing reassurances that things are really so much better than we think, when the troops and others coming back from over there say this is just not so.

As Senator Biden said, “The gap between the Administration’s rhetoric and the reality of Iraq has opened a huge credibility chasm.”

According to recent polls, a full TWO-THIRDS of the American people do not trust what this president and his administration tell them about this war.

Imagine what WWII would have been like if, during FDR’s fireside chats, 2/3 of the listeners didn’t trust or believe him?

That said, there has been plenty of ink and blogger-noise out there about all the mistakes made by this Administration in this war. I’ve tried very hard not to go into all that again or to dwell on it. My conservative readers want to know what the Democrats would do in their place, and as far as I can tell, this is as close to a consensus as I can come up with as long as there is no presidential candidate to be a spokesperson.

The suggestions put forth by the speakers at this roundtable are not all perfect, and I don’t necessarily agree with each and every one. But they are well-informed, sincere, and well worth considering at this crucial time in our history.

And they deserve far more respect than the simple slogan, cut and run.


One more thing: I’m going to post these six sections in reverse order, last to first, so that the post you are reading for today’s date IS the first post of the series. Read DOWN to reach the end. That way, you don’t have to start in the middle or bottom and scroll to the top and wander around dazed and confused. The five sections remaining will be posted below this one. As I said, read them in order or skip around as you have time and come back to read more later on.

If you want to post a comment, that’s always encouraged of course, but you may want to read all six sections before commenting on an individual section, because your comment or question may be addressed further down.

Thanks for hangin’ in there with me.

Our Guests:

General Wesley Clark:
Rhodes scholar, 34-yr. service US Army, 4-star General, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. Final military command, saved 1.5 million Albanians from ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, helped bring peace to Bosnia. Ideas put forth in op-ed pieces for the Washington Post, dated Auguest 26, 2005, and the New York Times, December 6, 2005. (www.securingamerica.com/issues/iraqplan).

Senator Joe Biden:
34 years US Senate, top Democratic Senator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Comments made, in a major address on the Iraqi war at the Council of Foreign Relations, New York City, November 21, 20005. (www.biden.senate.gov/newsroom/details)

Senator John Kerry:
Served two tours in Vietnam, decorated many times including the Silver Star and Combat V, later active in Vietnam Veterans Against the War, 4-term US Senator, 19 years Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Remarks in a major address on the Iraqi war at Georgetown University, October 26, 2005. (www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/speeches)

Article:
“Strategic Redeployment: A Progressive Plan for Iraq and the Struggle Against Violent Extremists,” by Lawrence Korb, assistant secretary of defense for the Reagan Administration, and Brian Katulis, director of democracy and public diplomacy on the national security team at the Center For American Progress. (www.americanprogress.org). This plan can also be accessed through a link from the official site of the Democratic party at www.democrats.org.)

(And yeah, I gave the wrong URL address for the Democratic Party last week. Chalk it up to war-mom stress.)

The Real Mission: Strategies for Stabilizing Iraq POLITICALLY

General Clark: “When the president flew out to the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and posed under the banner that read, Mission Accomplished, he made it clear that he did not understand the scope of the mission.”

All of the speakers here acknowledged that the situation in Iraq is not only terribly complex and complicated, but that the next six months will be absolutely crucial in deciding whether this country is able to stabilize itself and get on-track to being able to protect itself, govern itself, and provide basic services to its populace—or whether it will degenerate into a catastrophic civil war that could spread to the entire region.

One of my readers asked in a comment, basically, What does it matter whether or not there’s a civil war in Iraq? Those people have been fighting against one another for centuries. Let’s get out of there and let them fight it out.

But no country stands alone. They all have borders, neighbors, allies and enemies. What happens within the borders of one country can ignite a world war, as when a political ruler was assassinated in Sarajevo, sparking WWI.

The reason this is important is that in Iraq, the Shiite Muslims are the overwhelming majority. Saddam Hussein was a Sunni Muslim, so even though they were in the minority, they ruled the country with an iron fist. Now the Shiites have taken control of the Constitutional process and of the government, through the recent elections.

Iran is a predominantly Shiite nation, and in their recent elections, a religious zealot took over the helm, one with avowed hatred of our ally Israel and one who has ignored all international demands that Iran quit developing nuclear capabilities.

The dangers of not stabilizing Iraq politically were eloquently set forth by General Clark just this past December in the New York Times: “While Amercan troops have been fighting and dying against the Sunni rebels and foreign jihadists, the Shiite clerics in Iraq have achieved fundamental political goals: capturing oil revenues, strengthening the role of Islam in the state, and building up formidable militias that will defend their gains and advance their causes as the Americans draw down and leave.

“Iraq’s neighbors, then, see it evolving into a Shiite-dominated, Iranian buffer-state that will strengthen Tehran’s power in the Persian Gulf just as it seeks nuclear weapons and intensifies its rhetoric against Israel.”

Not that I’m a big fan of Saddam’s or anything, but under his rule, the country was not dominated by clerics who, in their most extreme form, can create a horrific situation such as what we saw in Afghanistan under the Taliban. Now that he’s gone, the clerics have begun wielding their influence. So far, it has been measured, but before we can pull out, we must ensure that there are checks and balances on their power.

The Constitution that was recently voted on in Iraq heavily favors the Shiites. This is partly the Sunni’s own fault, because they did not participate fully in that election, but when they began to show an interest in the political process, they were promised that some changes would be made in that very Constitution that would be more fair toward them.

But when the Shiites made such a strong showing at the polls, they began to renig on that promise, setting off dangerous rumblings in the Sunni community. As Senator Biden put it, “The Iraqi Constitution cannot be salvaged by military might alone. Unless changes are made by spring, it will be the document that divides.”

“If there’s no political concensus,” he continues, “our troops will be forced to fight a civil war on behalf of the Kurds and Shiites against the Sunnis.”

Even more important to the stability of Iraq is the necessity to get a government underway that can actually function.

All the speakers at the roundtable expressed immense frustration at the Administration’s habit of trotting out numbers of Iraqi troops that have been trained to take over their own security.

But as an expert on the Middle East, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times wrote in a piece called “The Measure of Success,” published December 21, 2005, “The Iraqi Army will have the will to fight only if its soldiers have a government they believe in and are motivated to defend.”

Senator Biden spelled it out clearly when he explained how government ministries in Iraq, “make FEMA look like a model of efficiency.”

Here is the most important political point, so important I’m going to bold-face it.
“Even the most capable troops will not make a difference if they cannot be supplied, sustained, and directed.” (Senator Biden.)

In other words—you can have the most beautifully trained troops in the world in Iraq, but if their government cannot PAY THEM, cannot ARM THEM, cannot HOUSE AND FEED THEM…then what have you got?

Beautifully trained troops for the Shiite and Sunni militias to fight their beautiful civil war.

Other political issues that need to be settled (quickly) according to our speakers are:

* Oil revenues must go to a central government and not to the Shiite majority, (just because that’s where it is pumped out of the ground)
* The Shiites must not form an autonomous group in the south.
* The Kurds must not be permitted to form an independent country.
* All ethnic and religious groups must be fairly represented in the government ministries.

There are several suggestions for ways we can help these goals along. First of all, everyone agrees that Ambassador Khalilzad is doing a skillful and diplomatic job, but the Bush Administration left a void after Paul Bremer departed for MONTHS. The Iraqis were forced to hammer out their Constitution without our guidance and assistance, which is one reason it has so many problems.

However, Ambassador Khalilzad (better late than never) can’t do it alone.

Both General Clark and Senator Biden proposed—as long as five months ago—that the American civilian diplomatic corps, as well as advisors and technical experts, be required to serve in Iraq for as long as two years, just as the military is asked to do. They can provide invaluable assistance in working out the knots that keep snarling up the Iraqi bureaucracy.

Just the other day, I heard a press release from Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice that said just that—from now on, the foreign service will be ordered to spend some time in Iraq.

It’s a good idea. I wonder where she got it.

Prime Minister Tony Blair of Great Britain has also floated an idea that individual countries could be partnered with various ministries to aid in making them more efficient. His idea was ignored by the US but it might be worth studying further.

Next I’m going to talk about things that Democratic leaders have suggested the world community can do to help us stabilize Iraq.

“Listen more carefully to the many voices in the region”…DIPLOMACY

General Clark: “The US should tone down its raw rhetoric for US-style democracy as an answer to all problems and instead listen more carefully to the many voices within the region.”

First of all, all of our speakers agreed that we’ve got to find some way to engage Iran in regional diplomacy. For one thing, Iraq shares a long border with Iran, and as long as we are avowed enemies of Iran, then we will not receive any cooperation from them on securing the borders. And as long as they support jihad against Americans, then their border will be widely open to any terrorists who want to cross over.

The Center for American Progress points out that we have an equally delicate diplomatic chore with North Korea, who also has nuclear capability and was included in the president’s so-called, “Axis of Evil.”

However, we’ve been quite successful in back-door negotiations with North Korea by including six nations in the talks, countries such as China, which shares our discomfort at the idea of a North Korea nuclear-armed and dangerous. All of our roundtable speakers agree that involving our Muslim allies, such as Saudi Arabia, in these fragile negotiations would be to our benefit.

Senator John Kerry: “Neighbors such as Saudi must have a larger stake in a stable Iraq. We’ve been their strong ally and now it’s their turn.”

Senator Joe Biden proposes what he called, “another Jim Baker mission.” (Jim Baker was a powerful Republican advisor to several presidents, including Reagan and George H.W. Bush.) “The president can ask him to convene a conference with our Gulf allies. These countries have seen huge windfall oil profits, from our pocket books. We’ve gone to war twice in the past decade to protect them and preserve security. It is past time for them to step up—and give back.”

Senator Joe Biden: “Persuade Iraq’s neighbors to wield influence with Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds for political compromise. They’ll do it because they don’t want to see a civil war.”

General Clark acknowledged that, “Syria and Iran don’t want us to succeed because they fear they are next on our invasion list.” He suggests using “carrots and sticks” to ensure their cooperation. This is a man who helped to stop genocide in Bosnia by working with Bosnians, Croatians, and Kosovoans—all of whom hated one another,.

General Clark gets right to the point: “We have to stop ignoring Tehran’s meddling and begin a public dialogue on respecting Iraqi independence, which will make it easier to get international support if (and when) they break their word.”

Remember, during the last elections, when a truck was seized by the Iraqi Army from Iran…and it was full of ballots? Why was there not an outcry by this Administration over that? Most people aren’t even aware it happened.

All our speakers were frustrated at the Administration’s insistence on complete monopoly and exclusive control of the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq. As General Clark put it, “That has cost us financial and military support of other nations and made America a bigger target for terror.”

He adds, “Turning our backs on our Allies makes it harder to protect our interests. We need our Allies.”

Senator Biden suggests something called a Contact Group as “Iraq’s primary international interlocutor.” He points out that three previous Republican Secretaries of State—George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, and Colin Powell—have also called for such regional strategy. “It’s what the Clinton Administration did in the Balkans. It’s what the Bush Administration did in Afghanistan. Organized, sustained international engagement can make all the difference.”

All of the speakers referred to offers that have been made from such countries as France, Germany, and Egypt to help in the training of the Iraqi police. They all think it would be an excellent way in which to ease the tremendous strain on our troops who are having to do everything.

But the Administration has, so far, ignored the offers.

Back to what General Clark said about the growing influence of Iran in Iraqi affairs and their growing power in the region: “What a disaster it would be if the real winner in Iraq turned out to be Iran, a country that supports terrorism and opposes most of what we stand for.”

In the following segment, I’ll discuss military options and strategies proposed or discussed by our roundtable.

How Not to Repeat the Failures of Vietnam: Democratic Military Strategies for Success

“President Bush and his team are repeating the failure of Vietnam—failing to craft a realistic and effective policy, and in its place, simply demanding that the American people show resolve.” (General Clark)

Frustrated though the Democratic thinkers at our roundtable are, they are also all in agreement on the same point: We must not pull out too soon or too fast. Contrary to popular Republican mythology, most Democrats share this view, though their peace-activist left-wing often gets the media attention.

General Clark: “It would be a mistake now to pull out…Instead, we need a strategy to create a stable democratizing and peaceful state in Iraq—a strategy this Administration has failed to develop and articulate.” However, he adds, “Early exit means retreat or defeat.”

Senator Biden: Success in Iraq, “will require the Administration not to STAY the course, but to CHANGE course and do it now.”

As stated at the beginning of this series of posts, it is a FALSE CHOICE to say that, basically, “you are either with us or you are against us.” In other words, “stay the course,” or “cut and run.”

It may make great sound bites for a political campaign, but it has nothing to do with waging modern warfare.

However, due to the fact that we are fighting this war after a full generation, basically, of peace, at a time when there is no national draft—a war that has nowhere near the massive coalition of allied forces as that put together by the first President Bush for the Gulf War—then the same troops are having to fight the same war, over and over again.

Three deployments are routine, sometimes more, and military morale, recruitment, and reenlistment is at an all-time low. As my son said, “I could have a really great career with the Marine Corps, but man, I don’t wanna be fighting Operation Iraqi Freedom Twenty.”

He, my nephew, and thousands of other fine soldiers are getting out of the military as quickly as they legally can, because they’re exhausted, burned out, and fed up by this war. Many of them love the service, but they know that every time they step foot in that bloody desert, their odds of never coming home again are increased.

Senator Biden: “Even if more troops (to secure Iraq) made sense, we don’t have more to give. We cannot sustain what we have now beyond next spring unless we go to four or five deployments.”

I’d like to add an aside here, too, that the divorce rate in the military has sky-rocketed since the war began. Yes, our all-volunteer military is proud to serve, but they are sacrificing their families, their sanity, and sometimes their lives.

The first key to a successful strategy in Iraq is agreed to by all: “Give the Sunnis a stake in the future of their country ,” says Senator Kerry, “that drains support for the Sunni insurgency and isolates the hard-core Baathists (supporters of Saddam) and jihadists (foreign terrorists.)”

General Clark flat-out suggests that we, “offer amnesty to the insurgents who lay down their arms.”

Now, as the mother and aunt of Marines who’ve been shot at by these same insurgents, yeah, I’ll admit, that one stings a bit. But I am smart enough to know that the al Qaeda insurgency, led by the bloodthirsty Abu Musab al Zarkawi—are terrorists. Most Iraqi Sunnis are horrified at the tactics practiced by al Qaeda in Iraq, such as blowing up mosques, funeral marches, children, and emergency workers responding—as well as Sunni Muslim men who try to join the Iraqi police and Army.

This resentment is growing—and it is a different resentment felt from the standard poor Sunni young man who rages against Americans they see as occupiers and whom they blame for the raw sewage in their streets, the lack of electricity, the toxic water in their home faucets, and the 40% unemployment rate.

Offering these same young men a chance to get involved in the political process of their government if they lay down their arms worked very well with the Irish Republican Army, which had waged similar warfare on occupying British soldiers during decades of “The Troubles” in Ireland. Yasser Arafat—that old terrorist—won the Pulitzer Prize for Peace for trying to work with the hated Israel that he himself had fought against for years.

Besides, every rifle or explosive device turned over to American forces is one less that could be used against them.

Greater control of the borders is also a Democratic concern—and not just the Syrian border. General Clark suggests 20,000 troops deployed along Iraq’s porous borders, as well as four to six Brigade combat teams in an intensified effort in the Sunni triangle.

As far as training of the Iraqi Army, Senator Kerry recommends “putting the training on a six-month wartime footing.”

As Americans draw down their presence in Iraq, security will still have to be maintained. In order to prove—once and for all—that the US is not an “occupying force,” General Clark recommends transforming the military presence to a NATO operation. He points out that General Abizaid, who is the commander of the US forces in the Middle East, would still remain in charge, but he would report to a NATO council, as General Clark once did in Kosovo.

“With NATO support and UN endorsement, we can expect the Arab countries to step in. Their presence would prove that this is not an American occupation but an international regional effort to stabilize Iraq.”

Meanwhile, we could start bringing our boys and girls home.

The Democratic Party has endorsed a plan, put forth by the Center for American Progress, called Strategic Redeployment.

This would be a military realignment and a redistribution of troops more in keeping with a global war on terror, and would streamline with an American drawdown of deployments to Iraq—some 80,000 by the end of 2006 and most of the rest by the end of ’07.

Here is how the troops could be redeployed:

46,000 National Guard and Reservists to come home to the US to shore up gaps in homeland security
20,000 troops to bolster US and NATO troops in Afghanistan, and counterterrorism ops in Africa and Asia
14,000 in Kuwait, a Marine Expeditionary Force to strike at terrorist camps


Senator Biden also thinks that, for a while anyway, we should leave from 20,000 to 40,000 troops in Iraq as what he calls a Rapid Reactionary force to prevent jihadists from establishing a permanent base in Iraq and to back up the Iraqi army with technical and surveillance assistance.

And I think it only fair to point out here that Representative John Murtha, who was roundly criticized for wanting to “cut and run,” also advocated having a Rapid Reactionary Force, deployed to Kuwait and at the ready to respond quickly to any crises in Iraq.

Commenting upon how overstretched the American military is now, the Center for American Progress puts it this way: “We sent the Army to Iraq to save Iraq. Now we have to redeploy the Army to save the Army.”
All of the roundtable is in favor of expanding our Special Forces, so that they may strike more effectively at terrorist cells world-wide.

They were crucial in the war in Afghanistan, but were yanked out before they could complete their tasks, in order to be used in Iraq. Consequently, the Taliban is once again gaining a foothold in Afghanistan. We need more of these specialized troops to help us hold to our gains in the Middle East.

The Center for American Progress would like to see President Bush state, flat-out, that the US has no interest in establishing permanent military bases in Iraq—again, to lay to rest the insurgent’s fears that the US is an occupying power.

And Senator Kerry addresses the president’s constant insistence that the US will stay indefinitely: “An open-ended declaration to stay ‘as long as it takes’ lets Iraqi factions maneuver for their own political advantage by making us stay as long as they want.”

It’s not just Senator Kerry who believes this way. General George Casey, commander of the US troops in Iraq states, flat-out, that the American presence in Iraq not only fuels the insurgency’s rebellion against American occupiers, but actually, “extends the amount of time for Iraqi security forces to be self-reliant.”

In other words, as long as we’re there, why do they have to bother learning how to defend themselves?

And finally, the Center for American Progress points out that we’re not just fighting a war against IED’s and rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire—we’re fighting a WAR OF WORDS, of misinformation on the Arab street and hateful ideology.

They say that, if we don’t fight a more skillful battle of communication, then any American drawdown of forces will be portrayed on the Arab street and in the Arab media as a defeat.

“Don’t rely on Cold War communication in a complex world,” they say. “Short-lived listening tours of the Middle East like the one conducted by Undersecretary Karen Hughes earlier this fall do nothing to help us in the important battle of perceptions.”

The Center urges a more sophisticated approach at countering Internet attacks that gain street credibility in the Arab world. They point out that disinformation needs to be fought as quickly and effectively as the insurgency, if we want to win anything in the Middle East.

Next…Reconstruction.

Reconstruction Corruption

The Reconstruction effort in Iraq is a nasty nightmare. According to the New York Times, a recent audit of American financial practices in Iraq has detailed widespread squandering of funds, of American officials certifying work as having been completed and paying off the project when clearly it had not been, of millions of dollars in cash found stuffed in such places as bathroom safes and unlocked footlockers, nonexistent paperwork, and rampant rebuilding projects that had been abandoned.

This is a sore point with me, because when the Pentagon—egged on by Vice President Dick Cheney, the former CEO—gave no-bid contracts to Halliburton and shut out even such countries as Great Britain, who were helping us fight this miserable war—I cried foul.

My Republican husband argued with me, saying that the only reason Halliburton had gotten the multi-billion dollar contracts was because they were experienced in such matters and would be able to get the job done.

Well, the job has most certainly NOT been done.

Part of the reason for this is that, since the Administration failed to secure such things as massive ammunition dumps during the days of widespread looting that followed the initial invasion, then a well-armed insurgency has developed into a security migraine.

But as much as this Administration would like to blame the insurgency for EVERYTHING (an insurgency they not only failed to predict but claimed, repeatedly, was either a “gang of thugs,” “mostly foreigners,” or “in its final throes”), there are more complicated reasons, such as the fact that, in some crucial cases, American engineers just screwed up and then didn’t have the money allocated to fix their own mistakes.

Consequently, 60% of projects designed to improve Iraq’s water supply, sewer systems and drinking water will remain unfinished.

More than 125 of 425 electricity projects will be left unfinished. And oil production has dropped to PRE-WAR levels.

“We were told before the war, “ says Senator Biden, “that oil would pay for the reconstruction. Two and one-half years after Saddam’s statue fell, Iraq is still not exporting what it did before the war—700,000 barrels per day below target. Roughly $15 billion in lost revenue per year.”

Clearly, as the Center for American Progress points out, there needs to be “greater oversight and transparency surrounding reconstruction projects.”

Of course, oversight is not something for which this Administration is known.

Senator Biden also suggests, “I would redirect our spending to Iraqi contractors and away from multinationals. Iraqis don’t have to add a line item worth 40% of the value of the contract for security. I’m glad to save American taxpayers money.”

Military commanders in the field know that, as Senator Biden says, “We can’t defeat the insurgency unless we have a reconstruction program that makes a difference to ordinary Iraqis.”

The reason reconstruction is as important as military strategy is that, as long as most of the country has raw sewage running in the streets, lights on for only half of every day, unsafe water, and 40% unemployment…then hoards of angry young men are going to be only too eager to join the insurgency and kill Americans.

So far, untold millions—if not billions—of our taxpaying dollars have been squandered in fraud, mismanagement, ineptitude, and corruption in Iraq. The president is not going to ask for any more money for Iraqi reconstruction in this budget.

I’m not saying we can afford to spend any more. What I am saying is that until and unless we let other countries and other contractors bid on and participate in the rebuilding of Iraq, this war is lost, period.

The last aspect I’ll be discussing—which follows—is what I call “The War at Home.” Controversies and disagreements continue to swirl here at home about how this war is being fought, and I have some thoughts on that.

The War at Home

Our reasons for being dragged into this war in the first place, as presented by this Administration, changed every few months, depending. First, we were going to war because the big bad evil ruler Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and our country was at dire risk that he would use them some day.

When no weapons of mass destruction were found, well, then we were told we were really there to “liberate the Iraqi people.” At first, when the Iraqi people started blowing us up and shooting us, well, they were victims of foreign terrorists. But when most of the insurgents turned out to be Iraqis, then our reason for being there changed again, and suddenly, we were charged with “spreading democracy in the Middle East.”

We were told the insurgency was nothing but a “gang of thugs.” We were told it was “in its last throes.” Neither of which turned out to be true.

As the war dragged on and casualties mounted, first, we were told that we had trained something like 210,000 Iraqi Army troops. That number suddenly plummeted to 1,000 when an American Army general couldn’t stand it any more and told the truth. Now, we are told we have 210,000 troops trained again.

Of course, as we pointed out earlier, all the training in the world doesn’t matter if the government can’t function well enough to pay and arm the soldiers. As it is, armed militias are gaining great power. There is a Constitutional ban against them, and our roundtable urges that Iraq be pressured to enforce that ban in order to help ensure that civil war does not erupt.

When widespread looting exploded in Iraq after the invasion, our esteemed Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, said that things like that happen, no big deal, and that Iraq was no more unsafe than some cities in the US.

Yes, he really compared Iraq to the US in terms of violence. I wrote my son in Fallujah and said, “Thank God. Maybe next time you’ll be deployed to Detroit.”

The Marines and troops with whom I have spoken have told stories showing how the situation has absolutely deteriorated, from their first deployments—could drive down to the next post to visit a buddy—to their second deployments—little kids throwing rocks at them, mounting casualties and danger—to their third deployments—lives at risk every moment of every day and can’t trust ANYBODY.

When they come home, they can’t hardly drive down the road in the family car because they remain vigilant for roadside bombs.

Until this Administration deigns to tell the truth about what is happening over there, until they are willing to listen to their own advisors as to what the situation really is, and until they stop throwing around simplistic catch-phrases and
soothing the American public with false declarations of how wonderful everything is and deal with the reality, until they reach out to their allies—and enemies—for help and mutual compromises, then, as Senator Biden says, “If we fail to implement a plan…Iraq will become a Bush-fulfilling prophecy—a terrorist training ground and a full-blown civil war.”

And if that happens, he adds, “then all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put Iraq together again.”

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I hope this lengthy analysis of the war in Iraq and the Democratic response to it, their thoughtful strategies for success, have provided you with some information you may not have had.

I hope, if nothing else, that you will distrust slogans and simplistic catch-phrases from either side and will take the time to find out for yourself this reality: We’re all in this together.

The Democrats are not the enemy.

And the Republicans are not the ONLY ONES capable of handling the global war on terror or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Electing a Democrat will not, as the vice president said, result in a “mushroom cloud” of some terrorist attack on our soil because our enemies assume the Democrats are weak.

This is all so much rhetoric. It is political, and it does not belong in a serious discussion about just what in the world we are all going to do to bring my son and my nephew and all the sons and daughters home, what in the world we are all going to do to find peace on this planet, and what in the world we are all going to do to keep from destroying one another, not just abroad, but here at home.

"Your blog has become...just typical extreme left Bush-bashing."

Oh my Loooord, you gotta laugh. I mean REALLY.

Obviously whoever wrote this has never in his or her life ever SEEN "extreme left Bush-bashing." Drop in over at Democrats.com (not the official Democratic Party website, which would be Democrats.NET) for starters, or hang out at Buzzflash or My Left Wing or Rudepundit or Americablog or Daily Kos or Crooks and Liars...I don't think I need to go on, but there are hundreds of websites out there full of inflammatory hate-Bush rhetoric, some of which makes me blush.

In point of fact, I have not "bashed" Bush once. I have stated truth, such as, that he used his congressman father's influence to get into the National Guard and thus avoid the draft and the Vietnam war--anyone who doubts this was not around back then, when there was a draft and if you weren't in college and were a certain age and male, you got drafted. They didn't even have the lottery then. Poor guys or guys without influential friends or relatives who really really didn't want to go to war ran off to Canada or whatever they could, and rich guys and guys with connections caught a break, (unless they chose to step up, as Al Gore and John Kerry did, neither of whom had to.) That's just the way it was during that long and bloody messy war. That is a fact.

The only reason the streets are not full of war protesters these days is because there is no draft. Re-instate the draft and see how quickly the campuses turn to mush.

I did not, in fact, refer to Bush and Cheney as chickenhawks. The subject of my blog at that time was Jacob Goldberg, who had claimed that he couldn't go into the service and go off to war because it would be a hardship on his family. I stated fact, and pointed out that it's awfully hard on all the men and women over there who've left families for the second or third time. Dick Cheney did indeed take five draft deferments when he was called up and said later that he had "other priorities" than going off to war. This is fact.

Stating an uncomfortable truth or fact is most assuredly NOT "bashing." Over on Buzzflash, for example, they refer to conservative Republicans as "Busheviks" and Bush's famous "base" as "Stepford Kool-Aid drinking." That Bush is malevolent and evil. And so on. You won't find things like that on my blog, and if you think what I do is "bashing," well, you need to get out more, a little bit away from all your comfort zones where everywhere you go, everybody you know agrees with you.

What may appear to a conservative reading my blog as a "rant," is in fact, a blog. It is my thoughts. If they sound frustrated at times, it could be because I have a son in Fallujah at the moment, for his second go-round--he helped clean that city out of insurgents in November of 2004. If he dies, I want a clear understanding as to WHY. I have that right. If you do not have a child in this war or you have not gone over there yourself, you do not have the right to "bash" me for my honest questions, fears, and anxieties about the disorganized, unprepared way in which we entered this war and the chaotic way it has been handled by the same people who started it in the first place.

And if you do not think it has been handled in a chaotic way, perhaps it would help if you had three family members who have been over there not once, not twice, but THREE times. My nephew says, every time he goes over there, it gets worse and worse. Tell me it isn't, anonymous, and I'll decide whom to believe, you or the guys fighting it.

Now, about this much-exalted PLAN PLAN WHERE'S THE DEMOCRATIC PLAN????

First of all, I must say that as I write this, it is late at night and I've been away from my computer for several days. There are some things I intend to look up so that I can be accurate, and I will do so in the next few days.

Suffice it to say, there are two points I'd like to make on that at this time. One, THE DEMOCRATS DON'T HAVE A COMMANDER IN CHIEF. THE REPUBLICANS DO. There isn't a presidential election going on at the moment, therefore, the Democrats do not have one candidate to get behind.

Therefore, the views on this war cut a broad swath, just as they do in the general populace, and among thoughtful Republicans as well. Some want to pull out now to safer deserts. BUT THAT IS A VERY SMALL MINORITY OF THE PARTY. When Representative John Murtha made his stand, ONLY ONE DEMOCRATIC CONGRESSMAN JOINED HIM. That would be Nancy Pelosi, who is a liberal.

But the vast majority of Democrats disagree with that--as do I, as a matter of fact. We're there now. As former Secretary of State Colin Powell said, "we broke it, so we have to pay for it." If we pull out now, civil war with almost assuredly erupt, so we have to figure out how to keep that from happening without having to stay there indefinitely, simply because our military is stretched way way too thin. The same guys are fighting this war over and over again, and they're exhausted, their families are falling apart, and the budget is straining. (I know one guy in the service who is over there right now for his FOURTH time. He's married and has several kids. This is shameful.)

However, believe it or not, several thoughtful Democrats have put forth some amazing, well-strategized plans for dealing with this mess.

But the so-called liberal media has not said one thing or focused even one episode of "60 Minutes" on any of these plans. No, instead, they've gone into hysterical overdrive because ONE Democrat advocated pulling out.

And the Republican attack machine was only too quick to label all the rest of the Democrats as weak "cut-and-runners" who didn't know anything to do but bail out, and consequently, it becomes accepted wisdom to anyone who does not take the trouble to actually LOOK IT UP.

The main mistake the Democratic party makes, as a whole, is not responding more forcefully when they are attacked. They need to be more aggressive and put the Republicans on the ropes more often, put the Republicans on the defensive, instead of the other way around. They could learn something from Karl Rove. I get very frustrated with them all the time. And, I'd like to see these war plans get more exposure than just the New York Times op-ed pages, but until the next election, when one voice can speak for the party after a nomination, then whose plan do you put forth?

Some of these Democratic plans make a great deal of sense. When I've had a little time in the next couple days to do the research, I'll put forth some of the points here, with proper acknowledgments. Otherwise I'm just paraphrasing from memory, and as I said, I like to state fact here, and how I feel about those facts.

In the meantime, the Republicans have the bully pulpit on the execution of this war. And so far, I haven't seen a damn thing but "stay the course" and "stay until victory."

There IS no victory when you are dealing with an insurgency and a vast network of individual terrorist cells. This is not a conventional war. Like my son and my nephew both say, the same people who come out in the day and shake the hands of the Marines and let their kids accept candy from the Marines and sell oranges at the roadside stand to the Marines, all smiles and warmth and hospitality for the military photographers...are the very same ones who creep out under cover of darkness and blow those same Marines to smitherines.

They can't trust anyone. They have to burn their mail to protect their families at home. They don't even know if they can believe their interpreters. They can' t drive down the road if a piece of trash blows across it because it could be a bomb. One time my son walked into a house and it was packed to the gills with explosives, enough to leave a 30-foot crater in the ground when they destroyed it later. His blood turned to ice water and all he could do was back slowly out.

Tell me how you can claim "victory" over that? Huh? Tell me.

Anonymous, if you think this is serious left-wing Bush bashing, well, I'm sorry for you. This is honest and open debate and is anything BUT bashing. Like I said, look around a little and you'll see what bashing is. Over here, you won't get it. All you'll get is one woman terrified for her son and two nephews and all their buddies, frustrated and angry and seeking answers. And MarineMom, I welcome any back-and-forth between anybody. I respect the opinions of any and all who choose to post them on this blog, and I welcome honest and open debate.

Give me a couple days, and I'll put together the brightest and the best that Democratic thinkers have been able to put forth on how best to work with what we have in Iraq and Afghanistan. Read it, and wonder how and why mythologies get started, like, all any of us wants to do is cut and run.

"I get tired of all the ungenerous, narrow-minded rants of the liberal Bush-haters."

In response to this post I'd like to make a list:

*"Slick Willy"
*Rush Limbaugh
*Ann Coulter
*Bill O'Reilly
*Chris Matthews
*Karl Rove
*FOX News--any talking head, most any time.
*More Hillary-hating and Clinton-hating books than I could possibly list, many of which are available in our local public library, in the same section as books with titles like, THE FAITH OF GEORGE W. BUSH.

Back when Bill Clinton was president, the airwaves of radio and television spewed hatred and rage the likes of which I had never seen in all the years I've been watching politics. Bill Clinton was accused of having orchestrated the MURDER of one of his best friends, Vince Foster. He was accused of having used sheriff's deputies to procure women for him, of having fathered babies out of wedlock, of having run a land-scam. And that doesn't even MENTION what-all Hillary was accused of, from lesbian affairs on down.

Books were rushed to press full of any lie and insinuation anyone wanted to make and fronted on talk shows as absolute fact. Respected journalists ran stories without fact-checking them, only to learn later that they were utter and absolute fabrications, but by then, it was too late.

During the Clinton years, the Republican oversight committee put out MORE THAN 1200 SUBPEONAS to members of the Clinton administration for suspicion of nefarious deeds.

A right-wing special prosecutor spent tens of millions of dollars, vast amounts of federal investigators, and imprisoned one woman in an attempt to get her to testify against them--YEARS investigating every single nook and cranny of the Clintons and was unable to find a single thing to charge them with other than the fact that he lied under oath about having had an affair.

During the five years Bush has been in office, according to the The New York Times, THAT VERY SAME Senate oversight committee has issued the following number of subpoenas: THREE.

Even now, with more corruption being unearthed from beneath every rock in Washington than that city has ever seen, the Senate oversight committee appoints one of the Senators named in an indictment against disgraced lobbyist Abramoff to HEAD THE COMMITTEE.

Clinton was impeached and nearly removed from office by the Republican Congress because he lied about having had an affair to protect his career and his marriage--something many, many self-righteous politicians had to plead guilty to, including Newt Gingrich and Henry Hyde.

When I was researching a book back in the 90's, I attended the National Soldier of Fortune convention and gun show in Las Vegas one year during that time. The gun show booths handed out literally hundreds of Clinton-hating documents, and the very atmosphere of some of those meetings simply radiated hatred and rage toward Clinton and toward the government.

I told my conservative friends at the time that I thought the hate-rhetoric should be toned down because it was going to push someone teetering on the edge of sanity over the edge and something terrible was going to happen. They made fun of me, argued with me, disagreed with me, said I was being paranoid, and went back to listening to Rush.

Then Oklahoma City happened, and it wasn't Mideast terrorists who did THAT.

So don't talk to me about how the "liberals" hate George Bush and how unseemly it is not to have more respect for the President of the United States, because the same people who howl about that now did not hesitate to refer to the 42nd President of the United States as "Slick Willy."

If there's any hatred and rage in the political arena these days, the Republican right need only look in the mirror.

LIBERAL: 'lib(e)-rel: generous, bountiful, not narrow in opinion or judgement; tolerant, also, not orthodox, not conservative
The Mirriam-Webster Dictionary

LIBERALITY: nouns: (1) generosity, unselfishness, munificence, largesse, bounty, charity, hospitality, philanthropy, fullness (2) tolerance, catholicity, broad-mindedness, impartiality of or freedom from bigotry, progressive.
Roget's College Thesaurus

"I'm 35 years old, my family couldn't afford the lost income, I have a baby daughter."

If you think these are the words of a National Guardsman or reservist, explaining why their deployment to war would put a hardship on their families, well, you'll have to guess again.

They were written by Jonah Goldberg, an editor at the National Review and a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Mr. Goldberg was defending himself because, an avowed hawk, he had written numerous pieces enthusiastically endorsing the administration's plan to go to war in Iraq. However, some thinking individuals had complained, pointing out that, if he was so hot for this war, then why didn't he volunteer to go fight it himself?

Hence, the excuse, "I'm 35 years old, my family couldn't afford the lost income, I have a baby daughter."

I seem to recall similar excuses--FIVE of them being offered up by the meanest hawk on Capitol Hill--Vice President Dick Cheney--back when this nation was at war in Vietnam. Our commander-in-chief didn't have to make excuses. His congressman daddy could pull strings and get him a choice slot in the Air National Guard, where there was a lengthy waiting list. The Texas congressman's son was able to be squeezed into the crowded flight class along with the son of Texas Senator Lloyd Bentson. (I guess whoever got bumped from the regular waiting list wound up going off to fly jets in a real war.) And although our esteemed Secretary of Defense, Daniel Rumsfeld, did a stint flying jets for the Air Force, he never had to do it in a place where there was any kind of chance whatsoever that he could actually be SHOT DOWN.

None of the Big Three who sent more than a hundred thousand troops (not counting the last war Cheney and Rumsfeld fought, the Gulf War, which sent in half a million)--anyway, not one of them has ever once in their lives been in a position where they've had to dodge a bullet.

The only member of this administration who DID, General Colin Powell, presented a number of sound arguments as to why this war was a bad idea. Consequently, he was ignored, manipulated, cut out of serious policy discussions and eventually, forced out.

In fact, anyone who DARED to say anything against this war back in the spring of 2003-- especially if he or she had the supreme misfortune of running for political office--were hacked up into little pieces by their opponents and presented as haters of their country. Max Cleland, who sacrificed both his legs and one arm and who once ran the Veteran's Administration under President Jimmy Carter, was defeated for his Georgia congressional seat when he was portrayed as unpatriotic, because he opposed the war in Iraq.

Unpatriotic.

So we went to war. National Guardsmen and women, who had joined the Guard because the commercials promised money for college and who thought they'd be doing things like riot control, hurricane relief, and fighting forest fires, found themselves shipped off to war. Reservists, some of whom had been on inactive lists sometimes for twenty years and were in their forties or even FIFTIES, were called up and given little time to settle their affairs before being deployed.

Often, the families of these troops were placed in severe financial hardship during that time, some having to sell their homes or go into foreclosure and many filing for bankruptcy. Divorces have been higher than ever.

They went without proper armor and had to buy their own from private companies charging up to $2000 per set. Once in-country, they had to jerry-rig armor for their Humvees, scavanging tin and plywood from trash piles and wreckage. Even as a Marine, my son on his last deployment had to do similar things.

And, by the way, did you know they have to buy their own medals? And extra sets of fatigues and boots? You old soldiers may not know that, but none of that stuff is issued any more. They have to buy much of the gear (on private's and corporal's pay) that they will need to fight this war.

Too damn bad they didn't go to work for Halliburton, eh? They'd have all they needed, then.

Anyway, if a Guardsman-woman or Reservist were wounded, they were usually pretty surprised when the hospital bill came. See, the National Guard and the various reserve units don't have the same military health care coverage as the active military.

Let me repeat that. Guardsmen and women and reservists who were wounded while fighting for their country in Iraq and Afghanistan had to pay their own hospital bills. I don't know if that is still the case, but it damn sure was for at least two years.

When a soldier complained about this sort of thing to our esteemed Secretary of Defense, he was brushed off with, "You fight a war with the Army you've got."

(Or the Halliburton you can buy.)

And if any troops were killed, well, they were flown in under cover of darkness, late into the night, and if anyone tried to photograph their flag-draped coffins, they were fired.

After all, we didn't want any depressing news coming along about this war that might upset all those Goldbergs out there who were busy supporting our troops!!!

Most of whom were in their twenties and thirties, with babies at home, or in their forties, with pre-teens and teens now left motherless or fatherless.

Oh, and when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita blew away half the Gulf Coast, where was the Louisiana National Guard?

Why, fighting in Iraq, of course.

Which brings me back to the hapless Goldberg. In a piece called "Another Chance for a Chicken Hawk," in Salon.com, Tim Grieve writes that the Army is having so much trouble recruiting people willing to fight and die for their country in this war that they've had to raise the top age for military recruits from 35 to 42.

A "chickenhawk," in case you're unfamiliar with the term, is someone who's very hawkish about going to war. They wave the flag and get all teary-eyed during patriotic songs and rant and rave about "our enemies" and how, if we don't want to be destroyed by them, we must fight! fight! fight!

But see, they're chickens, on account of how THEY don't want to be the ones to do the fighting. The bleeding. The dying.

But there's good news for the Jonah Goldbergs and the young aspiring Dick Cheneys and Karl Roves and George Bush's who worry that they might have missed their chance to fight! fight! fight! for their country.

As Grieve writes, with the new recruiting age of 42, "That gives Goldberg and other chicken hawks his age six more years in which they can sign up for the war they've been only too happy to have others fight.

"But really," points out Grieve, "why wait that long? Forty-two U.S. soldiers (and Marines) have died in Iraq already this month, and recruiters are waiting by their phones to hear from their replacements."

God bless America, eh Goldberg?

"Please set aside time daily to cry out to God...Judge Alito...is a man who cares about the sovereignty of God..."
---Family Research Council "Prayer Team Target" e-mail

Is it just me, or wasn't there some provision or other in the Constitution that mandated a separation of church and state?

I could swear I read something about that in my history books, and the reason makes perfect sense when you realize that, back in the 1770's, most all the framers of the fledgling constitution had ancestors--fairly recent ones--who had escaped to the New World in the first place because...why? Anybody? You, back there in the back with your hand up. That's RIGHT. They had to get on a boat with all their worldly possessions that could be carried, and their children, and grandma, and flee to this raw, unexplored wilderness because...well, because they were being persecuted. Punished, imprisoned, ostracized, harrassed, even put to death for the simple reason that they chose to worship God in a way which was not sanctioned by the State.

Back when Queen Elizabeth I was a motherless pipsqueak and her half-sister, Mary, sat on the throne, little Elizabeth was imprisoned because her daddy, King Henry VIII, had created a whole new religion, Anglicanism, because the Catholic church would not sanction his marriage to her mother, Anne. The new church gave him a divorce from his first wife, Katherine, and she never forgave him for it, and neither did her daughter. So upon her father's death, the first thing Queen Mary did was send the child Elizabeth away and threw her in a dungeon. She even considered having her beheaded, like her mama.

Meanwhile, anyone who did not worship at the Catholic church was rounded up and put to death.

Things happened. Wars were fought, whatever, and then it was Elizabeth's turn to ascend the throne. First thing she did? You guessed it. Threw her loving sister into a prison and left her to rot. Turnabout being fair play, she then proceeded to give the Catholics hell and to make Anglicanism the state church.

But if you wanted to be, say, a Presbyterian, then life was made so miserable for you that you had no choice but to pack up your family and take them across an ocean to a wild and untamed land and take your chances there, but at least you could read your Bible any way you pleased.

So the "founding fathers" wanted to make sure that, in this brand-new country, anybody could worship God any way he or she saw fit, or not at all, if that's what they wanted, and the government could not write church doctrine into law.

The Supreme Court has been pretty good to honor that provision.

But things have changed. In an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, Charles Marsh, professor of religion at the University of Virginia, writes, "In the past several years, American evangelicals, and I am one of them, have amassed greater political power than at any other time in our history. But at what cost to our witness and the integrity of our message?"

He goes on to examine excerpts from pro-war sermons given in the run-up to the war in Iraq that sounded, "as if from a slate of evangelical talking points."

(And, I'd like to add an aside here. One church in California delivered a blistering anti-war sermon one Sunday and were consequently targeted by the IRS as being "too political" and in danger of losing their tax-free status. I refer you to the paragraphs re Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth. Whichever church has the power then persecutes whichever one does not.)

Marsh goes on to say that he agrees with John Stott, a revered evangelical writer and reverand, that, "The church is the community of God's people rather than an institution, and must not be identified with any particular culture, social, or political system..."

Now, before you light up your torches and come looking for me, I must tell you that back in college, I was a member of Campus Crusades for Christ and literally went door to door saving souls. When my kids were growing up, we had Bible study every single week and they read the entire New Testament and memorized chunks of it. We are a close and spiritual family, and that gives me a membership card into this elite little club and therefore every right to protest.

And before you rush to inundate me with comments about how the evil liberal judiciary needed to be balanced with a godly conservative one, let me say that I'm not commenting on whether or not Alito would be a good justice. The American Bar Association seems to think he's well qualified. In fact, I'm not commenting on the Supreme Court at all, here.

Recently, Focus on the Family and another powerful evangelical lobbying group were approached by some activists who were deeply worried about a budget which was about to be passed in the Republican Congress that would supposedly help to pay down the towering national debt by deep cuts in Medicaire, Medicaid, food stamps, school lunch programs, and college student loans--this just a couple weeks after Hurricane Katrina had wiped out half the Gulf coast, causing the poorest among us to suffer the most.

As Christians, the activists begged, shouldn't we DO something to protect these innocents? You're a powerful group, they said. Can't you petition your congresspeople to back off on this measure?

The group was told that Focus on the Family and other big Christian organizations had chosen to, well, focus, their considerable resources and power on two issues: abortion rights and the Supreme Court nominations. "We have to have our priorities," they were told.

Now, see, this is the problem you get into when you get religion all tangled up with the state. For one thing, WHOSE religion? Jews? Muslims? Hindus? New Age pagans? We've got a lot of them in this country, but apparently, no, not them. Only Christian evangelicals, it seems, know what's best for our country. No one else needs to be consulted because, well, they're just wrong and probably going to hell, anyway.

Secondly, WHOSE PRIORITIES? Middle and upper-middle class white folks? That's pretty much who you see in the talking-head television circuit, representing Christian evangelical activists. And some of them are pretty embarrassing to other, less nutty, Christians. (Try googling "Pat Robertson.")

So when Christians are directed to "cry out to God" over a Supreme Court nominee, or a political candidate, or a law that is before Congress that is considered Anti Our Agenda, then I call foul.

Because when I cry out to God, when I fall to my knees and pray, I don't waste my valuable prayer time trying to tell God what to do re the Supreme Court. Instead, I agonize about how 80% of Marine Corps casualties in this war could have been PREVENTED with $260 worth of BODY ARMOR. (And no, my son did not think it would be too heavy. Now that they have decent armor, which they did not have in his last deployment, he's thrilled. It may not save his life but it will damn sure help. And I cry out to God that he, his cousin, and all their buddies will come home from this bloody war with all their arms and legs and most of their sanity.)

I cry out to God because there are still 3200 people MISSING due to Hurricane Katrina, and along the Gulf coast--not just New Oreans--where entire towns were washed off their foundations, families still live in TENTS PITCHED BESIDE THEIR HOUSE FOUNDATIONS while they wait on HeckuvajobBrownie's FEMA to help them. Maybe God does help those who help themselves, but when your job, your bank, and your school have all been washed away, what, exactly, are you supposed to do? (Oh yeah, I forgot. Use your tax-cut money to rebuild, unless, of course, you don't earn $100,000 and up a year, in which case, you live in a tent.)

I cry out to God because we have a health care system where many oncologists (cancer doctors) refuse to see cancer-stricken patients until they pay in full their bills, which could run in the thousands, but which their health insurance is insufficient to cover, and their chemotherapy drugs cost hundreds each and every month, which means, only the rich or those with plenty of assets and savings to run through can afford to survive cancer. (I have a family member who may have to file for bankruptcy just so he can continue to receive his cancer treatments without having to sell his home and squander his savings and live to be penniless. I cry out to God, not only for his healing, but for his financial survival.)

I cry out to God because my beautiful daughter, 25, vibrant, hard-working, independent and resourceful and talented, who was busy building an acting career in New York City, was struck down with, of all things, tuberculosis, and is living under "house arrest"--strict quarantine in her cramped little apartment, which she has not been able to leave in a month and will not be able for another month. (Which means, of course, that she can't pay her rent, bills, or buy food. If she did not have a loving family and cadre of friends, she'd be homeless.) She was prevented from coming home Christmas and was therefore unable to see her brother before he departed for war, and my heart breaks because I am helpless and powerless to do anything for her other than wire money and send care packages and call her and e-mail her and pray for her and her brother.

That last one was purely personal, and I included it because life can just be so damn hard sometimes, and we need our spiritual brothers and sisters to gather round us in times of suffering and difficulty. The Christian community needs to focus far more of their considerable manpower and resources on the sick and the hungry and the homeless, not their political agenda.

"There is no denying that our Faustian bargain for access and power has undermined the credibility of our moral and evangelistic witness in the world," wrote Marsh. "The Hebrew prophets might call us to repentance, but repentance is a tough demand for a people convinced of their righteousness."

When Jesus walked the earth, he healed the sick and encouraged the hopeless and reached out to people society shunned. He questioned a legalistic, judgemental culture. Politics? Well, He left it up to the Saducees and Pharisees to do the politicking. And look how good their judgement turned out to be.

Before I start today's ramble, let me say that I won't always be writing about having a Marine son at war, just in case civilians reading this won't think that we won't be discussing anything else, but even so, I would like to say that I am very pleased to be getting some feedback from other Marine and service moms and moms of kids who have served, and even more pleased that my words are ringing true with them. This helps me not feel so lonesome, too, because the truth is that I don't do well on sanctioned Marine parent-type websites, because I keep getting censored. (Okay, you can stop laughing.)

Good lord, there are a lot of paranoid people out there.

At one Marine parent website from my son's last deployment, I mentioned that he happened to be a rifleman. Now, a "rifleman" is nothing more than a plain old grunt--just an infantry joe, like, well, Army infantry. There are thousands upon thousands of them in this war.

And I got censored, like that was some sort of top-secret information that would lend some sort of strategic analysis to our enemies who, I'm sure, have nothing better to do than troll such gabfests looking for highly sensitive war strategy. The funny thing about getting censored over saying my son was a rifleman was that each person who submitted posts on that website could have a "signature" at the end of their posts, right? And most of them said stuff like, "Proud Mom (or Dad) of LCpl Joe, 2/7 Weapons Plt." (or whatever. I made that up, by the way, just in case our ENEMIES are reading.)

When the truth is that all anybody ever does on these websites is ask if anybody has gotten a phone call yet? or When we send socks, do they have to be white or black??? And the moderators post all kinds of stuff designed to make all our respective chests swell with patriotic pride, much of it helpfully provided by the Department of Defense. Or the Country Music Association.

Recently, I tried to go on another, smaller Marine parents mesage board, and I mentioned in my getting-acquainted post that my son had helped to take part in the historic seige of Fallujah this past November, and also helped to secure the city for the first elections ever, last January. He's very proud of that and rightfully so. So are we.

Now, the thing is, it wasn't just Marines who took part in that operation. All you had to do was buy a TIME magazine, which had a two-page map spelling out exactly what units of what branches of the service swept into exactly what neighborhoods in that city. There were tens of thousands of troops in Fallujah last November. My son was one of them.

And I got censored. Even worse--the sentence just cut off, in mid-stream, like I'd forgotten to finish it.

Now, I've had enough family members in Special Forces or in the career military or in combat to know when to keep my mouth shut and when it's okay to speak out. And, bottom line, I would never, ever, not EVER say a single thing that would jeopardize one hair on my precious boy's head. EVER. And that goes for his buddies, too.

So I get pretty ticked off when I drop in to visit a website or chat group that is supposed to be there for the support and encouragement of a gaggle of utterly terrified parents, many of whom come from civilian backgrounds and have been terrified ever since their kid went to BOOT CAMP, for heaven's sake. There is so much they don't understand about what is happening to their family, and we're supposed to be there to offer help.

For instance, one time, a woman's son had not called her since arriving in-country, and it had been several weeks. She had no experience with war or with military life, and she was petrified that something awful had happened to him. I tried to explain to her that the unit was keeping very busy at the time, and that it was a 40-minute walk for them to get to the phones, and a two-hour wait, and that he was probably too exhausted just yet to make the trek. I told her that in war, no news really is good news, that if he were hurt or worse, the Marines would let her know immediately.

I was trying to comfort her, but I wasn't allowed. The entire post was censored. And yes, I could have looked up her e-mail address, but by then, I said, to hell with it.

Writers, see, we've got a thing about being censored. For any reason.

The funny thing about it--and not funny ha-ha--is that if "our enemies", meaning, I guess, the Iraqi insurgency, want to know what my son's unit is doing right now, I don't have to tell them. All they have to do is set up a kiosk selling oranges across the road, or get a job working on post emptying trash or something. Or ask their cousin who is working with the Iraqi army. They're watching all the time. They already know more than we do.

So it's nice to have my own space where I can say what I want to without my post vanishing into thin air. And no, I won't specify what my son's unit is doing or even where they are right now, because I have, let's see...what's that phrase again? Oh yeah. COMMON SENSE.

If we could all just have a little more common sense--political and otherwise--and not keep running around like Chicken Little all the time, we'd be better off.

Well, I'm excited to see that even a computer-moron like me can occasionally fumble around and do something right--after I clicked the correct box, people have been freed up to make comments, and I appreciate those that have been posted so far.

I'd like to address the person who asked what "regular people" could do to support those families who have loved ones in harm's way, to show their appreciation. How kind of you to ask. It means a lot to me. My answer though--as usual--might be a bit different from what you might expect.

Most people think that big gestures such as having an organization send a ship-load of care packages or hundreds of anonymous well-wishing cards is a good idea. And please don't misunderstand me when I say that such gestures are wonderful and that the troops do indeed appreciate them.

But believe it or not, there has been such an outpouring of anonymous gestures of patriotism that not only the U.S. mails but also the troops themselves are getting a bit overwhelmed. Most people really don't understand that, at least in the case of the Marines as well as various combat Army units, these guys aren't living in established barracks with nice big storage lockers. Right now my son is stuck in a tent with 80 of his closest Marine buddies--you're supposed to laugh, here--sleeping in bunk beds stacked up two deep. If they want to call home, they have to wait in line up to four hours, and when they get their turn, they have exactly one-half hour to call all the loved ones who would love to hear from them. During my son's last half-hour, he called us here at home (my husband and me), his sister up in New York who is very ill, and his girlfriend. You can't say a whole lot that way, other than, "I love you and miss you." They have no place to store anything, and when they move, they take with them whatever will fit on their backs. A lot gets left behind.

This is not to say that we haven't sent him any care packages, so don't get me wrong. What I'm suggesting to this kind person who inquired is that the simplest gestures can mean a great deal. If you know someone personally--a neighbor, member of your church, family member--even an acquaintance--I would suggest you get their address and send them something personal. Rather than having your Bible study group do up a hundred care packages with generic deodorant and socks--why don't you ask this guy or gal's mom what you think they need or what you think they would most appreciate, something personal? I confess, the most popular item I've sent overseas is copies of the racy young-men's magazine, MAXIM. They all love it and pass it around to their buddies. And it's not something they get in a generic "any-soldier"-type box.

But you don't have to go to even that much trouble. You can send a funny card or even just a quick note saying, "I'm praying for you dear, and I'll keep an eye on your mom (or wife or kids) for you until you return to us safe and sound."

Personal notes mean so much--you just can't imagine. When they are on patrol, they are in the most terrible danger, but when they are back on post, they have hours of boredom to fill. So, while it's nice to dig into the industrial-size box sent by ABC Women's Foundation--it's so much nicer to come back and find a card or letter or box addressed just to that guy or gal, with personal news from home, or maybe their favorite beef jerky or some little goofy toy that makes them laugh and gives them something to do.

One of the things I sent that my son appreciated most was a packet of standard thank-you notes with some addresses of family and friends. It gave him a chance to show HIS appreciation. When he sent one to a fourth-grade class who'd written to him, they said his was the only thank-you they'd gotten from any of the soldiers they'd written, and they were thrilled to death.

The U.S. Postal Service now offers these great Priority Mail "flat-rate" boxes. They are medium-sized boxes that, no matter how much stuff you can cram into one, only costs a single flat rate. With the recent postal hike, that comes to $8.10. You can pick them up for free from the post office, take one home, assemble it on your kitchen table, and then whenever you stop by the discount store or grocery and see something you think your neighbor's son or niece might like over there, pick it up and toss it into the box. When it's full, it'll cost eight bucks to send and take a couple weeks to get there.

But again, just cards or notes are sufficient. Anything that says, I'm thinking of you. If you want to do more, you can ask that same soldier or Marine if there is a platoon buddy who never gets anything from home, and send something taylored to them. One of Dustin's buddies loved Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies, but when he got his one and only care package from his mom, it was full of generic dollar-store brands. He was so disappointed. Dustin gave me his name--the address will be the same--and I sent him several big packages of different Chips Ahoy cookies along with a funny letter. Dustin said you'd've thought the guy had just opened King Tut's tomb.

As for the family members, let me tell you--there is no way to put a price on how much it means when you get a phone call out of the blue from a friend or acquaintance who says, "How is Dustin? Have you heard from him? How are YOU dong?" Especially when there has been terrible news from Iraq, such as the day eleven Marines died in one explosion--a quick phone call can just mean the world. All you have to say is, "I'm praying for you and thinking about you." You can ask for their loved one's address. It doesn't take ten minutes, and I promise you, they will never forget it.

Sometimes people say things that are well-meaning, like the gentleman who said to me, when I told him Dustin had deployed his first time, "Well, I'd rather they be fighting the terrorists over there than over here." I stared at him and said, "Well, it feels a little different when it's YOUR OWN SON."

It's not that I didn't think what he was saying had merit, it's just that there is no room for political arguments when a friend's heart is breaking with constant, constant terror that she will come home from the grocery store one day to find that blue sedan sitting in front of her house--which is what happened to one woman I know.

The generic "they" who are fighting those terrorists are our children, our CHILDREN. When it gets right down to it, that's all we care about, that's what keeps us lying awake half the night, what keeps us dreading the knock on the door, what makes us burst into tears over the evening news.

Expressions of faith are also kind and well-intentioned, but you have to be careful. Just to say, flat-out, "God will protect him and bring him home," sounds very comforting, but the way we mothers look at it is this...All those OTHER mothers were praying for THEIR children, too. Was God not protecting THEM?

In other words, we try to have faith in God's protection, and we pray for it all the time, but we still cry outselves to sleep with anxiety, dread, and fear. It doesn't mean we don't have faith, and to make blanket declarations like that can sound smug and make someone feel like somehow they don't have enough faith or the right kind.

We trust that God will protect our children and bring them home--we have to. But the tragic truth is that they DON'T all come home. Every single day, an average of three families get that knock on their door or that phone call, and it is over for them.

So all you have to say is that you are praying for us. We appreciate that, we really do.

In the end, that's all any of us can do, isn't it?

Quick apology--

My apologies to all of you who have tried to post "comments" and have found a big hassle. When I was setting up this blog, I was simply too computer-ignorant to realize that I had to specify a setting for that purpose.

I've since repaired the mistake--bear with me while I learn--and you should have no trouble posting comments now. I'll read 'em all, and I'll try to respond when I can or space allows.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Deanie Mills

"Uncle Travis, why did you get two purple hearts in Vietnam?"
"Because he kept shootin' and I kept gettin' up!"


Here's the thing about combat vets, and how they go about recognizing one another. The true combat vets make light of whatever action they have seen. They joke about it. If they should talk about it at all--which is rare--they frame the most harrowing experiences into funny stories.

They don't much talk about the bad stuff to people who have not been there. Period. The guy at the bar with his arm around the brassy blonde, regaling her with his exploits of heroism during his time in the warzone is, in all likelihood, lying. He's either exaggerating, making it up altogether, or telling someone else's experience as if it were his own. The true combat veteran doesn't talk about the bad stuff to people who have not been there. Period.

If they do talk about it at all, it is to other combat veterans. They seldom talk about it to their spouses for the simple reason that they don't want to scare them or worry them. If they do talk about it to a close loved one, it is usually because this loved one has earned a high degree of trust. They feel safe in going to those dark places. And chances are, it takes years for them to be able to do so.

This is also true about books. The book Jarhead, for example, which was made into a major motion picture, was based on the Gulf War experiences of Marine Anthony Swofford. As you may have noticed, it's been a long time since the Gulf War.

My brother-in-law, Travis Mills, served in the U.S. Army Special Forces, rose to the rank of Captain, and did two tours in Vietnam. The incident my daughter asked him about was truly horrific. Their post was ambushed in the depths of night. Men all around him were killed. He was shot once, and when he tried to get up, shot again. He had to play dead in order to live.

He laughs about it now, just as he laughs about the screaming pain he suffered from those wounds while recovering on a hospital ship. Even when he talks about that period, he frames it as a funny story.

I come from a distinguished military family. My husband, Kent, served with the 101st Airborne Division as a 1st Lt. platoon leader in the jungles of Vietnam. We were married for 14 years before he talked much about his experiences and how he lost one man. But it was my son, just returned from combat duty, who Kent told that he had always blamed himself for the young man's death, because it had been he, as platoon leader, who had ordered the private to take the canteens to the stream and refill them.

Right now, I have five family members in active military service, including a nephew and a son with the Marines in Iraq and another nephew who served in Afghanistan with the Army Special Forces and is soon to deploy to various other dangerous destinations. My father, brother, husband, and brother-in-law all served in Vietnam. My step-dad and father-in-law served in WWII. I have been around combat veterans all of my life.

This is all a preface to say this: Representative John Murtha, who fought in Vietnam and served his country for several decades, has become a lightning rod for controversy because he has stated that he wants the troops brought home from Iraq, or at least withdrawn to nearby but safer deserts. It's natural that people would disagree--I'm not sure I agree completely with what he has proposed, even if it would bring home my own son.

But those who confuse the word "opponent" with "enemy" seem to have taken it upon themselves to smear his reputation and claim throughout the Internet that he somehow did not deserve the purple hearts he brought home from that war. This is all based, apparently, on a conversation he had with a political opponent he had defeated, Don Bailey, who had won numerous medals in Vietnam. Murtha is reported to have said, "Hey, I didn't do anything like you did. I got a little scratch on the cheek."

Now suddenly he's a coward or liar or worse? People who make these claims--many of whom never served in combat themselves--do not understand the nature of the combat veteran. Remember how Sen. John McCain, who was held for years as a POW in Hanoi, once joked, "It doesn't take much of a hero to get yourself shot down." ??

Murtha was being respectful of a fellow warrior, and he was downplaying his own sacrifices just as my brother-in-law, Travis, did. To take those words as some sort of literal reason for personal attack is reprehensible.

I have one thing to say to any of those who do: Shame on you. Shame, shame on you.