Category: National

It’s no secret that al-Qaeda operatives may be trying to sneak into the United States through Mexico. They’d have to be stupid to ignore America’s 1,989-mile sovereign sieve of a southern border. And as we know all too well, they are not stupid. Would that they were. And it’s now known that Hezbollah has operations in Latin America.

What is hard to fathom, however, is President George Bush’s decision to drastically slash the proposed increase in Border Patrol agents next year. When Congress passed the intelligence reform bill in December, it authorized an additional 2,000 agents; Bush is requesting 210.

This is not the place for nominal budget cuts and symbolic deficit-reduction gestures. Nor is this the time to back off beefing up America’s notoriously porous border as if the security issue will forever be relegated to bilateral spats over illegal immigrants and smugglers.

Then again, perhaps the president prefers the neighborhood watch approach.

Next month about 1,000 volunteers are expected to descend on a 40-mile stretch of the Arizona-Mexican border. They will become temporary – but de facto – border guards. Actual contact with migrants will be officially forbidden, but volunteers with handgun permits can still carry their weapons.

Critics obviously see the “Minuteman Project” as incipient vigilantism.

That may be an overreaction. What isn’t is the sobering realization that border defense on the cheap – in a post-9/11 world – is unconscionable and scary.

The debate is far from over as to whether this country is safer for having invaded Iraq. There should be no debate, however, when it comes to the correlation between safety and the intruder-inviting 1,989 miles of U.S.-Mexico border.

A terrorist is a terrorist, although there are gradations based on degree of depravity and sheer numbers.

Now that the Irish government has officially fingered Gerry Adams as part of the Irish Republican Army’s seven-member army council command, shouldn’t Americans – especially Irish-Americans — regard Adams as something other than the glib, fundraising spokesman for Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political arm?

While it might seem blasphemous to those who still romanticize the IRA as doing nothing more than fighting the morally good, anti-empire fight for freedom and equality, shouldn’t the Adams’ outing change that once and for all? If vengeance and reprisals – inevitably complemented by the spilling of innocent blood – is still the modus operandi , isn’t that terrorism?

And fundraising, including that done at American universities and sympathetic neighborhood pubs, is still terrorism albeit once-removed. No matter what percentage goes to propaganda and “orphans.” No matter that it’s not aimed at us, for somebody assuredly is in the cruel crosshairs. And chances are, they don’t appreciate the bloody enabling.

In fact, when we are the targets – of Islamic jihadists in our midst — we don’t have qualms about dispensing with political and fundraising euphemisms. We know terrorists can have blood on their hands without picking up a weapon.

Germany recently memorialized one of its most ghastly remembrances: the 60th anniversary of the devastating Allied bombing in World War II that killed some 35,000 residents of Dresden.

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said the anniversary was an opportunity for people everywhere to unite against the “inhumanity of war.” He also railed against several thousand neo-Nazis who were rallying against the Dresden firestorms. The neo-nazis were calling them a “bomb Holocaust” and vowing “The day of revenge will come.”

While the neo-Nazis deflected attention from Schroeder’s “inhumanity” message, there is another theme that needed to be – but wasn’t — specifically verbalized and directly underscored. It is this: It is always wrong to target civilians.

Theirs or ours – however you define “they” or “us.” Whoever started the war becomes a moot point; it surely wasn’t the citizenry. It never is.

It was wrong for the Germans to bomb London and intentionally kill innocents in an attempt to demoralize the English. It was not right for the Brits and Americans to firebomb the citizens of Dresden. Anymore than it was morally justified to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima or Nagasaki – or fly airliner bombs into the World Trade Center Towers.

No one legitimately claims the moral high ground when targeting the innocent.

The contexts, of course, differ significantly and cannot — and must not — be ignored. There is no equating the pragmatic decision of Harry Truman with the perverted agenda of Osama bin Laden. The U.S., for example, wanted to avoid the loss of thousands – maybe hundreds of thousands – of G.I.’s if Japan had to be invaded the old fashioned way. And there was Pearl Harbor that precipitated it all.

But the pulverized non-combatants are no less incinerated because it was their governments who were the bad guys.

So the Democratic Party will now be led by Howard Dean, M.D.

For a party still reeling because it keeps missing the mark with mainstream American values, the choice for party chairman could not have been worse had it been Dr. Kevorkian. Dean’s appeal during his abortive presidential run, lest anyone forget, was his “outsider” status.

Dean truly represented, as he used to say on the stump, “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” – as if there were nostalgia for the well-oiled McGovern machine.

The Dems might as well finish off the political euthanasia with the ’08 presidential nomination of Sen. Hilary Clinton.

For those of you who weren’t counting at home, President Bush used the word “freedom” 27 times and the word “liberty” 15 in his inaugural address. Conspicuous by their absence, however, were the words “order” and “safety.”

Such pedestrian references don’t make for soaring rhetoric. All they do is address the real-world priorities of people who fear for their lives and increasingly wax nostalgic for the bad old days when they knew the despotic rules and had more electricity. A people for whom anarchy and civil war remain too high a price for “liberation.” A people for whom “occupation” is a pig that can never be perfumed enough.

The president’s “F word” overuse also holds the U.S. hostage to hypocrisy. That’s a reflection on our pragmatic relationships with countries – such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt – that are hardly the embodiment of democratic values.

And how ironic that Bush chose to paraphrase some of John F. Kennedy’s inaugural sentiments. Most notable was the updating of “bear any burden”and “pay any price.” Recall their use as rhetorically rationalizing America’s ever-escalating involvement in Vietnam.

Trying to remake Iraq into a Muslim democracy that could act as an outpost of stability and pro-Western sentiment is undoubtedly a swell idea. But it’s hard to find a Middle Eastern model for that other than, well, Israel.

More realistic models, however, may be Cyprus and Yugoslavia. Where ancient religious and ethnic enmities render peaceful co-existence impossible, the answer for Iraq may lie in partition. As in Kurdistan, (Shiite-dominated) Iraq and (Sunni-dominated) Mess O’Potamia. Rule of thumb: Where there are tribes and warlords, a viable, all-inclusive sovereign state is a bloody long shot – not worth the blood.

Army Spc. Charles Graner, who was recently sentenced to 10 years in military prison, got off easy. He should be serving his sentence – along with impregnated torture moll, Lyndie England, in Abu Ghraib prison itself. He should be picking out a hood and practicing holding his breath right now.

To say he was following orders is to pretend that Nuremburg never happened. What is safe to say happened, however, is that more innocent lives were lost because of flotsam such as Graner. His sexual perversions transcended “rough treatment” and amounted to a PR coup for Al Qaeda, which further fueled the recruiting of Islamo-martyrs.

Administration critics have said that it is a moral, political and tactical mistake for the U.S. to be blurring the lines between “rough treatment” and “torture.” And they, of course, have a valid point.

While there’s no excusing sadists such as Army Spc. Charles Graner, it is not irrelevant to cite some context. The mother of all blurred lines: those who don’t differentiate combatants from ambulance drivers. First and second runners-up: combatants waving white flags as a ruse and those wearing the other side’s uniform.

Here’s hoping that some – if not many or most – MLK Day celebrations worked in references to Bill Cosby’s “Knuckleheads” speech. Among those who would have been most understanding of such an inclusion: Martin Luther King Jr.

By most criteria, Donald Rumsfeld has the right stuff for the job he’s in. As in intelligence, patriotism, determination, toughness, media savvy, work ethic and as impressive a breadth of experience as any secretary of defense has ever had.

But it’s also the righteous stuff and the fright stuff. He is the architect of the zero-sum, neo-con game that is Iraq: an unnecessary war and an unplanned, disastrous occupation. Iraq is now shorthand for America’s undermined global status and imperiled presence in any number of incipient hotspots around the world.

America is not a safer place because of Iraq, and Rumsfeld needs to answer for the colossal, bloody blunder. The post-election period of cabinet reshuffling is the most appropriate – and opportune – time to address it.

Rumsfeld is no mere hawk, but an albatross hanging over the best interests of this country. On his watch and under his misguidance, America has totally squandered the moral high ground it was accorded in the aftermath of 9/11. In the good name of rooting out terrorism, we’ve unleashed an Islamic extremist propaganda and recruiting coup that has resulted in more than 1,000 American fatalities, scores maimed and America’s reputation devalued worldwide.

In the process, Rumsfeld has skated on accountability. Not enough troops and not enough supplies are part of his calamitous Iraqi legacy. “R & R” duplicitously now means “retain and recall.” Standard standing armies of occupation – even the most powerful in the world – historically don’t do well against insurgencies. We need only to recall our own history on that one.

We also know, thanks to a patronizing recent remark by Rumsfeld, that “