November 1, 2004
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November 1, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Days of Shame
By BOB HERBERT
verseas, our troops are being mauled in the long dark night of Iraq - a war with no end in sight that has already claimed the lives of more than 1,100 American troops and thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of innocent Iraqis.
At home, the party of the sitting president is systematically stomping on the right of black Americans to vote, a vile and racist practice that makes a mockery of the president's claim to favor real democracy anywhere.
This will never be seen as a shining moment in U.S. history.
There is a hallucinatory quality to the news as Americans prepare to vote tomorrow in what is probably the most critical election the country has faced since 1932. Osama bin Laden made his bizarre cameo appearance on Friday, taunting the president who once promised to get him dead or alive. Commentators have been compulsively reading the tea leaves ever since, trying to determine who was helped by the video,
George W. Bush or John Kerry.
On Saturday, as if to take our minds off the sideshow, nine more American marines were killed in the Iraq slaughterhouse. It was the deadliest day for U.S. forces in six months. The death toll for Iraqis, which the U.S. government has tried mightily to keep from the American people, is flat out horrifying. Unofficial estimates of the number of Iraqis killed in the war have ranged from 10,000 to 30,000. But a survey conducted by scientists from Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad compared the death rates of Iraqis before and after the American invasion. They estimated that 100,000 more Iraqis have died in the 18 months since the invasion than would have been expected based on Iraqi death rates before the war.
The scientists acknowledged that the survey was difficult to compile and that their findings represent a rough estimate. But even if they were off by as many as 20,000 or 40,000 deaths, their findings would still be chilling.
Most of the widespread violent deaths, the scientists reported, were attributed to coalition forces. "Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces," the report said, "were women and children."
That people are dying by the tens of thousands in a war that did not have to be fought - a war that was launched by the United States - is mind-boggling.
Also mind-boggling is the attempt by Republican Party elements to return the U.S. to the wretched days of the mid-20th century when many black Americans faced harassment, intimidation and worse for daring to exercise their fundamental right to vote. A flier circulating extensively in black neighborhoods in Wisconsin carries the heading "Milwaukee Black Voters League." It asserts that people are not eligible to vote if they have voted in any previous election this year; if they have ever been found guilty of anything, even a traffic violation; or if anyone in their family has ever been found guilty of anything.
"If you violate any of these laws," the flier says, "you can get ten years in prison and your children will get taken away from you."
In Philadelphia, where a large black vote is essential to a Kerry victory in the crucial state of Pennsylvania, the Republican speaker of the Pennsylvania House, John Perzel, is hard at work challenging Democratic voters. He makes no bones about his intent, telling U.S. News & World Report:
"The Kerry campaign needs to come out with humongous numbers here in Philadelphia. It's important for me to keep that number down."
That's called voter suppression, folks, and the G.O.P. concentrates its voter-suppression efforts in the precincts where there are large numbers of African-Americans. And that's called racism.
These are days of shame for the United States. No one writing a civics text for American high school students would recommend this kind of behavior for a great and mighty nation. We have to figure out a way to extricate ourselves from Iraq and rebuild a truly representative democracy here at home. Right now we have a mess on both fronts.
It was Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, who said that "America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment."
That's as good a thought as any to carry with you into the voting booth tomorrow.
E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com
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Posted on Mon, Nov. 01, 2004
The architects of quagmire
POLITICIANS AND ADVISERS ARE TO BLAME FOR VIETNAM, NOT PROTESTERS LIKE KERRY
Recently, as we looked back a generation to the war in Southeast Asia, a Vietnamese official stationed in Washington remarked: ``We suffered grievously but we have put the ordeal behind us and are strenuously laboring to reconstruct our devastated country. It puzzles me, however, that America is still fighting the conflict.''
His comment was prompted by the shrill effort by Sen. John Kerry's rabid opponents to besmirch him. They maintain among their myriad allegations that he inflated his service as a naval officer in Vietnam, cooperated with the communists by secretly meeting with their representative in Paris and maligned his fellow soldiers by accusing them of perpetrating horrendous atrocities.
In a cascade of books, articles and television ``documentaries,'' they contend that his agitation and condemnation of the war in vocal testimony before a congressional panel after his return home played into the hands of the enemy, lengthened the conflict, significantly increased the number of U.S. dead and wounded and postponed the release of the captured American bomber pilots incarcerated and tortured in the ``Hanoi Hilton,'' the grimy dungeon in the North Vietnamese capital.
Right-wing gambits
Contrived to derail Kerry's campaign for the presidency, these attacks are politically motivated gambits generously subsidized by ultraconservative Republican groups. As such, they are blatantly partisan. Particularly flimsy is their charge that the communists, cleverly using an array of clandestine channels in Europe, Hong Kong and elsewhere, surreptitiously financed critics of the war as an expedient device to disseminate their propaganda.
The anti-war movement has been acclaimed in retrospect by many of its participants as a salutary episode that awakened the nation to its manifold problems in the wake of the complacent 1950s. But Vietnam was only one of their issues. They focused on everything from voting rights to environmental problems, each faction promoting its own agenda. Their agitators convulsed and paralyzed cities and campuses, inciting panicky governors, mayors and deans to subdue them by mobilizing police and troops equipped with loaded rifles and canisters of tear gas.
The turmoil failed to influence middle-class voters. On the contrary, it alarmed and alienated them, enabling Richard Nixon to score a landslide triumph in 1972 by vowing to achieve ``peace with honor.''
`Stay there forever?'
Eager to extricate himself from the vexatious Vietnam predicament and pursue an ambitious foreign policy, Nixon instructed Henry Kissinger to agree to a cease-fire that caved in to the stiff communist demands. Kissinger's deputy, John Negroponte, cautioned that the lopsided accord would doom the feckless South Vietnamese regime, to which his boss furiously retorted, ``What do you want us to do? Stay there forever?
I began reporting on the war in the summer of 1959, and covered it until the communist tank, infantry and guerrilla units crashed into Saigon 16 years later. Like my colleagues, I was swayed by the ``domino theory,'' the thesis enunciated by U.S. strategists that the Soviet Union and China would dominate the world unless we held the line in the Far East. But I soon recognized that despite our military superiority, we were bogged down in a hopeless quagmire as we confronted stubborn, resilient adversaries prepared to accept ghastly losses to attain their goals.
My several visits to Vietnam in the aftermath of the conflict authenticated that estimate. Every North Vietnamese and Viet Cong veteran I questioned adamantly emphasized that he had been engaged in a sacred struggle for which he would have willingly sacrificed himself. Having seen the contorted, decapitated cadavers of their comrades bulldozed into mass graves, I believed them.
Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, the commander of the communist forces, was equally intransigent when I interviewed him in his modest villa in Hanoi in March 1991. I asked him whether he had entertained the notion of a compromise settlement as a means to reduce casualties.
Rejecting the suggestion as ludicrous, he stressed that his primary concern was victory and thundered in fluent French, ``We would have fought the Americans for another 10, 20, 50, 100 years, regardless of the cost.''
Hence, our foes had little faith in their sympathizers to turn the tide in their favor. Implacable, isolated and unfamiliar with the complicated practice of negotiations, our foes concentrated on the battlefield as their pivotal arena. It was in their flooded paddies, concealed villages, tangled mountain jungles and labyrinth of rivulets that they had repeatedly resisted Chinese invasions for millenniums and vanquished their French colonial rulers in the remote valley of Dienbienphu in 1954.
The Vietnam War was a momentous chapter in U.S. history, and deserves to be debated and discussed in detail, as it now is in high schools and colleges. But Kerry's flamboyant antagonists have added nothing of substance to the subject.
`Terribly wrong'
Opinion polls indicate that the overwhelming majority of Americans believe it to have been a dreadful mistake -- or as the efficient, vigorous Robert McNamara, a chief architect of the conflict under both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, subsequently concluded, ``We were wrong, terribly wrong.''
Yet the hard-liners obstinately refuse to concede it was a futile enterprise and, in their strident endeavor to depict it as a glorious venture, insist on attributing the worst and only defeat in our collective memory to the crude, rambunctious protesters rather than to the actual culprits: the Democratic and Republican politicians and their entourage of supposedly sagacious civilian and military advisers who, suffused with deceptive optimism, propelled us into the debacle.
STANLEY KARNOW is the author of ``Vietnam: A History,'' and won the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1991. He wrote this article for the Mercury News.
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Posted on Mon, Nov. 01, 2004
Voters have a duty, too
INFORMED CHOICES BETTER FOR ALL
The voting reform most needed in America today is one that costs little and that the government has the least control over.
Americans need to inform themselves about the candidates, the issues and the election process.
The problem with this reform is that it requires effort. Too many Americans are willing to let their private decisions be guided by campaign commercials and political sales pitches.
This isn't a good way to buy a car, much less elect a president.
Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and third president of the United States, feared for the future of the new democratic government he helped establish if Americans failed to inform themselves about the candidates and the issues.
The problem, as Jefferson saw it, was that citizens too lazy to become well-informed become easy prey for political manipulators who will form a despotic government for their own benefit and deprive the citizens of their liberties.
Jefferson was such a believer in his premise that an informed electorate was necessary to sustain democratic self-government that he proposed a constitutional amendment to legalize federal support for education. That proposal failed but his conviction that citizens can protect their freedoms only if they can cast informed ballots never wavered.
Even with nationwide public schools, repeated surveys show Americans are woefully ignorant of both the candidates and the issues that affect their daily lives.
Only 30 percent of voters, according to the Cato Institute, know about the new highly controversial Medicare prescription-drug benefit. And the list goes on.
Being one of Jefferson's well-informed citizens should include a daily habit of keeping up with current issues in local, state and federal governments.
Voters informed about the candidates, the issues and the voting process can do a better job protecting their liberties than the legions of lawyers prepared to file lawsuits on their behalf.
ROWLAND NETHAWAY is a senior editor of the Waco Tribune-Herald.
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Posted on Mon, Nov. 01, 2004
The poor: unseen and ignored
POVERTY RATE AN ISSUE FOR NEXT PRESIDENT
Mercury News Editorial
With 35 million poor people in America, including nearly 13 million children, why has poverty been virtually ignored as an issue in the presidential campaign?
The poverty rate has increased steadily over the past three years, most dramatically among children. Yet the poor aren't classified as likely voters, and they don't contribute to political campaigns.
So it's not surprising that when President Bush and John Kerry have paused in their debate over national security to discuss domestic issues, their focus has been the plight of the middle class. They've debated whether the rich pay more than their share of taxes. When asked about the plight of the poor, they've marveled at the success of welfare reform in putting poor mothers to work. They've promised poor families the same thing they've promised to the middle class: better schools, health care and jobs.
Education and jobs are a long-term prescription to end poverty. But in the short term, it's hard to go to school on an empty stomach. A job is a ticket out of poverty only if it pays enough to live on. With the federal minimum wage stuck at $5.15 an hour, one quarter of the working families in America live below the poverty line.
Taking care of the poor -- helping them buy food and clothing, get to work and pay rent so they aren't homeless -- costs money. Voters equate expensive social programs with higher taxes. The only campaign message that's palatable to the middle class today is: Help the poor help themselves (so they can pay their own way).
In Santa Clara County, CalWORKs employment counselors are helping the poor help themselves. They're placing welfare clients in jobs that pay an average of $11 an hour. But even that wage isn't enough to support a family in Silicon Valley, and many single parents have to work two jobs.
Increasingly, unemployed fathers are joining women in the employment office. But recent state budget cuts will make it harder for the county to provide those workers with the support they need to work. The two men who want to lead America for the next four years don't want voters to look at the face of poverty. But the growing divide between rich and poor is going to plague the next president.
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