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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (42856)	9/9/2002 12:17:22 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Zell Miller: Questions for the Commander in Chief (this is a good one!) washingtonpost.com. Sunday, September 8, 2002; Page B07 (Posted on GWB thread by Buddy McKee) When it comes to showing deference to our president in a time of war, I doubt there are many who have more respect for him as a leader and an individual than I do. As a Marine, I was taught to say, "Aye, aye, sir," do an about-face and go do the job my commander in chief ordered me to do. That's just my nature, and that's why I'm with the president 100 percent on his homeland security bill now in the Senate. I also believe he has gathered together the finest national security team since Harry Truman had George Marshall. So, when it comes to expanding the war on terrorism to Iraq, I stand with the president and I will not criticize his judgment. He has already made the case with me, and I am convinced that Saddam Hussein has to go. But I always like to run things by my focus group back home, and lately the comments from my focus group tell me that the folks out there in Middle America, sitting around their kitchen tables, have questions that need to be answered before we march our soldiers into Iraq. Now, my focus group is not one of those formal meetings where you pay people to sit around a conference table in an office building. It's a very informal chat with the regulars at Mary Ann's Restaurant, up the street from my home in rural Young Harris, Ga. They are construction workers, retired teachers, farmers, preachers and the waitresses who chime in with their opinions as they pour coffee and bring more biscuits. Several of these folks have previously worn the uniform of this country, some in combat. Not an Ivy Leaguer in the bunch. Not a single one reads the New York Times, The Washington Post or the Weekly Standard. And their television time is devoted mainly these days to the evening news and to watching the Braves, who are close to clinching another division pennant. I jotted down some of the questions that they want the president to answer in building a case for going to Iraq. (1) Even if Hussein has nukes, does he have the capability to reach New York or Los Angeles or Atlanta? (2) The old Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear missiles for decades, many of them capable of reaching our major cities, and yet we didn't get into a war with the Soviets. The president needs to explain why Iraq is different. (3) Who will join with us in this war and what share will they be willing to bear? (There was also some grumbling about our boys in Afghanistan "just doing guard duty" to protect those warlords.) (4) What happens after we take out Hussein? How long will our soldiers be there? And, again, with whose help? (5) There is concern about too much deployment. We've got our soldiers stationed all over the world. Someone needs to bring us up to date on where they all are, why they are there and how long our commitment to keep them there is. (6) How does our plan in Iraq fit in with the whole Middle East question? How will it affect Israel? How will it affect our war on terrorism? Does taking Saddam out help or hurt that entire messy situation? (7) At Mary Ann's Restaurant, Tony is all right. But Putin is not. Why are we putting so much trust in him? Is he still with us in the war on terrorism, or was that just so much talk at a photo op? (8) The people at Mary Ann's know very well who fights our wars -- the kids from the middle-class and blue-collar homes of America. Kids like their grandchildren. They want to hear the president say that he knows and understands that. (9) Forgive my bluntness, but these folks also want to hear the president and the vice president say that this war is not about oil. (10) They also want to hear an explanation of why we didn't take care of this in the Persian Gulf War, and why it is on our doorstep again so soon. None of the above in any way should be interpreted as my backing down in my support of the president's effort. His position and his principles have already made the case with me. I write this in the spirit of trying to get a better explanation for the folks back home and the folks across Middle America. Those folks who love their country very much and who respect their president, but who need a few more answers. The writer is a Democratic senator from Georgia. © 2002 The Washington Post Company

To: JohnM who wrote (42856)	9/9/2002 12:29:36 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

''Ugly Americans: What is wrong with us?'' By C. Bryan Lavigne YellowTimes.org Guest Columnist (United States) Printed on Thursday, September 05, 2002 @ 12:16:25 EDT yellowtimes.org (YellowTimes.org) – There is something seriously wrong with Americans. Something that was inherent in the Europeans who first came and were able to live and breed here. Those first colonists had to be made of steel, they had to be hard and emotionless or they wouldn't have made it through the first winter. Hell, the ones who weren't solid didn't make it past the first winter. Americans love war. No, it goes beyond that; we love violence and explosions and big fucking guns, and we love to watch other people suffer in pain and misery. Deprived of our own struggle for survival, we find comfort in watching the desperation of others. Anywhere you look in our culture you see it: violent lyrics in music, action movies and TV shows with explosions and gun fights every five minutes, the ever present war dramas and documentaries, video games, professional wrestling and sports, kidnapped children and murdered parents and a thousand desperate faces vying for time on the network news. We don't get any happier than when there is a real war to gawk at. Who isn't glued to the TV in this country any time our military machine goes to work (when the corporate media deems it worthy to show) against some impoverished country? We can't get enough of smart bombs and carpet bombs and cluster bombs and bunker buster bombs. I bet your pulse is up just reading this. We love it so much that in our oafish gape we don't even bother to ask ourselves important questions. Questions like: "Why are we really bombing these people?" and "Isn't there a better way to settle disputes than this?" or how about "When will we go too far, if we have not already?" Not only do we fail to ask these important questions, but we also make up the most absurd arguments to justify killing people. Take the conversation I had today with my brother-in-law in which he gave me these zingers: "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, Saddam is trying to build weapons of mass destruction, Saddam won't let weapons inspectors in, and Saddam is a danger to the United States." I won't go into my responses; I'm sure you've all heard the arguments before. I argued with him for half an hour on this subject, and when I proved all his arguments to be faulty, he still maintained that we needed to bomb Saddam. The same thing happened over and over again when we were bombing Afghanistan, no matter how well I argue, no matter what I say, people just will not open their eyes and see the truth that is slapping them in the face. They just don't want to admit that the only reason they support any war is because they just like to watch people getting bombed for no good reason. I think the real problem here may be that Americans don't have the proper faculties to distinguish between fiction and reality anymore. We don't understand that those are real people being torn to pieces by our daisy cutters. Those are real people suffering under the wheel of our military machine. We've been conditioned to disassociate ourselves. Programmed not to care. Movies and television have brainwashed us into believing that our government's intentions in the world are utterly and irrefutably noble; that we're the good guys and they're the bad guys and that everything is black and white, good and evil, us and them. The world does not work like this. Our government's intentions are anything but noble; they fight (or rather, they make us fight) for power, money and influence, nothing more, nothing less. History proves this. But we don't believe it. Not our government! Not my elected officials! We can't accept that our government is the terrorist force in the world because then we wouldn't have any reason to cheer on the troops. We'd have no reason to hoop and holler when we see the smart bombs fall on the evening news. We'd have no reason to enjoy other people's misery. We will not face that reality. Well, maybe some of us do. After all, you can never get the whole population to agree on any one thing, so maybe some of us can get past this ingrained inability to believe our government incapable of foul play. Maybe some of us won't look at other people's hardship as entertainment. Maybe some of us can feel. Maybe… _______________________________________________ [C. Bryan Lavigne is a starving artist and political activist who may or may not be completely insane. He lives in the United States.] C. Bryan Lavigne encourages your comments: cbryanlavigne@yahoo.com