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

To: JohnM who wrote (99696)	5/31/2003 8:37:53 PM
From: spiral3	Respond to of 281500

Embracing The True Nature Of Patriotism related story nytimes.com May 31, 2003 Historians Trace an Unholy Alliance: Religion and Nationalism By ALEXANDER STILLE When Shiite Muslims in Iraq took to the streets to protest the presence of American troops as well as Saddam Hussein, was the world witnessing the birth of nationalism? When President Bush used the term crusade to describe the war on terrorism, was he inadvertently revealing religious roots in American patriotism? In short, is religious sentiment, long considered the prime enemy of nationalism, actually one of its founding elements?

To: JohnM who wrote (99696)	6/2/2003 8:38:48 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

HAVE AMERICANS CHECKED OUT ON OUR WARS? ________________________________ By Richard Reeves Syndicated Columnist May 30, 2003 WASHINGTON -- When I turned on the computer on Thursday to write about the president's latest tax cut, I was stopped by the headline on AOL's mail page: "Do you think the rescue of Jessica Lynch was hyped to boost the war?" Surprised to say the least, I forgot about getting rich and punched a key to get the totally unscientific answers to AOL's question. By then, 40,366 people had voted. Twenty-nine percent of them said, "Yes, it was a Hollywood-style stunt." Fifty-five percent said, "No, the troops did what they had to do." Two percent had no opinion. Fourteen percent checked the answer I would have picked, "We may never know." My second choice would have been that the soldiers did what they had to do. I know that doctors at Nasiriyah General Hospital told The Associated Press that they gave the Americans the key to Private Lynch's room and said there were no Iraqi soldiers at the hospital. But if I were one of those GIs, I would have taken no chances. That said, it seems pretty clear, at least to me, that the military tells the public what it wants us to know, the way it wants us to know it. Truth is the first casualty of war, particularly television wars ably fought by voluntary forces. There were, in fact, two other small stories in the papers the same day that made it seem as if the Pentagon certainly knows what it is doing in making and reporting news, even if citizens and journalists are a bit bewildered. The first one, a four-paragraph Reuters dispatch, said that the famous bunker we blasted from the sky to begin the war -- the one that was supposed to have killed or wounded Saddam Hussein and one of his sons -- never existed. The news agency was confirming a CBS News report that neither the Army nor the Central Intelligence Agency could find any evidence that there was a bunker under the house obliterated by the war's first missile. So it goes -- the fog of war. Who remembers that the Pentagon has been using that incident to promote the need for new nuclear weapons programs -- the first in more than 20 years -- to blast bunkers even deeper than this one was supposed to be? And who even remembers the hours of excited coverage from Washington and Baghdad that perhaps the war would be over before it began? The second item released on Thursday seemed to answer that last question. The Center on Policy Attitudes and the Center for International Security Studies at the University of Maryland released a national poll showing that almost half the respondents across the country, 41 percent, believed (or were unsure whether) our troops have discovered the "weapons of mass destruction." Those are the same WMD, it was once said, that were the reason we had to attack Iraq before it attacked us. For the record, of course, we have not found any -- at least yet. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been trying to explain where the fields of missiles and the tons of poison gas and biological weapons have disappeared to, but perhaps he doesn't have to bother. The poll also indicated that almost one-third of respondents, 31 percent, believed (or were not sure whether) Iraq had used such weapons against us. That could mean that if eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, we're in trouble. Or, it could mean that significant numbers of us are not paying any attention to the war, to the Pentagon or to the media -- at least not since we declared victory. There is another possibility, and that is that the press and television just do not have the attention span to cover events of such serious moment. You may have noticed that the cable channels interrupted the war to send their swarms to cover the murder of poor Laci Peterson. If by chance you think I exaggerate, then ask people around the neighborhood or the office what is going on these days in Afghanistan. You remember Afghanistan, don't you? It was a famous victory. Or was it just famous reality television? Does anyone know? COPYRIGHT 2003 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE uexpress.com