Although polls show Americans’ support for the war in Iraq is slipping, the public is not of one mind. Some oppose the war, some support it; many have mixed feelings. Just as soldiers in combat fight for each other and not for an ideology or a political position, there are issues on the home front that transcend the politics of the Iraq war.

One of those issues is military recruiting. There have been several stories in the media recently about aggressive efforts by military recruiters to sign young men and women into the armed forces and parents’ rights to be involved in that process.

A particular concern is the depth to which recruiters have penetrated high schools. The 2002 No Child Left Behind Act (Section 9528(a)(1)) says, “each local educational agency receiving assistance under this Act shall provide, on a request made by military recruiters or an institution of higher education, access to secondary school students names, addresses, and telephone listings.”
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The war in Iraq, like the war in Vietnam, is a quagmire, but where does the comparison end? There’s a wall in Washington, DC that says the Vietnam War lasted 16 years and cost 58,000 American lives. Let’s hope we don’t match those statistics before we bring the troops home.

As in Vietnam, it’s been clear from the beginning that Iraq’s principle issues are political and cannot be solved by any amount of military intervention by the United States. The difference is that in Iraq, military officers and diplomats are already willing to admit to the futility of seeking a military solution. Getting to this point in Vietnam took a decade.

So what’s the political solution? As in Vietnam, it lies with the legitimate aspirations of the Iraqi people. The Vietnamese people aspired to a nation governed by Vietnamese, for Vietnamese. The Vietnamese Communist Party may not have been the highest, best and most democratic expression of the will of the Vietnamese people, but it had more legitimacy than the succession of crooks and hoodlums maintained in power by the French, Japanese or Americans.
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Science, law and religion are meeting this spring in state capitols and at local pharmacies. The topic of discussion is “Plan B,” a contraceptive drug sometimes called “the morning after pill.” Plan B is a concentrated dose of the hormone levonorgestrel and taking it will prevent a woman from ovulating, prevent an egg from being fertilized or prevent a fertilized egg from implanting into the wall of the uterus. Keep that third effect in mind.

To be effective, one dose of Plan B must be taken within 72 hours of unprotected intercourse, a second within 120 hours. Plan B is meant as an emergency backup to other forms of contraception, such as a broken condom, or for cases of unanticipated sex, such as rape.

The federal Food and Drug Administration has ruled that prescriptions are needed for Plan B. Since getting to a doctor, getting a prescription and getting it filled may take more than 72 hours, seven states have passed laws allowing doctor-pharmacist collaborations that permit pharmacists to dispense Plan B without a prescription.

Plan B is not the same as RU-486 (mifeprestone), a drug that causes an abortion early in a pregnancy. By medical definition, pregnancy begins when a fertilized egg implants itself into a uterine wall. Plan B is not an abortifacient, because its effects occur before the onset of pregnancy. Some people, however, believe pregnancy – and life – begin when sperm fertilizes egg. To their minds, Plan B is an abortifacient.
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Mexican President Vicente Fox put his foot in his mouth up to the knee last week. Speaking to a business group, he criticized U.S. immigration policy, saying Mexican workers are willing to go to the U.S. and perform jobs “that not even blacks want to do.” There was the usual uproar and, after initially standing by his remarks, presidential backpedaling. Mr. Fox’s inadvertent blurting of his actual thoughts is an insight into the mindset of North America’s ruling class.

Mr. Fox’s assumption is that African Americans get the worst legal jobs in the U.S. and jobs worse than those – off the books, sub-minimum wage and no protections – are the province of the people he was allegedly elected to serve.

Without condoning racist statements, it has to be admitted the U.S. has done little to contradict Mr. Fox’s prejudice. A family court case in point is playing out near Nashville. In the 1990s, Felipa Berrera brought her family from the Mexican state of Guerrero to Tennessee. Ms. Berrera is Mixtec and speaks neither English nor Spanish, but only her native language, Mixteca. Needless to say, Ms. Berrera and her family are poor. They live in a trailer, there is often little to eat. Sometimes, Ms. Berrera would keep her daughter Linda, now 11, home from school to care for her younger siblings.
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