05/01/2003

Vatican Roulette

Now that hostilities have subsided in the Iraq war, we’re all hoping for an outpouring of democratic spirit. At the same time, we fear the nation may be falling into the hands of fundamentalist demagogues. I’m not talking about Iraq; I mean the United States of America.

Three weeks ago, Rick Santorum, the Republican junior senator from Pennsylvania gave an interview to the Associated Press in which he compared homosexual sex to bigamy, polygamy and incest and said states should be free to outlaw homosexual acts, even performed behind closed doors by consenting adults.
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By floegel | Posted in Catholicism, Civil Liberty, Commentary | Comments (0)
04/24/2003

Hard Lessons

The newspapers say President Bush is determined to avoid the mistake his father made in 1992. Now that Bush Junior’s Persian Gulf war is winding down, George W. is said to be prepared to pay attention to his domestic agenda in ways his father did not.

The domestic agenda could stand a bit of attention. The American economy has shed over two million jobs since Mr. Bush took the oath of office; you would have to look back to the administration of Herbert Hoover to find a president who presided over a greater downturn in the national economy.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Comments (0)
04/17/2003

Hail, Dorothy

My friend Jeanne said, “Those guys at the Pentagon must have watched ‘The Wizard of Oz’ too many times. They think Saddam Hussein is the Wicked Witch of the West and now that he’s gone everyone will kneel down and say, ‘Hail, Dorothy.’” If you follow the analogy, George W. Bush is Dorothy. I wonder what his sister would think of that.

Iraq is not the Land of Oz, by any stretch of the imagination. For one thing, Oz had a good witch in the south and Iraq has – Basra. A week after coalition forces took control of the city, there’s no water, no electricity, no medicine and very little food. The British forces and some of the locals have put together a skeletal police force and Shi’ite imams are calling for order, but life is miserable for the people of southern Iraq. Only a few miles from the Kuwaiti border, there are not enough troops to maintain order and tend to humanitarian needs. Chalk up another one for Donald Rumsfeld’s estimates of necessary troop deployments.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Comments (0)
04/10/2003

Freedom’s Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose

The battle for Baghdad, and thus the war in Iraq, is drawing to a close. Already the hawks in the Pentagon are rattling their sabers toward Syria. The war on terror, it is to be assumed, continues unabated even if we still can’t find Osama bin Laden.

Shortly after 9-11, President Bush, referring to terrorists, said, “They hate us for our freedom.” That sentence has been repeated many times in the past few years and every time they trot it out, we seem to have less freedom. Civil liberties are assaulted from all sides, John Kerry was accused of treason for suggesting we may not wish to re-elect Mr. Bush and economic freedom is a fond and distant memory.

Maybe this is the real strategy to fight the war on terror. If we really believe the terrorists “hate us for our freedom,” then by taking away our freedom, the terrorists will no longer hate us. They’ll pity us.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Comments (0)
04/03/2003

Shock Waves

I was reading the twenty-fourth paragraph of a war story in the Washington Post Sunday when the sentence jumped out at me: “If the Pentagon does deploy into Iraq all the troops currently scheduled to go, almost half the combat power of the Army and the Marine Corps will be in Iraq.”

That’s an uncomfortable thought, for four reasons:
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Comments (0)
03/27/2003

A War of Choice

Early in the Clinton administration, UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright sat in a meeting with General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, discussing Bosnia. Ms. Albright suggested sending in American troops.

“What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” she asked. General Powell, later wrote that he nearly had an aneurysm. “American GIs,” he wrote, “were not toy soldiers to be moved around on some sort of global game board.” General Powell went on to write that when using armed force to resolve a political dispute, the military force involved has to be commensurate with the political interests at stake.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Comments (0)
03/20/2003

All Over the World

Life is uncertain. Change is the only constant; so it is now. As I write these words, we are still within the 48-hour window that precedes the onset of hostilities in Iraq.

I went downtown Sunday night to the front lawn of the Unitarian Church. Some 400 of my fellow Burlingtonians gathered with candles to keep a vigil for peace. I recognized many faces from around town, from previous anti-war gatherings. Unlike the rallies, the crowd was subdued and solemn Sunday, standing for long minutes in silence. A full moon showed in the sky; lights from the street threw shadows from the bare branches of a sugar maple onto the church’s facade. Above the door, the number 1816 – the year of the church’s founding – was carved in granite. Less than two years before the church was built, Americans had repulsed the British army and navy just across the lake at Plattsburgh, New York.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Comments (0)