Posted on Sun, Nov. 25, 2007

A national epidemic of all-or-nothing disease

When the horrors of one day in a Vietnamese village known as My Lai first surfaced, many Americans instinctively rallied to the defense of the Army officer at the center of the incident. That defense, in the context of what we knew at the time, was not unreasonable - the likelihood that Lt. William Calley of Columbus, Ga., was being made a scapegoat for the decisions of higher-ups; that the atrocities of My Lai were a tragic reality of the chaos of war, especially a war in which the enemy was not so easy to identify. But something curious began happening: Calley became, in the minds of some, not just an unfortunate caught in the middle of a tragedy, but a hero, a great American. It was not enough simply to defend Calley; he had to be lionized. (He was later court-martialed and served three and a half years of house arrest at his military barracks at Fort Benning.)

Something not so very different happened a few years later when a New Yorker named Bernard Goetz shot some subway toughs he said were trying to mug him. The image of Goetz as an ordinary guy defending himself against the thuggery and crime then rampant in New York quickly gave way, for some at least, to the myth of a heroic Charles Bronson figure playing out some real-life everyman fantasy of "Death Wish."

That pattern seems to be recurring with increasing frequency and intensity: Americans lining up on one side or the other of no-middle-ground causes that countenance no ambiguity and no ambivalence - just absolute heroes and absolute villains, angels and devils, the most inviolate good and the most unforgivable evil. And more and more often, it seems, those causes are split across troublesome chasms of race, class or both. Genarlow Wilson. The Duke lacrosse team. The Jena Six. They all have at least these three things in common: All have racial overtones, all involve obvious injustice, and all long ago plummeted past reasonable resolution and into a bottomless pit of angry, recriminatory, with-us-or-against-us absurdity. Wilson, a Georgia high schooler, was convicted of aggravated child molestation for having consensual sex with another teen and sentenced to a mandatory 10 years in prison - an outrageous legal backlash that raised legitimate questions of whether a nice white suburban youth would ever face even the remote possibility of such punishment for the same offense.

In Louisiana, six black teens beat up a white classmate in the town of Jena, prompting local authorities to charge one with no less than attempted murder, a charge later dropped. And at Duke, three lacrosse players were falsely accused of raping a stripper they had hired for an off-campus party. The district attorney in the case was later disbarred. Just about everybody, it seems, knows the facts of all these cases. So why do so many otherwise decent and intelligent people insist on turning what began as just and reasonable causes into outrageous crusades, and trying to make heroes out of those who have, to put it mildly, done nothing remotely heroic?

Genarlow Wilson, from all credible accounts, is a basically decent kid who did a bad thing; he's not the first or the last. He's also no hero; nor is he, in this context at least, a role model. In Louisiana, six teens beat up one. That's not a civil rights cause worthy of squeezing the Freedom Riders out of the history books, any more than the authorities who so grossly overreacted should be immortalized as champions of law and order. And in Durham, some white Duke college kids were subjected to a long, harrowing and uncalled-for ordeal. That doesn't make them choirboys, their behavior heroic or their accuser any kind of victim. We've all heard a lot of loud and more than faintly self-righteous cries for justice. Maybe what we should be crying out for is some perspective.

Dusty Nix, Columbus (Ga,) Ledger-Enquirer

Posted on Sun, Nov. 25, 2007

U.S. still remains popular in much of the world

It seems hard to believe, but less than one year from today a new president-elect will be preparing to enter the White House.

Of course, he or she will face an unprecedented array of foreign-policy challenges: The Iraq war, global warming, Iran's nuclear program. ... But not least among them is regaining America's stature in the world.

At no other time in this country's modern history has America's reputation fallen to a point so low. Still, the new president should be heartened by a contradictory but indisputable fact: The popularity of the United States worldwide. Yes, the popularity.

I've worked in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq and many other places where America's image appears to be near bottom. In many of these places, I have visited the United States Embassy at 9 a.m. on Thursday - or whenever the consular section is accepting visa applications.

There, lines stretch around the block and back again. And many of the prospective applicants are young men, much like those young men who march in the streets denouncing the Yankee-Zionist enemy.

Ask them, as I have: What are you doing here? Why would you want to go to America? And every time, they will say: Oh, I don't dislike Americans. I love America. I just don't like your government.

They say that even in countries like Saudi Arabia, where anti-American sentiment seems to course through the blood. Of course, 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 came from the kingdom. During the time I have spent reporting there in recent years, I could not find anyone who was unwilling to spit vitriol about the United States.

And yet, if you introduce yourself to any Saudi man, chances are he will immediately tell you that he went to college at the University of Arizona, or some other school here, and wax eloquent about how much he enjoyed his time in the United States. To this day, a rite of passage for well-off Saudi men is to attend college in America.

A few months ago, an opinion column in the Arab News, an English-language newspaper in Riyadh, discussed this paradox and said: "It is curious that so many Arabs remain envious of the American way of life at a time when the U.S. has demonstrated such contempt for the Arab people. The truth is that the idea of America retains a dazzling allure - though America is afflicted by a chronic moral and spiritual malaise."

The Arab world remains deeply conflicted. And no matter what the new president does, it may be impossible to win over the fundamentalists on the Arab street. They have a different vision of the world. As Abbas Milani, an Iranian scholar at Stanford University, puts it: "These are the people who see Islam as an alternative to modernity." That may be an ideological contest the United States cannot win.

Still, much of the rest of the world wants - needs - to have good relations with America.

In Great Britain, Tony Blair lost office primarily because people thought he was too cozy with President Bush. They called him " Bush's poodle." And yet his successor, Gordon Brown, has hardly tried to distance himself from Washington.

Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder won office through vocal opposition to the Iraq war - and Bush. Nonetheless, his successor, Angela Merkel, has proved to be quite friendly. And what about France? No country was a greater antagonist during the buildup to the Iraq war and beyond. But when France's new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, visited Bush at the White House this month, he declared: "I want to reconquer the heart of America."

So, is this reservoir of goodwill enough to turn things around in January 2009? Probably not completely. If I were the new president, in my inauguration speech I would announce that I am closing Guantanamo.

Very soon after that, I would launch a significant new initiative on global warming - something that says: We get it now. Of course, the new president will very quickly have to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq. That is a domestic demand first. But it will be welcomed abroad.

And I am sure he or she will be smart enough not to use provocative throw-away lines like "you're with us or against us" or "bring 'em on."

Winning back the world may not be as difficult as it seems. In fact the most important act will be Bush's goodbye wave as he steps aboard Marine One for the last time.

Joel Brinkley is a former correspondent for The New York Times and now a professor of journalism at Stanford University. His e-mail is: brinkley@foreign-matters.com

Posted on Fri, Nov. 23, 2007

SOA protesters neither ignorant nor stupid

Contrary to Sloan Oliver's opinion, the annual protesters of the School of the Americas (that trains Latin American soldiers) at Fort Benning, are far from ignorant or stupid. They are led by dozens of ordained clergy of many denominations, religious sisters, military veterans, and many other educated, patriotic Americans who hold our government and our military to high moral standards.

Oliver naively believes our military would never do wrong; while it is to be honored for its service, military personnel sometimes do bad things, such as at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were they humiliated and tortured foreign prisoners.

At SOA/WHISC, the Army has admitted that the military training manuals did include tactics such as torture. Only within the last 10 years did the Army revise these teaching manuals. Too late for the four American religious women murdered in 1980 in Central America by graduates of SOA. Too late for Archbishop Oscar Romero, shot at the altar in church by SOA graduates. Too late for six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter, at the University in San Salvador, attacked at home in the middle of the night and murdered by SOA graduates.

None of these victims was armed or a military threat to the dictators in government. The fact is that a large percentage of the graduates of SOA/WHISC have been identified in murders and human-rights violations when they returned home to Latin America. Unless Latin leaders sent only military thugs to be trained at SOA/WHISC, the percentage of those who returned south to bully and kill anti-government citizens is quite telling.

Why is our government in the business of training Latin American soldiers at Fort Benning? In the interests of our "national security?" If that is the reason, then for many decades our national security has depended on U.S. support of dictators, fascists and military coups of democratically elected leaders. And we preach to the world, so self righteously, how the U.S. is the champion of human rights.

David B. Connor is a resident of Macon.

Posted on Wed, Nov. 21, 2007

Simply untrue

Sloan Oliver's assertion that the U.S. Army School of the Americas did not teach torture is simply untrue. In the past, the SOA has been accused of training members of governments guilty of serious human rights abuses and of advocating techniques that violate accepted international standards, particularly the Geneva Conventions.

In 1996, the Pentagon admitted torture, execution, false imprisonment, extortion and other techniques were included in training manuals used at the SOA and by mobile training units in Latin America until 1991. This admission triggered an investigation by the Pentagon's inspector general.

In his final report, the inspector general said "mistakes" led to the inclusion of "objectionable" information in manuals used to train Latin American soldiers and officers at Fort Benning.

This was one reason the SOA lost it's legal authorization in 2001 and the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation was established. The new curriculum does offer optional human rights training.

It seems to me protesting the use of torture is isn't really a liberal or Democratic issue. Perhaps it's the Christian, and more important, the moral thing to do.

John Planchon
Warner Robins

Posted on Sun, Nov. 18, 2007

How could this be?

The incident in Iraq involving the private security firm Blackwater USA was yanked from public scrutiny faster than a speeding politician going through the construction area around Hartley Bridge here in the good ol' USA. Why was a private security firm providing security for any member of our armed forces? Am I stupid? The logic behind this stinks to the highest level.

Ask your congressman or senator a few questions the next time he or she dares show their face back home. How much of the $50 or so billion currently under consideration by Congress is earmarked for "private security"? This amount is bound to go up faster than a Saturn rocket and the public outcry should make an atomic bomb look like a firecracker.

Private security for our military "heroes."

Balderdash!

Ken Brown
Byron