Articles 12-2

December 7, 2004

Friday, December 10, 2004; Page A36

WITH PRESIDENT Bush's choices for a second-term Cabinet complete, a striking feature is the continuity of the national security and foreign policy lineup. The secretary of state leaves, but the national security adviser moves over to take his place, her deputy moves up to take hers, and the defense secretary stays put: No new blood there. It's understandable that a president might not want to change teams while war rages, but such continuity can have pitfalls. One is an absence of fresh thinking. Another is that Mr. Bush's principals will be so intent on proving their first-term decisions correct, or so intent on blaming others for what hasn't gone right, that they won't be open to the wisdom that might be on offer outside government or farther down their chains of command.

It's in that context that we were listening to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's comments this week. The one that got the most attention was his response Wednesday to a soldier in Kuwait who wanted to know why troops were being sent into Iraq without properly armored vehicles. "As you know, you go to war with the Army you have," Mr. Rumsfeld replied. "They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time." A true statement, no doubt; and Mr. Rumsfeld went on to assure the soldier that the Army was sending better-protected vehicles to Iraq as quickly as it could. But the remark seemed to suggest that Mr. Rumsfeld himself bore no responsibility for how the Army had been equipped before the 2003 invasion; nor for the timing of that invasion; nor for the failure to predict the ferocious insurgency that has made the absence of armor so relevant.

That same combination of breeziness and blame-passing was on display even more when Mr. Rumsfeld spoke to reporters while en route to Kuwait Monday. (Transcripts of both sessions are available at www.dod.gov.) Asked about first-term mistakes, Mr. Rumsfeld reflected on the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the failure to predict the insurgency, but even in the latter case, which might be thought to fall under the broad category of strategic thinking, the defense secretary seemed to pass the buck. "I don't think anyone would say that the intelligence left anyone with the impression that you'd be in the degree of insurgency you're in today," he said.

Even more remarkably, he shifted all blame for what many believe to have been a woefully inadequate troop commitment. "The big debate about the number of troops is one of those things that's really out of my control," he said. Out of the defense secretary's control? "I mean, everyone likes to assign responsibility to the top person and I guess that's fine," Mr. Rumsfeld explained. "But the number of troops we had for the invasion was the number of troops that General Franks and General Abizaid wanted." But reporting by Bob Woodward and others shows Mr. Rumsfeld ordering Gen. Tommy R. Franks to rewrite plans for Iraq to reduce the number of troops; the one general who said he thought more would be needed for postwar control, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, found himself unwanted in Mr. Rumsfeld's Pentagon.

On one level, Mr. Rumsfeld's distinctive reading of recent history may matter less than his commitment, restated eloquently during his trip this week, to help Iraqis and Afghans live in freedom. But in the past Mr. Rumsfeld's breeziness has masked serious errors. The postwar looting wasn't just a matter of the untidiness of freedom; it struck a grievous blow at the U.S. occupation. Carelessness toward the Geneva Conventions precipitated a hugely damaging scandal. The insufficient troop levels allowed the insurgency to gain traction.

Now Mr. Rumsfeld says: "It's a violent country. It has been in the past. It very likely will be in the future." Insouciant, charming, worldly-wise. But if someone else is always to blame -- or if no one is -- how much confidence can the country have in decisions going forward?

One's first response to the report by the International Red Cross about torture at our prison at Guantanamo is denial.

But our country has opposed torture since its founding. One of our founding principles is that cruel and unusual punishment is both illegal and wrong.

The first requirement here is that we look at what we are doing — and not blink, not use euphemisms. Despite the Red Cross' polite language, this is not "tantamount to torture." It's torture. It is not "detainee abuse." It's torture.

Yes, it's true, we did sort of know this already. It was clear when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in Iraq that the infection had come from Guantanamo.

In a way, Abu Ghraib is easier to understand than this cold, relentless and apparently endless procedure at Gitmo. At least Abu Ghraib took place in the context of war.

Our country, the one you and I are responsible for, has imprisoned these "illegal combatants" for three years now. What the hell else do we expect to get out of them? We don't even release their names or say what they're charged with — whether they're Taliban, al-Qaida or just some farmers who happened to get in the way.

Why are people representing our government, paid by us, writing filth on the Korans of helpless prisoners? Is this American? Is it Christian? What are our moral values? Speak out, speak up.

The creepiest aspect of the Red Cross report is the involvement of doctors and psychiatrists in something called "Biscuit" teams. Get used to that acronym: It stands for Behavioral Science Consultation Team and will end up in the same category of national shame as Wounded Knee. According to The New York Times, Biscuit teams are "composed of psychologists and psychological workers who advise the interrogators." Shades of Dr. Mengele.

An earlier Red Cross report questioned whether "psychological torture" was taking place. I guess that's what you call sleep deprivation and prolonged exposure to extremely loud noises while shackled to a chair.

If you have neither the imagination nor the empathy to envision yourself in such circumstances, please consider why the senior commanders in the military are so horrified by this. It's very simple. Because if we break international law and the conventions of warfare, then the same thing can be done to American soldiers who are captured abroad.

My question is: What are you going to do about this? It's your country, your money, your government. You own it, you run it, you are the board of directors. They are doing this in your name. The people we elect to public office do what you want them to. Perhaps you should get in touch with them.

To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

Posted on Tue, Dec. 07, 2004

From the stress of Iraq to the death of 'lifetime' benefits

By Molly Ivins

AUSTIN, Texas

Here are a few political developments that have flown in under the wider media radar recently.

• Mental health experts say we face a crisis because one in six returning soldiers from Iraq is suffering from post-traumatic stress, and the number is expected to grow rapidly. You will not be amazed to learn that the Pentagon did not anticipate the problem, since it has yet to anticipate anything about Iraq correctly.

A study by the Walter Reed Army Institute found 15.6 percent of Marines and 17.1 percent of soldiers surveyed after tours in Iraq suffer from major depression, generalized anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which can cause flashbacks, sleep disorders, violent outbursts, panic attacks, acute anxiety and emotional numbness. The numbers are expected to be higher among reservists than among career soldiers.

According to the Los Angeles Times, 30 percent of Vietnam Vets experienced PTSD, and the greater tragedy was that at first it went unrecognized and later often went untreated. This time, we should have known it was coming (except this was supposed to be a "cakewalk" and our troops greeted with flowers). We're totally unprepared again, and the system cannot move fast enough to treat the problem. But hey, anyone who criticizes the Pentagon is "not supporting our troops," right?

• The Wall Street Journal spotted yet another depressing trend in the pension field. Many companies have started suing their own retired employees in order to cut their pension benefits.

"Many companies have already cut back company-paid health-care coverage for retirees from their salaried staff," the Journal notes. "But until recently, employers generally were barred from touching unionized retirees' benefits because they are spelled out in labor contracts. Now some are taking aggressive steps to pare those benefits as well, including going to court."

Here's the part I love: The companies' legal argument is that the "lifetime" coverage specified in the contracts does not mean the lifetime of the workers, but the "lifetime" of the labor contract. Cute, eh?

• Here's a dandy: Our government now arranges "torture flights." We are outsourcing torture. A Gulfstream 5 jet has been leased by the Department of Defense and the CIA. We use this plane to transport suspected terrorists from other countries or U.S. military bases to countries that practice torture.

A Swedish television program tracked two Egyptians arrested there and supposedly "extradited" by Egypt. They were flown out on the leased American plane, and both suspects were then tortured in Egypt. According to Britain's Sunday Times, the plane's logbooks show it has been to 49 destinations outside the United States in the past two years, including Guantanamo and other U.S. bases, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Morocco, Afghanistan, Libya and Uzbekistan.

• We already know that a kitchen sink of unrelated stuff, including a new restriction on abortion and a gross invasion of privacy through our tax returns, was included in the obscene appropriations bill. Riders that were never voted upon or discussed in either House have been added during conference committee meetings, and likewise, amendments never brought up during conference have been added.

This is what the media call a "procedure story," which they avoid like the plague. All editors believe that the public is bored silly by procedure stories. Indeed, only a legislator would wind up in a red-faced fury because some article 21 of subsection C of Rule 22 has been broken.

Nevertheless, every little, petty violation of the rules means that laws affecting our lives are being made by something other than a democratic process.

The Natural Resources Defense Council found these undebated gems in the appropriations bill, just the place for anti-environmental legislation:

• California developers pushed for an amendment to weaken the Endangered Species Act by weakening protection for critical habitats.

• A measure removing all endangered species protections from pesticides. According to the NRDC, this last-minute addition would take away the ability to limit pesticide use even if it meant the extinction of the bald eagle.

• A rider to authorize the largest public-lands logging in history, overriding environmental review and prohibiting judicial review. Passed for a forest in Oregon, courtesy of Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore.

• Approximately $17 billion in pork barrel water projects, a measure that was never debated in the Senate.

• A waiver of environmental review of grazing permits on public lands. We keep selling grazing rights to Western ranchers at below-market prices, even when the grazing destroys public lands.

• Oil drilling in an Alaskan wildlife refuge, of course.

• A provision allowing commercial fishing within wilderness areas of Alaska. Hey, don't all wildernesses have commercial fishing operations?

And so on. And so forth.

No one is claiming that following proper procedures will produce brilliant legislation untouched by corporate or parochial interests. But it would help.

Molly Ivins is a columnist for Creators Syndicate, 5777 W. Century Blvd., Suite 700, Los Angeles, CA 90045.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

By James Dobbins

Friday, December 10, 2004; Page A37

American outrage over the diversion of U.N.-supervised Iraqi oil-for-food money seems to miss three salient points. First, no American funds were stolen. Second, no U.N. funds were stolen. Third, the oil-for-food program achieved its two objectives: providing food to the Iraqi people and preventing Saddam Hussein from rebuilding his military threat to the region -- and in particular from reconstituting his programs for weapons of mass destruction.

The oil-for-food program was part of a comprehensive set of U.N.-mandated sanctions designed to prevent Hussein from again becoming a threat to his neighbors. The program was intended to allow the proceeds from Iraqi oil exports to be used to purchase food and medicine for the Iraqi people, but not weapons or WMD-related technology for the Hussein regime.

It is now clear, based on the most exhaustive American post-intervention examination, that the U.N. sanctions regime, including both U.N. weapons inspectors and the U.N.-administered oil-for-food program, fully met this core objective. At the direction of the Security Council, and as a result of the international embargo and international inspections, Iraq destroyed its stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in the early 1990s, did not acquire new such weapons and did not even reconstitute a program to develop nuclear weapons. More broadly, U.N. sanctions resulted in a steady decline in Iraq's military capabilities from the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991 to the day of the American-led intervention.

At the same time, the oil-for-food program served its humanitarian goal of feeding the Iraqi people, if not perfectly at least so effectively that Washington asked the United Nations to keep the program in effect for six months after the United States took power in Baghdad.

It is clear that Hussein and his henchmen took advantage of inadequate U.N. oversight to siphon large sums from the program, but the money was Iraqi to begin with and the amounts siphoned were never enough to undermine the purpose for which the sanctions were in place. It is also clear that unscrupulous non-Iraqi businessmen sometimes, apparently, with the knowledge of their governments, connived in these diversions and drew illegitimate profits from them.

Thus the bad news is that the United Nations proved unequal to the task of preventing a rogue regime from stealing some of its own money. The good news is that this same U.N. machinery proved equal to the task of preventing that regime from fielding weapons of mass destruction, developing nuclear weapons and reemerging as a military threat to its neighbors. So the U.N. performance was mixed, but at least it got its priorities straight.

U.N. sanctions against Iraq, including the oil-for-food program, are worth close scrutiny not just because some of that money was stolen but because, taken as a whole, this represents one of the most successful uses of international sanctions on record. Any effort to correct past abuses and forestall future ones should proceed from the recognition that, despite its defects, this regime served the international community's security and humanitarian objectives exceptionally well.

The writer, a former assistant secretary of state, is director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at Rand Corp. He will be online at noon today at www.washingtonpost.com.

December 10, 2004

The Suicide Supply Chain

From what I can tell from the new organizational flow chart for U.S. intelligence that Congress adopted yesterday, it is a god-awful combination of new titles and jobs at the top, without clear lines of authority to the people on the ground. One thing I've learned from 25 years in the newspaper business (which is just another form of intelligence gathering) is this: Whenever you add a new layer of editors on top of reporters, and don't get rid of some of the old layer of editors, all you get is trouble. You get less intelligent.

The right way to improve U.S. intelligence is to get more people on the ground who speak the languages we need and who can think unconventionally. If that sounds blindingly obvious to you, it is, but it is precisely the shortage of such people that explains to me America's greatest intelligence failure in Iraq - a failure we are paying for dearly right now. You see, we didn't invade Iraq too soon. We actually invaded 10 years too late.

Let me explain: America's greatest intelligence failure in Iraq was not the W.M.D. we thought were there, but weren't. It was the P.M.D. we thought weren't there, but were. P.M.D., in my lexicon, stands for "people of mass destruction." And there were far more of them in Iraq than anyone realized. The failure of U.S. intelligence to understand what was happening inside Iraqi society during the decade-plus of U.N. sanctions that preceded our invasion is the key to many of the problems we've encountered in post-Saddam Iraq.

The U.N. sanctions pulverized Iraqi society - a society already beaten down by an eight-year Iran-Iraq war, the war over Kuwait and some 30 years of Saddam's tyranny. As Saddamism and sanctions chewed up the Iraqi people during the 1990's, many people of talent left. Before the war, the Bush team told anyone who would listen that Iraq had the most talented secular elite in the Arab world. And it was right. The only problem was that during the 1990's many in that elite moved to Amman, Damascus, Beirut, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and Cairo, where they worked as professors, music teachers and engineers.

Meanwhile, back in Iraq, those who had no access to Baath Party privileges got steadily ground down. Many Iraqi youth, unable to connect with the outside world and unable to find jobs at home, turned to religion. Saddam encouraged this with a mosque-building program. By wrapping himself in an aura of Islam, Saddam also hoped to buttress his own waning legitimacy. So Wahhabi religious influence flowed into the Sunni areas from Saudi Arabia, as Iranian religious influence flowed into Shiite regions.

You know all those masked Iraqi youth you see in the Al Jazeera videos, brandishing weapons and standing over some foreigner whose head they are about saw off? They are the product of the last decade of Saddamism and sanctions. Those youth were 10 years old when the U.N. sanctions began. They are the mushrooms that Saddam and the sanctions were growing in the dark. The Bush team had no clue they were there.

These deracinated, unemployed, humiliated Sunni Iraqi youth are our biggest problem today. Some clearly have become suicide bombers. We can't say what percentage, because, unlike the Palestinians, the Iraqi suicide bombers don't even bother to tell us their names or do a farewell video for mom. They not only are ready to commit suicide on demand, but they are ready to do it anonymously. That bespeaks a very high level of commitment or psychosis, or both.

I would estimate that U.S. forces have been hit with over 200 of these human missiles, and we still are not sure how they are recruited and deployed. What we are facing, I think, is a crude underground suicide supply chain - a mutant combination of Wal-Mart and Wahhabism.

Its organizers appear to use word of mouth, and the Internet, to recruit suicide bombers from Iraq and the wider Muslim world. These bombers are ferried down the supply chain to bomb makers in the field, who get them wired up and deploy them against U.S. and Iraqi targets tactically.

This is not haphazard. These bombings are timed for maximum effect. That means the insurgents are quite confident about their supply of bombers. It's just like Wal-Mart's supply chain: you buy an item in a Wal-Mart in Arkansas, and another one is immediately made in China. In Iraq, you deploy a suicide bomber in Baghdad, and another one is immediately manufactured in Mosul or Riyadh.

When we have people in U.S. intelligence who can explain how that organizational flow chart works, I'll feel safer.

Lost in a Masquerade

MORAL STANDARDS: UNDER ASSAULT, BUT HOLDING THEIR OWN



Nicollette Sheridan in a towel; raunchy lyrics on the radio; violence, skin and bad language in nearly every film -- it's no wonder Americans feel the entertainment industry is putting in overtime doing the devil's work. A recent New York Times/CBS News poll found that 70 percent of us fear that "popular culture -- that is, television, movies and music -- is lowering the moral standards in this country."

But if that's what the purveyors of trash are attempting, they're doing a very poor job of it. The curious experience of recent years is that the more blood-letting and debauchery we're exposed to in mass media, the less inclined we are to emulate it. It's as though vicarious sin is an adequate substitute for the real thing. Our entertainment may be sinking lower, but our moral standards keep rising in spite of it.

In fact, anyone trying to prove that we're succumbing to bad influences would have trouble filling a thimble with evidence. In 1994, conservative moralist William J. Bennett published a book, "The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators," noting an array of alarming trends and warning of impending doom. "Unless these exploding social pathologies are reversed," declared Bennett, "they will lead to the decline and perhaps even to the fall of the American republic."

Well, he's been proven right in a sense -- most of those pathologies were reversed, and the republic didn't fall. But social conservatives rarely publicize the progress we've made. As a result, many Americans mistakenly assume that we are going to hell on a fast freight.

One of the most vicious and destructive social ills is crime. In the late 1980s, with the rise of crack, it appeared to be spinning out of control. But in the last decade, the crime wave has moved toward low tide. Since peaking in 1991, the murder rate has plunged by 43 percent. The rate for all violent crimes has fallen by 29 percent. Ditto for property crimes like burglary and theft.

You'd think all the canoodling onscreen would overstimulate carnal appetites, particularly among the young and hormonal. But all the data suggest it works more like a cold shower. Among teenagers, for example, the federal Centers for Disease Control report that since 1991, "HIV infection, other sexually-transmitted diseases and unintended pregnancy have decreased among high school students nationwide." Out-of-wedlock births among teens are down as well.

Among women in general, unintended pregnancies have become less common. That's one reason the abortion rate, which was already on the decline, continued to fall during the 1990s. Although there have been some claims that it has risen since 2001, the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which specializes in reproductive health research, says the data are too sketchy at this point to know whether anything has changed.

Nor does all the racy fare seem to weaken marriage as an institution. The divorce rate has been slowly falling since the early 1980s, including a 16 percent decline in the last decade. Birth rates among unmarried women have been stable.

How about other vices? Alcohol consumption is on the wane, along with tobacco use. Drunk driving deaths last year hit their lowest level since 1999. A rare exception is illicit drug use, which has risen.

From all this data, you might get the idea that people take what they see and hear as a guide -- to what not to do. As it happens, there's other evidence for that proposition. In the Bible Belt, people tend to be more religious, which would be expected to foster more upright conduct. But the expectation proves unfounded.

In 2002, most of the states with the highest divorce rates (after perennial champion Nevada) were conservative and Southern -- such as Arkansas, Alabama and Kentucky. The state with the lowest rate of marital dissolution? Massachusetts, home of John Kerry and hotbed of secular liberalism.

How do we explain the overall paradox? Maybe endless exposure to racy or violent entertainment really does reduce the need for people to seek out such thrills in real life. Maybe openness about sex, drinking and other risky pleasures fosters more communication, which in turn leads to better decision-making. Maybe when we trust individuals with the freedom to make their own choices, they become more responsible rather than less.

In any event, we do know that however tasteless and degrading our entertainment may be, we can enjoy it (or not) without letting it rule our lives. Our moral standards may be under attack, but they seem to be big enough to take care of themselves.

To find out more about Steve Chapman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

BE A HERO ON 805 PERCENT A YEAR

by Alexander Cockburn

The president went to Camp Pendleton, togged up in his nice, new USMC tanker jacket with “Commander in Chief” sewn on the front. He got a gentler reception than his defense secretary received the same day a few thousand miles further east, in Camp Buehring, Kuwait.

As reported by AP's Robert Burns, Army Spc. Thomas Wilson of the 278th Regimental Combat Team (which is mostly made up of people from the Tennessee Army National Guard), asked Rumsfeld why "do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrapmetal and compromised ballistic glass to uparmor our vehicles?" The question got an ovation from the approximately 2,300 soldiers mustered for Rumsfeld's visit.

Flustered, the Defense Secretary got Wilson to repeat his question, then answered, "You go to war with the Army you have," and "You can have all the armor in the world on a tank, and it can (still) be blown up."

No one in Camp Pendleton belabored the commander in chief with so sharp a query as he thanked soldiers and families separated during the holidays. But there's no shortage of reports about the anger over long deployments, as well as the steady toll of dead and wounded. To date, 269 of the Marines based at Camp Pendleton have been killed in Iraq and many more wounded.

Bush lauded groups aiding families at the base, including a Camp Pendleton nurse, Karen Gunther, who, with other Marine families, started the Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund to raise cash for families in financial trouble. He urged Americans to go to the Web site www.AmericaSupportsYou.mil to offer support and donations.

Charity's not going to solve a problem that jumps straight out of the pork barrel priorities of the defense budget. Money sluices into the treasuries of defense contractors making those poorly armored tanks. Meanwhile, an E-2 level Marine gets $1,337.70 a month. Married, this Marine gets a monthly housing allowance of $460.50 a month, unmarried, $289.20.

I was down in Oceanside, Calif., the town just south of Camp Pendleton, earlier this year, and as I pointed out then, you don't have to drive more than a couple of blocks through Oceanside's main drag before the economic realities underlying military upkeep of the American Empire become apparent. On the south side of the 4000 block on Pacific Coast Highway is a colorful storefront with two big signs shouting "We Support Our Troops" and "Welcome Home Heroes." But the biggest sign of all says "PAYDAY ADVANCE." On the other side of the road there's a pawnshop, one of several in Oceanside, and there are several other storefronts offering advance loans for Marines who can't make it to the end of the month.

"Being poor in America," I wrote, " a reality for millions who might once have called themselves middle class, means having to face debts each month, without any decent financial services and hence dealing with interest rates of around 20 percent."

Not long after, I got a politely instructive note from Carol Hammerstein of the Center for Responsible Lending. It's not a matter of 20 percent interest rates, Ms. Hammerstein pointed out. "While this may be true of predatory mortgage lending, the rates are actually much, much higher for small consumer loans. For instance, payday lenders actually charge fees of about $15 to $20 per $100 borrowed. Because their loan terms are very short, usually two weeks, and they generally do not accept partial payments (by design), their annual interest rates actually start at about 400 percent and can exceed 1,000 percent."

Payday borrowers mostly have no idea what they're getting into. On the customer disclosure form the annual interest rate won't carry a percentage sign. Just a number, like 805. A payday lending business plan, cited by Ms. Hammerstein, advises: "Remember, in your response to clients' questions regarding your fees [say], ‘We charge $15 per $100 advanced.' Sounds like 15 percent, but in reality, since it is an eight-day loan, the true annual percentage is 805 percent."

So the borrowers get caught, paying fees for no new money, week after week. Ms. Hammerstein says her Center has found that payday lending is almost never for that one emergency stopgap loan. The payday lending business model is based on developing these lethal borrowing patterns. Ninety percent of all payday loans go to borrowers with five or more loans in a single year.

The Armed Forces recruiters target poor neighborhoods. The payday lenders target the Armed Forces. At Fort Bliss in Texas, Paul Fain wrote earlier this year in Military Money, the Army Emergency Relief office estimated nearly one-tenth of the 10,000 active duty troops stationed there have had to undergo credit counseling because of payday loans and other debt problems." Young soldiers and sailors, Fain went on, "are the perfect marks for payday lenders for reasons beyond financial naivete. Though they often live paycheck to paycheck, military personnel are paid regularly, never get laid off and face penalties for failing to repay debts."

Back to Oceanside. The enlisted servicemen and women hock stuff in the pawnshops and borrow against payday. The generals and the contractors buy up beach property and own stock in the institutions that bankroll the pawnshops. The military coming home from the war face rotten prospects in the service economy. The president was smart to make it a quick visit to Camp Pendleton. If, like Henry V in Shakespeare's play, he'd moved among the Marines in disguise and listened to their worries, he'd have had a rude surprise. But in the fake world of TV news PR, "heroes" aren't racked with worries like an 805 percent annual interest rate.

Footnote: Just so you know, Military Money calculated that if you borrow $200 for two weeks from the bank under your overdraft protection, you probably pay $235, which translates into an annual rate of 456 percent, 65 percent more than the payday loan rate for the same sum. Payday lenders aren't the only sharks in the water, and sometimes they're the only sharks prepared to lend to the small fry.

MOLLY IVINS


AUSTIN -- Two extraordinary books make brilliant companion pieces about one of the most disturbing and politically and morally troubling crises in our country. Inner-city poverty is one of those subjects about which too many of us think we already know as much as we need to know.

Minds made up, smug assumptions intact, pat solutions and platitudes -- "bootstraps," "enterprise zones," "responsibility," "teen pregnancy," "school vouchers" -- endless bromides. "Rosa Lee: A Mother and Her Family in Urban America" by Leon Dash, who won the Pulitzer Prize for the series on which the book is based, and "When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor" by the distinguished sociologist William Julius Wilson take completely different approaches to the same story.

It is hard to think of more radically different perspectives: Dash's book is, as they say, up close and personal, the in-your-face story of one three-generation welfare family. Wilson's book provides the consoling perspective of social science; and yet, with its relentless accumulation of fact, it is in its way the more horrifying of the two books. But because Dash's book is essentially reportage on a hideous situation, in the end, Wilson's book -- with its careful, nuanced, scholarly arguments -- is the more hopeful of the two.

He sees solutions that are critical for all of us, not just for poor blacks in inner cities. "The problems of joblessness and social dislocation in the inner city are, in part, related to the processes in the global economy that have contributed to greater inequality and insecurity among American workers in general and to the failure of U.S. social policies to adjust to these processes. It is therefore myopic to view the problems of jobless ghettos as if they were separate from those that plague the larger society."

Wilson -- like Mickey Kaus and others who study the inner city -- believes that JOBS are the single most important answer to the socio-pathologies of the ghetto. The ludicrous insanity of telling people on welfare to go out and get a job when they live in areas where every entry-level job has applicants stacked up 10 and 15 deep is something that only Newt Gingrich's Congress could have come up with. In this arid campaign year, devoted to the problems of "soccer moms," Wilson's deep analysis of the problems that paralyze the ghetto -- and increasingly the rest of America as well -- is as welcome as a slow, soakin' 3-inch rain on a parched prairie.

The story of Rosa Lee Cunningham, her eight children and numerous grandchildren, is a tour de force of a different kind. You want to shake her, you want to scream at her, but most of all, you care about her. Not to coin a phrase, but I couldn't put the book down.

No noble, downtrodden victims in this book -- hard-core hell-raisers, people rippin' off the system (not to mention every department store in downtown D.C.), crime, drugs, prostitution, AIDS -- what a mess. When "Mr. Dash," as Rosa Lee always called him, first ran this story in The Washington Post, a lot of middle-class black folks objected -- said it was reinforcing stereotypes, why not write about the success stories, etc. Well, because the success stories aren't the problem. I suppose those who think "values" are the answer to everything could find some reinforcement from this book. But I think that more perceptive readers will find much more.

Wilson's point about jobs is only indirectly reinforced. The institutional failure that I find most striking in this story is that of the public schools. Not only was Rosa Lee Cunningham illiterate, but so are most of her children. Her whole life centered on her children (and later heroin), so Rosa Lee's slow, hurting realization of how badly she had neglected their education is one of the most painful parts of the book.

"Mr. Dash" also focuses on the two of Rosa Lee's eight children who made it out of the ghetto -- both sons. And here all the sociological studies fall away and the mysteries of human development and luck come into play. In both cases, the answer was simple: Somebody helped. A wonderful teacher, a persistent social worker -- somebody was there for those two kids at a time when it made a big difference, in early adolescence. The most surprising part of Rosa Lee's story to me was how she herself was shaped: her family's caste and class in rural North Carolina, the source of her own mother's rigid, angry tungsten-toughness -- all that might have been in her life.

It has been said that the trouble with liberals is that we are hopelessly nonjudgmental, unable to say, "You are bad." But I do not see how it helps to demonize or dehumanize Rosa Lee Cunningham. It seems to me that we lose

Failing Haiti
 

Saturday, December 11, 2004; Page A22

ROGER F. NORIEGA, the assistant secretary of state with responsibility for the Caribbean region, takes umbrage at suggestions that the United States has been quicker to send troops into Haiti than to alleviate its appalling poverty. "Nothing could be further from the truth," Mr. Noriega huffed last month in a letter to the St. Petersburg Times. Mr. Noriega goes on to describe the lavish infusions of U.S. aid to Haiti over the past decade -- most of it before the Bush administration took office. He does not mention the Haitian Economic Recovery Opportunity Act, known as HERO, a trade bill that could have provided tens of thousands of jobs in the country's textile sector. Perhaps that's because his administration let the bill die quietly in Congress without lifting a finger to help.

In Haiti, the hemisphere's poorest nation, there are precious few economic openings that hold the promise of relatively quick and meaningful improvements in people's lives. The struggling textile industry is one of them. HERO would have provided some duty-free access to U.S. markets for low-priced T-shirts, shorts and sweatshirts assembled in Haiti using foreign fabric. Allowing cheap fabric imported from anywhere was a heady inducement for investors not otherwise eager to do business given Haiti's poverty and political chaos; without it, apparel makers would take their business elsewhere, probably to Asia. And a small trade preference in U.S. markets would go a long way: Duty-free access to 3 percent of the U.S. market would support 100,000 jobs in Haiti, according to some estimates.

Under pressure from textile-producing Southern states and their representatives in Congress, the bill was watered down in the House. But even that modest helping hand for Haiti was too much for two Southern Republicans, Sen. Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina and Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who blocked a vote in the Senate, although as past president of the American Red Cross, Mrs. Dole might have been expected to grasp a thing or two about jobs and relief for desperately needy people.

Faced with the expiration of a quota system for textile imports at the end of this year, many countries are requesting preferential access to U.S. markets. But Haiti is in a category of its own. Its destitution is staggering. The United States has sent troops there twice in the past decade, each time pledging a renewed commitment to help lift Haiti's sputtering economy. And Haiti's crises have a way of washing up on U.S. shores. Yet when presented with an opportunity to help create jobs and lift living standards in Haiti, the Bush administration took a powder.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

In These Times
December 13, 2004

WHY THE VIETNAM WAR STILL MATTERS

BY JACKSON LEARS; JACKSON LEARS is editor of Raritan and author, most recently, of Something for Nothing: Luck in America (Viking/Penguin).

GEORGE BUSH'S VICTORY IN 2004 signified the triumph of lies. Some of the least examined lies involved the history of the Vietnam War. In their attacks on Kerry's antiwar dissent, Bush and his Swift Boat allies advanced a right-wing narrative of the Vietnam War -- a narrative that legitimated current administration policy in Iraq. Popular acceptance of this story required widespread ignorance of what actually happened in our recent past. The diffuse but undeniable influence of the Swift Boat slanders was a symptom of the collective amnesia that threatens democratic debate in the contemporary United States.

"The struggle of man against power," the Czech novelist Milan Kundera wrote, "is the struggle of memory against forgetting." During the 20th Century, control over public perceptions of the past has become an essential strategy for the maintenance of state power. Kundera opened The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by recalling the disappearance of a Communist leader from official photographs after he had been charged with treason and hanged. Anyone who had questioned the regime's legitimacy could simply be airbrushed out of history. Our postmodern media managers are subtler, but in reshaping the public memory of the Vietnam War they have accomplished something even more impressive. They have erased the experience of an entire generation.

Since the rise of Ronald Reagan, right-wing journalists and intellectuals have been successfully selling a fictional explanation for American defeat in Vietnam. It is a variant of the "stab in the back" story concocted by German nationalists after their defeat in World War I. The American mission in Vietnam, from the post-Reagan view, was a "noble cause" done in by cowardly campus radicals and their allies in the "liberal media," whose combined pressure on politicians forced the military to fight "with one hand tied behind its back." During the last 25 years, this rightist fairy tale has seeped into our popular culture -- in the regularly scheduled rants of talk-radio and cable-television hosts, in films from Rambo to Forrest Gump, and in the rhetoric of politicians in both parties. By the '90s, even liberals were too cowed by this bizarre account of the Vietnam War to recall the actual events of that era.

Yet for a moment in July, on the last night of the Democratic Convention, it seemed as if one major party, at least, might finally be remembering the truth about the Vietnam War. In different ways, Max Cleland and John Kerry made the same larger point: Despite having volunteered for the war, many veterans came to see it as a catastrophic mistake, sustained by systematic mendacity. Opposition to this war was a patriotic service. For a moment that night in July, as Cleland and Kerry recalled their commitment and disillusionment, it looked as if our politicians might finally be coming to grips with the real meanings of the American misadventure in Vietnam.

But that hopeful assumption underestimated the tenacity of the right-wing narrative, as well as its centrality to contemporary Republican strategy. The Orwellian Swift Boat Veterans for Truth burst on to the post-convention scene, telling big lies and sowing big doubts about Kerry's medals. In a predictable display of phony "evenhandedness," the national media gave the Swift Boat charges equal time with Kerry's defense, as if lies and truth deserved an even break from a responsible press.

The Swift Boat Veterans embraced the "stab in the back" story of defeat in Vietnam. They were enraged that Kerry told the truth about the Vietnam War, as he did in his testimony to Congress in 1971 when he reported the results of the Winter Soldier Investigation. At this investigation, he testified, "over 150 honorably discharged, many highly decorated veterans" acknowledged their common participation in acts that could be characterized as atrocities or even war crimes. These men courageously questioned their own conduct, and demanded to know how their government had placed them in conditions that encouraged or even required that conduct. They spoke for themselves and their comrades, those who had died as well as those who lay helpless in veterans' hospitals, forgotten by the prating politicians who publicly claimed to exalt them.

The young Kerry was clear about who was responsible for this disaster. He asked: "Where are the leaders of our country? . . . Where are they now that we, the men they sent off to war, have returned? These are the commanders who have deserted their troops . . . These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude."

This testimony is simply inadmissible to the sanitized story of the Vietnam War that dominates contemporary politics. The Swift Boat Veterans professed outrage at the very notion that any Americans might have committed atrocities in Vietnam. By focusing on ordinary soldiers and leaving policymakers out of the picture, they avoided the larger meanings of that capacious word, "atrocity" -- the carpet bombing, the free fire zones, the use of Napalm and Agent Orange -- all the government strategies sanctioned by the highest military and civilian authority. Faith in American virtue remained intact, and the erasure of collective memory was stunning. About the time of the first debate, a headline in the Village Voice read: "Kerry Was Right: New Evidence of Vietnam Atrocities." As if Kerry needed "new evidence" to confirm his own experience and the experience of his contemporaries! Well, apparently he did.

In contrast to the media legitimation of the Swift Boat Veterans' lies, consider the discrediting of the essentially accurate CBS report on Bush's National Guard service. The truth about Bush's service -- or lack of it -- disappeared beneath a fog of charges and countercharges regarding the authenticity of several letters written by Bush's commanding officer, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian. No matter that the colonel's secretary confirmed the substance of the documents (while asserting that she herself had not typed them). No matter that the former lieutenant governor of Texas, Ben Barnes, admitted publicly that he was "ashamed" of securing preferential treatment for Bush and other wealthy, well-connected young men. The letters could not be authenticated, and that became the story.

The problem here was not that Bush evaded the draft or even that he did so by benefiting from economic privilege. No one should have to apologize for avoiding that vile war by any means necessary. The problem was that his behavior epitomized the hypocrisy of the draft-dodging hawk. Like most of his administration, Bush vigorously supported the war while even more vigorously trying to evade it, and ever since his entry into presidential politics his handlers have concealed their candidate's spotty military record while outfitting him in military costumes and posing him as a courageous commander in chief, brimming with "resolve." He became the quintessential postmodern patriot, for whom the appearance of bravery and command is more important than the actuality.

The acquiescence of the national media allowed this pose to work. The draft-dodging hawks embodied heroic leadership, while his opponent was "perceived" (we were told) as indecisive and weak -- this man who courageously volunteered for combat, then came home and courageously criticized the insane policies he had seen on the ground in Vietnam. One does not have to be an uncritical fan of Kerry to feel outrage at the injustice done to him. Under the barrage of Republican disinformation, his noblest moments became the seed of his undoing. No wonder so many of us, when we encountered the national media coverage of this campaign, felt that we had entered an "Alice in Wonderland" world, as the novelist and Vietnam veteran Tim O'Brien said of the Swift Boat controversy -- a world where factual evidence was ignored, common-sense perceptions of reality were reversed, and history was refashioned to meet the needs of those in power.

The consequences for contemporary politics cannot be overestimated. Refusal to come to grips with our defeat in Vietnam -- to reflect on the hazards of a morally charged hubris -- lies at the core of our current misadventures abroad. Bush's advisers came of age in the shadow of that defeat, determined to deny its significance by reasserting imperial power on a grand scale, just as German nationalists had longed to do in the wake of World War I. That dream of national regeneration, combined with our collective amnesia, lets the Bush administration ignore the growing parallels between the failed policy in Iraq and the failed precedent in Vietnam: the millenarian fantasies used to justify the war; the ignorance of local culture and custom; the reiteration of empty platitudes as chaos looms; the fetish of "free elections;" the soldiers trapped in an impossible assignment -- as vulnerable to local hostility as any Western army of occupation has ever been, in any country with a history of colonial domination.

The most important parallel is the government's inability to tell the truth about the war. The lie at the center of the right-wing Vietnam narrative -- the stab-in-the back story -- was central to Bush's campaign strategy, and continues to underwrite support for his war in Iraq. The belief (against all evidence) that the troops in Vietnam were somehow betrayed by the antiwar movement, rather than by the men who sent them there, remains a powerful rhetorical weapon. It allows Bush and his handlers to equate criticism of government policy with treason -- or at best with a failure to "support our troops." The persistence of this twisted logic underscores the continuing relevance of the young John Kerry's charge: that the people who have truly abandoned our troops are the policymakers who sent them on a fool's errand under cover of false claims, and then "retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude."
They've done it again. That is why the Vietnam War still matters.