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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ann Corrigan who wrote (10254)	4/14/2007 10:29:45 AM
From: Richnorth	Respond to of 224729

The shifting burden of war By Geoffrey Wheatcroft \| April 14, 2007 Taken from The Boston Globe BATH, England AFTER HE had been sent by President Franklin Roosevelt as his wartime emissary to London, Harry Hopkins became a friend as well as a colleague of Winston Churchill. When Hopkins's son, Stephen, was killed in the landing on Iwo Jima, Churchill expressed his sympathy. Since this was Churchill, there was no mere letter of condolence but a touch of grandeur, a parchment inscribed with the haunting lines from Macbeth that begin, "Your son, my lord, has died a soldier's death . . . " Sign up for: Globe Headlines e-mail \| Breaking News Alerts When I was reminded of this story recently, something struck me, a jarring anachronistic note. Not the friendship of two great men nor the hardships of war; it was the fact that one of the most powerful Americans of his age could lose a 19-year-old son serving as a private in the Marines. Not so today. Even during the Vietnam War there were several dozen sons of senators and congressmen in the armed forces. Now Senator Jim Webb of Virginia is unique on Capitol Hill in having a son serving in Iraq. That is a most ominous change. Nothing was more striking in the first half of the past century than the way in which the richer, educated classes bore their share of the burden of war, or more than their share. Nothing is more striking in the past generation than the way this has ceased to be true. In two world wars the rich fought and died for their country in disproportionate numbers: The casualty rate for junior officers in the British Army from 1914 to 1918 was three times as heavy as for privates. Among prime ministers, H.H. Asquith lost a son, and Andrew Bonar Law lost two. The American toll in that war was less grim, although in all the US elections from 1868 to 1900, eight of nine Republican presidential candidates had served as officers in the Civil War. A contrast indeed to the GOP today. The present administration is notoriously composed of men like Vice President Dick Cheney, who had "other priorities" when he might have been drafted, or President George Bush, who served in the National Guard when it was an acknowledged way of avoiding combat. An examination of the neoconservative elite who dreamed up the Iraq war will yield few with any military experience. And a contrast also to Tony Blair's Labo r party. One of the more striking footnotes to British political history in the last century is that every prime minister between 1940 and 1963 had served as an infantry officer in the Great War. That included Churchill, when he left the Cabinet to command a battalion in 1916. There are now more than 100 ministers in the Blair government, but not one has performed any military service or has a child in the armed forces. "We are fast approaching the day when no one in Congress . . . will have served or have any children serving," Kathy Roth-Douquet and Frank Schaeffer write in their recent book "AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America's Upper Classes from Military Service -- and How It Hurts Our Country." That day has almost arrived at Westminster. This trend dates back to the 1960s, when the British government ended the draft and when the United States had a draft of sorts, but one which operated in notoriously unfair fashion. "People who figured out how to work the system were exempted," the defense secretary admitted in 1975. "It is inconceivable that a system designed and operating the way the draft did could have produced a true cross-section of America in the military." That was Donald Rumsfeld during his first stint at the Pentagon. He could scarcely claim that the forces he sent to Iraq during his second stint were much more of a true cross-section. At New College, my own old Oxford college, the 1914-18 memorial in the chapel bears the names of 228 men, and another 135 were killed in 1939-45. Compare that with another figure: 12 Harvard men died in Vietnam. It is hard to exaggerate how grave are the social and political implications of this. Many American and British families have been bereaved by war over the past generation. How many of them will be told by their president or prime minister "Your son, my lord, has died a soldier's death"? Geoffrey Wheatcroft's latest book is "Yo, Blair!"

To: Ann Corrigan who wrote (10254)	4/14/2007 10:43:17 AM
From: Richnorth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224729

War on Terror looks like a fraud By JOHN GLEESON Contrary to the "patriots" who try to use the deaths of our soldiers in Afghanistan to stifle debate on Canada's involvement in the War on Terror, I would say that as new evidence presents itself, we would indeed be cowards to ignore it simply because we've lost troops in the field and are therefore blindly committed to the mission. And new evidence is piling up around us, arguably strong enough to declare the whole War on Terror an undeniable fraud. Virtually ignored by mainstream media, the Americans showed their hand this year with the new Iraqi oil law, now making its way through Iraq's parliament. The law -- which tens of thousands of Iraqis marched peacefully against on Monday when they called for the immediate expulsion of U.S. forces -- would transfer control of one of the largest oil reserves on the planet from Baghdad to Big Oil, delivering "the prize" at last that Vice-President Dick Cheney famously talked about in 1999 when he was CEO of Halliburton. "The key point of the law," wrote Mother Jones' Washington correspondent James Ridgeway on March 1, "is that Iraq's immense oil wealth (115 billion barrels of proven reserves, third in the world after Saudi Arabia and Iran) will be under the iron rule of a fuzzy 'Federal Oil and Gas Council' boasting 'a panel of oil experts from inside and outside Iraq.' That is, nothing less than predominantly U.S. Big Oil executives. "The law represents no less than institutionalized raping and pillaging of Iraq's oil wealth. It represents the death knell of nationalized Iraqi resources, now replaced by production sharing agreements, which translate into savage privatization and monster profit rates of up to 75% for (basically U.S.) Big Oil. Sixty-five of Iraq's roughly 80 oilfields already known will be offered for Big Oil to exploit." While the U.S. argues that the oil deal will give Iraqis their shot at "freedom and stability," the International Committee of the Red Cross reported this week that millions of Iraqis are in a "disastrous" situation that continues to deteriorate, with "mothers appealing for someone to pick up the bodies littering the street so their children will be spared the horror of looking at them on their way to school." Four years after the invasion, it's becoming pretty clear that Iraq has been "pacified" solely for the purpose of economic aggression. Humanitarian considerations are moot. The awful plight of Iraq's one million Christians, who have no place in the new Iraq, underscores this ugly truth. Afghanistan, meanwhile, has given the U.S. a strategic military beachhead in Central Asia (which "American primacy" advocates called for in the '90s) and it was quietly reported in November that plans are being accelerated for a $3.3-billion natural gas pipeline "to help Afghanistan become an energy bridge in the region." With many Americans (including academics and former top U.S. government officials) now questioning even the physical facts of 9/11 and seriously disputing the "militant Islam" spin, with the media more brain-dead than it's been in our lifetimes, now is not the time for jingoism and blind faith in the likes of Cheney, George W. Bush and Robert Gates. Our young men are worth more than that -- aren't they, Mr. Harper? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- John Gleeson is the editor of the Winnipeg Sun. He can be reached by e-mail at: jgleeson@wpgsun.com Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@wpgsun.com.

To: Ann Corrigan who wrote (10254)	4/14/2007 11:37:51 AM
From: American Spirit	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 224729

Bush has cost taxpayers more than all other presidents combined. At least since WWII which was a time we really needed to go into hock to support the government. Bush is on target to double the national deficit from about 6.5 to about 13 trillion dollars. He is running about a 500 billion a year deficit and lying about it. He will waste at least a trillion dollars in Iraq alone. He has allowed his big oil gougers to rip us off for at least a trillion dollars. Big Drugs has gotten into the act, ripping us off for about 400 billion dollars. If you want to talk about waste in government, look at Bush. Clinton created large surpluses for the first time since 1961. Bush quickly reversed that and turned record surpluses into record deficits. So if Hillary wanted a party at the WH she deserved it. Clinton made the USA a lot of profits. Bush is nsquandering them all and a lot more.