Race and Face

What a sad story the Shirley Sherrod saga has become.

To recap, Andrew Breitbart, who paid for the people who did the ACORN sting, edited a videotape so that the remarks of Sherrod to a long-ago NAACP gathering falsely portray her as a racist rather than someone who, in recounting an example of her own racism long ago, goes on in the same tape to reject her former attitude and talk about the growth she achieved through the incident.

"Fix" News picks up the edited video and turns it in the context of black racism, trying to answer charges of racism leveled against Tea Party activists.

Next, the NAACP finds out about the edited tape from Fix and calls for Sherrod's resignation.

Then Tom Vilsack's deputy secretary of Agriculture calls Sherrod up as she's driving home from South Georgia and tells her the White House wants her to resign because Glenn Beck is going to use the item that very night. Sherrod resigns.

Vilsack tells CNN he never heard from the White House and that it was his idea alone to "save her job" by having her quit.

Then the White House denied it had contacted Vilsack about the issue.

CNN then contacts the aging white farmer that Sherrod was discussing in the original video, and he and his wife call her a "magnificent" person who helped them save their farm through her personal intervention.

Then the NAACP reviews the entire tape, not just the Breitbart-Fix News edit, and its leadership apologizes to Sherrod, saying it had been "snookered" by Breitbart and Fix, and calls on Vilsack to reconsider.

He tells CNN he won't reconsider.

Then the President says he backs Vilsack's decision.

And Breibart goes on CNN and tells John King it wasn't about Sherrod but about the NAACP.

Glenn Beck doesn't use the story. It's not on the Fix News programming at all Tuesday night.

Throughout all this, it comes out slowly that Sherrod really is a dedicated and wonderful public servant who has been grievously wronged by knee-jerk reactions by Vilsack, and that she has been lied to by the deputy secretary of USDA who told her
the White House was demanding her resignation and Glenn Beck was on her trail.

What all this reveals, shamefully, is that the White House really does believe it is going to lose the House and is desperate to avoid any mistakes that would make that a sure thing. This attitude has obviously infected the bureaucracy, producing the kind of nonsense the deputy secretary breathlessly relayed to Sherrod.

Never understimate the foolishness of human beings.

I hate to be the first to break the news, but the White House is not going to lose Congress. They do not have to panic. The polls may say something different, but the American people see a President who is winning for them. He's got us health care, he's got us Wall Street reform and now he's got us extended jobless benefits.
We can count.

Republicans have achieved zero, or as author Brett Easton Ellis would put it, less than zero.

The NAACP, on the the other hand, demonstrated some nobility of character in plainly admitting it had been fooled. I love that word "snookered."

Sherrod should probably change places with the deputy secretary at USDA; that would be only fair. Vilsack should vigorously apologize for being "snookered" by Breitbart and Fix News, the mortal enemies of the Obama Administration. And the President and First Lady should invite Sherrod to the White House to recognize her long years of hard work and many contributions to the hard-working farmers of South Georgia. I think that may go a long way to heal the damage.  ¶ 6:04 PM

  No Jobs

There is one, and only one - not "many different" cures for the U.S. economy.
Forget about people who talk about "multi-pronged approaches" - they have forked tongues. There is one cure.

I was again reminded of the need for this cure when I heard the President speak today in the Rose Garden about the need for Republican members of the U.S. Senate to step up and extend unemployment benefits for millions of jobless Americans who cannot find jobs and without those benefits can't pay their bills, feed their families, drive their cars - there's no end to the hurt.

The one clear answer is free energy. Yeah, right, you say, when pigs fly. With genetic manipulation, they may be flying any day now. And free energy is, right now, the cure for our nation's joblessness and growing poverty.

Two forms of free energy, and a third that is on the way, offer themselves. The first is the "hydrino" reactor that uses the heat tghrown off by steakling a photon from the hydrogen atom creates electricity, while some of the resulting hydrinos are steered back to the catalyst that makes the pohoton loss happen and regenerate the material that created the loss in the first place. Thus, once it gets started, the hydrino reactor needs no more fuel. It is as cheap to build as any conventional large-scale power system, and far cheaper than nucklear power. Go to www.blacklightpower.com to find out more.

The second is a technology abandoned and rediscovered. You may have seen the "60 Minutes" show last Fall that profiled Dr. Michael McKubre, the director of the SRI International Center for Energy Research in Palo Alto,. At the annual meeting of the American Chemical Socity in May, he talked about the work done with cold fusion in Israel that has the ability to generate far more energy than is needed to start the process, just as the BlackLight Power project does. Environmental assessments need to be done, he told National Public Radio in another appearance, but it is commercially viable now.

The entire energy Establishment is powerfully arrayed against these technologies. no greater foe of free energy than Dr. Stepohen Chu, President Barack Obama;s unfortunate choice to head ther U.S. Dept. of Energy. Back in 1999, long before the BlackLight Power process could be explored, he went out of his way to warn investors away, saying he "felt sorry" for those who invested. Those investors include a former CEO of Westinghouse, some of the nation's biggest and most successful joint venture firms, and even a former USAF chief of staff, who together have given $70 billion for R&D. Eight utilities and private multinational firms have ordered BlackLight reactors that can serve about one million homes. The DOE has yet to invest a single cent.

Buit what do I mean when I say these technologies, and the near-complete perfection of the so-called magnetic motor projects, are the one cure for the U.S. economy?

You have to understand that the ciost iof ebnergy uin the United States is so great that the numbers are meaningless to many of us. ExxonMobil alone took in a trillion dollars in revenues last year. They are just one company, yet millions of other companies exist within their industry, which ultimately is the one that turns our lights on and off throughout the country and the world.

So how can we grow rich by bankrupting the source and endpoint of so much wealth?
It's u;ltimately pretty simple: By providing cheap or free energy, as these technologies can do, those trillions now supporting fossil fuels actually flow back into the pockets of the 300 million American consumers who spend it.

And the millions of jobs that flow from fossil fuels like oil, coal and natural gas?
They will be soaked up overnight by then deploymkent of the new technologuies in cars, homes, factories, schools, government buildings and other infrastructure. The CIHT car proposed by BlackLight Power will get $1,500 miles on a liter of water. There go the gas stations, but here comes the auto industry!

These enormous changes can be implemented far more quickly than anyone suspects. It takes a national will and public demand to make it happen, but it can. People will stop spending money on fossil fuels just as quickly as they can when they realize there's a cheap or free alternative.

Electric cars and wind turbines are neither cheap nor efficient compared to these newer technologies. Let's skip that step and go to the next one - the cold fusion, hydrino reactors and magnetic motors - that can transform and enrich us overnight.

  ¶ 8:29 AM

  The Editorialist

There are so many things that I'd like to write about that I sometimes give into despair and don't write about any of them.

The president's financial reform bill doesn't go nearly far enough to rein in banks too big to fail or to protect consumers from an abundance of evils.

"South Park" cartoons are a lame excuse for free speech. They are full of racial and gender bias, pornography and other evils that do not deserve contsitutional protection.

The health care reform enacted by Congress will probably never reach people like me - unemployed, broke, under 65 and in need of health care.

Mel Gibson is one of the world's most talented filmmakers, and he should no more be shunned than Roman Polanski. But Mel is under so much stress he has become temporarily ill - mentally ill, I'm sorry to say. Polanski is just an aging pedophile.

The Republicans are butt-kissers who divisively attack the President and Congress with invective formerly reserved to our enemies. They are like communists in wolve's clothing. They are destroying their party to win elections, and it won't take long before they become a third party, behind Independents, Libertarians or Tea Party people.

Racism is the basis for the Tea Party, but it is sublimated and rarely overt racism. They lump all black people in with the part of the black population they fear so much - the killers, rapists, gang leaders and other criminals who fill our jails with their numbers and their own neighborhoods' streets with blood. You can't help but be afraid of those black people, but it's apparently hard to remember that there are more evil white people in jail - and more white criminals on the streets - than similar black people. Obama suffers because of them, not because he is the most able, farsighted and effective reformer since FDR.

Obviously, I love Obama and believe in him. But I, too, believe he should display his original birth certificate for all to see. Like Ronald Reagan, my personal motto on matters of belief is "Trust, but verify."

Well, I've gotten all that off my chest. Maybe now I can start writing editorials again.  ¶ 6:04 AM

  Waiting For Wilma

The porch furniture is piled high in the living room, the refrigerator is stocked with cold cuts, the cooler is packed with ice, every appropriate container is full of fresh water, and all the flashlights and the portable radios are ready to go. Now all we need is a storm.

Hurricane Wilma is about 100 miles off the southwestern coast of Florida as I write at 12:42 AM, and was recently bumped up to a Category 3 storm capable of inflicting enormous damage wherever it hits. That would appear to be somewhere between Naples, Fla., where my cousin Patti lives, and the Everglades, the magnificent wild swamp south of Alligator Alley that is one of the largest preserved wetlands in the world.

According to the weather people, the storm will bring winds from 60 to 70 MPH to Bradenton, where I live on the South Florida Gulf Coast, 60 miles south of Tampa.

For the folks on Marco Island, a community of 20,000 boat-owning retirees just south of Naples, it could mean once-in-a-lifetime devastation of the kind suffered in New Orleans. That's because the tightly-organized little city actually is a complex web of interlinked boating canals that could experience a flood surge of anywhere from eight to 17 feet, according to the U.S. Weather Service.

Just off Bradenton, where I live about a half mile from a large bay that opens into the Gulf, is Anna Maria Island to the north, and then Longboat Key, Lido Key, Siesta Key and Casey Key to the south. These barrier islands are not nearly at as much risk from Wilma as they once were from Charlie - they were spared that time - but they are in danger of losing more of their precious beaches, where the sand has been rated the finest and whitest in the world.

Back on the mainland, though, you go down through Sarasota to Philippi Creek, then Venice, North Port, Englewood, Port Charlotte and Punta Gorda. The latter four are tourist and blue-collar communities that were devastated by Hurricane Charlie last year. You realize quickly that this is no highly affluent Gold Coast, not a place of million-dollar tear-downs like Southern California's coast, but a beautiful if humid and sometimes dangerous place for ordinary middle-class Americans.

After Punta Gorda there's a long stretch of mostly nothing all the way down to Fort Myers, where once again the population briefly builds up before fading away into tropical swamps and retirement communities south to Naples.


You're now about 130 miles south of Bradenton via Interstate 75, and 30 or 40 miles south of Fort Myers, a true resort town with a Spring Break rep just shy of Fort Lauderdale's.

Across the Gulf to the southeast, of course, is Cancun and Cozumel, the resort cities on the upper tip of the Yucatan Peninsula, where Wilma just had her way with thousands of tourists and many more Mexicans. Many of those will probably be on their way to Arizona and Texas as soon as the weather clears, having been beaten out of work sometimes left homeless by Wilma.


After a 24-hour whirlwind visit to the Mexican resorts, Wilma took a straighter course to America. On her current northeast-trending trajectory, moving along at 18MPH, she'll hit somewhere south of Naples and Marco Island around 7 AM this morning.


Before she gets here, though, up north in Bradenton we'll have started getting lots of rains from the "feeder bands" of the outer circulation, and those bands of warm air will meet a cold front coming down from Texas, with a lot of tornadoes at the margins.


A tornado is what I fear most, and we've had a tornado warning, a tropical storm warning, a hurricane warning and a whole lot of groceries to prepare us.

But that is hardly the whole of Wilma, or even the least of these storms. We're keeping a wary eye out for Alpha, which doesn't seem to threaten our state, just as we've watched Wilma's development way out in the Caribbean since last Friday afternoon. Then it was just a "tropical wave," which precedes a "tropical depression," which can become a "tropical storm" and then a hurricane when it damn well pleases to blow at 75mph or more.

All of these storms bear a lot of waitful watching, mostly of television and much of it also on the Internet at the government's weather site, www.noaa.gov. There the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Weather Service, the National Hurricane Center and a whole bunch of departments and branches and sub-branches hold forth in copious forecasts, advisories, warnings, updates, position reports and the like, many of which find their way either onto my desktop as background maps or into my AOL mailbox.


During a big storm like this one, I can expect 30 to 40 pieces of welcome NOAA Storm Advisory mail - I repeat, mail that is welcome - that allows me to save money by not spending the $300 to $1,000 a storm can squeeze even from the pockets - if we had them - of turnips like us when it's unnecessary to evacuate.

Yet the waiting is far from a pleasure. There is nothing remotely sublime or blissful about listening to storm forecasts all day from CNN, our local Bay News 9, the local network channels, the Weather Channel and a couple of Tampa Bay and Sarasota-area radio stations. But I do keep informed.

We've so far spent something under $60 to ready ourselves for Wilma, and most of that will probably be wasted if all goes as it appears it will go a few hours from now (1:12 AM).

I concentrated on getting sweet things that would stave off boredom, while my wife concentrated on keeping me from buying those things. I ended up with two pounds of cooked ham, two pounds of turkey breast, a pound and a half of roast beef, a pound of Swiss cheese, some nice onion rolls, a half-gallon of ice cream and some sugar-free jello cups, along with a box of wheat thins, a can of tuna, two cans of sliced peaches, a small tub of cottage cheese and two small tubs of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter. I don't think that list is at all interesting, except that the tab at Wal-Mart came to $45 and I can't figure out how. The lines went on forever.

The wind is picking up now. It's become steady instead of intermittent, and it's coming directly at the seven floor-to-ceiling sliding doors that front on our lanai and the southeast-facing side of the building. The rain has come and gone unpredictably, but it often does that here, and thankfully tonight there has been little lightning and no thunder at all.

But does some evil-minded, humongous tornado await us out there in the dark, out past the parking lot and the swimming pool and the golf course, out there beyond Bradenton Beach and Anna Maria? It's pitch dark beyond the palm trees except for the tiny, infrequent streetlamps swaying in the dark, and there's no way to know.

If it comes, the windows will resist winds of up to 100mph or so, but then things get iffy. A few miles-per-hour more at, say, 115 MPH, stuff starts crashing through the lanai screens. At about 125 MPH, the roof starts to feel a tug, and maybe the corridor's end windows break, meaning that children of the hurricane come screaming past the corridor doors of our condos, stopping only to smash the lights. Our entry door is sucked out into their playground, along with patio furniture too light to resist and any real children not well seated, and then begins a katabatic maelstrom. In a few minutes that will erase the accumulations of our lives, and at last, our lives as well.

That's why some people evacuate. Having neither ready cash nor a current job and lots of bills to pay, it's almost as painful staying as it is when good sense or preternatural instinct tells you to run for your life. Just now (1:26 AM), almost on cue, that old familiar whistle of the wind has started to rise. I'm waiting for Wilma, with my wife and my daughter sound asleep nearby.


It's dark out there.

  ¶ 1:28 AM

  The Judith Miller Case

The American Reporter took a unique approach to the Judith Miller case, in which a Federal judge in the Valerie Plame investigation ordered her jailed for refusing to testify regarding her sources, to whom she had promised anonymity.

We strongly supported Judith Miller's decision not to testify, and even more so, we admired and were inspired by the decision of the New York Times to spend millions of dollars on behalf of a principle that has allowed countless whistleblowers come forward without subjecting them to retaliation for telling the truth.

Every other day during her two months in jail, we ran a boldface notice at the top of our homepage expressing our encouragement for these decisions; I don't think anyone at The Times ever noticed them, but we did make it clear that, as a publication owned by reporters, we do care very much about the principles that protect our confidential sources and permit us to publish otherwise unprintable information.

The right to protect one's sources has no explicit support in the Constitution. The right to a free press granted by the First Amendment is not in itself - without supporting legislation from Congress - sufficiently clear to guarantee that a reporter can shield his or her sources from exposure in court.

For a lot of different reasons, most of them political and some of them constitutional, Congress has been reluctant to create such a shield. There is none for priests who hear murder confessions in the confessional, nor for reporters who hear state secrets in an interview, and thus we all remain equal under the law. Some state laws, such as one in California, do provide a limited exception.

It perhaps begs the question to say the concept of a shield law could have protected many abusive priests; it might also protect abusive journalists.

Our broad and strong support for the principle of confidentiality for news sources must not be confused with any approval of Judith Miller's reporting. It is not enough to state that she supported the Bush administration's case for the war against Iraq by repeatedly reporting unqualified assurances that Saddam Hussein possessed various implements of mass destruction. In my own estimate, Judith Miller is a liar.

In the stunning probe the paper conducted of its own reporting on the WMD story, her articles (some of them written with other Times reporters) comprised five of the six the paper published that supported the administration's assertion that Hussein had such weapons.

Clearly, she was beating the drum for war, and we do not believe for a moment that in her own mind she was convinced such weapons existed or that she did not know and at least intuitively understand that in her reporting she was doing a job not for the Times alone, as she should have been, but for the part of the intelligence community that is tasked to defend the interests of Israel when they can be harmonized with those of the United States - and sometimes even when they cannot.

There is a fact of life that has rarely been mentioned since Seymour Hersh back in the 1970's reported (in the Times) that the Central Intelligence Agency had long been paying journalists at major newspapers, networks and wire services to be part of their teams. I should add that a "fact of life" is by all means a "fact" that may not be availed of proof, and then I must say that Judith Miller is more than a reporter. In later years, "pay" has instead become "access" and a book.

In her reporting on weapons of mass destruction, Miller has been fulfilling a vaguely defined but politically vital function that allows government - permanent, constitutional government - to go about its business in the national security sphere with the critical support of public opinion.

Her role was simple: to repeat what she was told in print while rejecting any critical analysis that disproved it. Moreover, her role has broad support in government, and one need only hear the criticism that attends attacks on the falsity of government statements regarding national security issues to know that her role is secure. She is not alone in what she does; otherwise respected reporters for major news organizations, such as Wolf Blitzer, Brit Hume and a few others, do the same job for government.

Those reporters, when pressed, would likely explain themselves as having been forced to make critical choices between accuracy and access; they would likely say that uncritical reporting of government views on national security issues is the only way to gain access to the highest levels of power. But in fact, that access - especially to high-level liars - is only necessary when government wants to tell us its point of view. That is often obvious from its actions, which are more easily and accurately reported.

Misleading the American people is a time-honored tradition of many famous politicians. Most presidents have engaged in it. They marshal slender files of evidence and from it construct reams of elaboration, giving their chosen reporters a substantive-seeming defense and supporting documentation to persuade wary editors. The handful of reporters being used by the government must have sufficient autonomy to be able to safely report a lie, and sufficient standing in the journalistic community - and support from the owners of their news organizations - to resist the attacks that may come when they publish lies.

Many Americans find such reporting defensible, and even desirable. They feel no need to know all of the truth, as it does not assist them at all in their daily lives; they similarly respect the need of government to do things in secret, and to have secret goals and operations, so that it can defend us from our enemies and carry out the actions that smart government people believe are necessary.

Thus the agenda items of first, protecting Israel - whose physical presence as a state is our ultimate insurance against a catastrophic denial of access to Middle Eastern oil, and whose supporters produce a substantial portion of all the campaign contributions given each year - and second, defending America - which, after all, except for internal subversion and the occasional Al-Qaeda attack is probably unassailable - are goals and operations that fulfill certain aims of American foreign policy and of the grateful people who create it.

I will disappoint many when I say I cannot dispute the rationality of these goals. Israel's odious approach to the Palestinians could never justify our generous financial help, if only due to its impact on public opinion; if we did not fully support Israel, though, its security would be quickly eroded, and the armies of Araby would conquer and destroy it once they got past the nuclear arsenal that we probably provided.

Who would the United States then have as an ally in that region? Saudi Arabia? It would go next. Jordan, third. Bahrain, the tamer Emirates, etc.? Simultaneously.

And what would it cost us to switch our fondness for Israel to fondness for Islamic states? Perhaps nothing economically, but it would be extremely painful; who wants to be in bed with people who chop off heads for adultery, and force women not to wear miniskirts?

It's a lot worse than that, of course. It would require us to back off all of our human rights stands, all of our hopes for Middle Eastern democracies, all of our resistance to the use of shari'a (Islamic law) in international courts, all of our commitment to human rights based on gender, religion and due process - it would degrade and deprave our shelter, our culture, our Constitution.

What troubles me is that we have to lie so much about it. Our government cannot afford to be explicitly so pro-Israel and anti-Islam that it concretely risks access to oil - not unless, that is, we are guaranteed access to the vast and very long-lived resources of Iraq, which dwarf those of most oil-producing nations combined.
That guarantee will only be fulfilled by a friendly government there.

We must acknowledge that in any historic fight with Islam and its extreme defenders, we need a secure and highly strategic base of operations, a mountain redoubt, if you will, that allows us to attack and destroy our enemies with a good degree of impunity, and that is what Iraq is for us. It borders most of the nations that hate us and in so doing fulfills the Godfather's dictum, "Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer."

Judith Miller is an instrument of all that. Firing her would only achieve the promotion of a Miller-in-waiting. I wish her no harm. There must always be a Miller, just as there must always be a Shea.  ¶ 1:26 PM

  Starting Over

I've decided I would like to start commenting on a lot of things, as I once did daily for the American Reporter. These days, there is not enough new content daily in AR to allow me to do so without making it appear I write seven articles for each one someone else writes. So, I've decided to do it here. I'll get started on that tomorrow.  ¶ 12:26 AM

 

The Lessons of Sept. 11

I am terribly conflicted about what America ought to do or think or say about the events of Sept. 11. There are days when I would like us to distance ourselves from the Israeli-Palesrtinian/Judeo-Islamic conflict and let these two old enemies solve their own problems in whatever way their Old Testament "eye for an eye" creeds will permit.

Then there are days when I think I want to see the deaths of Sept. 11 avenged by dropping nuclear weapons on Riyadh, Kabul and Baghdad. perhaps with Teheran, Rawalpindi and Damascus - and Tripoli, too - thrown in for good measure.

There are days when I fear the old shibboleth of Jewish control of our media and our forteign policy has come to pass, and that dual citizenship is not an acceptable approach to American patriotism.

And then there are days when I sense that America's love affair with Israel is unfathomably fragile, such as when I heard Sen. Joe Lieberman speak up against Howard Dean's rejection of "50 years of American policy" in calling for a neutral approach to Israel and Palestine. On those days, my heart resumes the deep admiration for the struggle of the Jews through the ages of diaspora, the Holocaust and the founding of Israel - even as James Michener so eloquently described it in his novel The Source.

When one day I believe that Israel is a bully, beating Palestinians mercilessly into submission, on the next I think of Israelis as the strong but compassionate warrior who does what is necessary to stave off attacks but never uses all its power to utterly vanquish their enemy. That gives rise to a nagging question about what Israel would have done had the targets of Sept. 11 been not the Pentagon and World Trade Center but the Knesset in Tel Aviv or the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem? Would they, learning that the hijackers who attacked them were Saudis, have promptly leveled Riyadh? And would I blame them, or would I cheer? I would cheer, and weep for my soul.

This relentless seesaw of emotions eventually must lead me back to a respect for reason, and yet it leads me first the words of Jesus, "If a man smites you on one cheek, turn the other cheek to him." That is a fundamentally different approach than the one Israel takes against Palestine (and Palestine takes against Israel), and that the United States - which is thus not a Christian nation at all - takes against those who smite it.

As a Catholic, I believe profoundly in the Fifth Commandment: "Thou shalt not kill." I oppose abortion for this reason, and for this reason I oppose the death penalty. I am emotionally incapable - or so I believe - of killing anyone, either as a civilian defending my home or as a soldier defending my country. Yet my mind is filled with thoughts of horrible homicidal revenges against those who threaten this nation, who suppress the lives they control, and who in my mind are enemies of freedom.

While he is certainly an enemy of freedom, I do not think of Osama bin Laden as evil incarnate; there is nothing in his personality, as we see it dimly through the glass of television, that has the peculiar rotten flavor of evil, or its dead eyes. I think of him instead as a leader of something akin to pre-nationhood Israel's Stern Gang, or the Likud, both of which engaged in many acts of terror, killing many innocent people, before their dream of nationhood was realized.

It might be an axiom of the political canon that no one gives you a nation, but that it must be taken. That was true for the United States, for East Timor, for Israel, and for every nation that has won its freedom in bloody armed struggle culminating in independence. That Osama bin Laden engages in this kind of struggle, and makes his war with powerful attacks against us, does not alter his fundamental nature as a "holy" warrior inspired by his faith's precepts to liberate what he sees as an oppressed people from the rule of a cruel enemy that has taken its homes, its freedom and its lives at will. One need not diminish him to want to kill him.

The Old Testament doesn't offer us a solution to the Mideast conflict. Hatred is taught on every side as virtue. Attacks are met with more attacks. As the bodies pile up, the war grows wider and encompasses not only other nations but many other innocent lives, and finally engenders other wars such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Fundamental differences over religion have set two new and unpredictable nuclear powers, India and Pakistan, at each other's throats in yet another variation on the theme of religious intolerance, revolt and the abysmal chasm of endless retaliation. There is no justice possible in the sea of blood, for all are bloody and there is no innocence.

What then does reason say? Experience informs reason. I am one who gambles, often to the last cent. I am also generous when I can be, even to my last cent. And I am one who fights, both in the physical man-to-man sense, and also in the spirit (without ther skill) of crusading journalists like Seymour Hersh and Ben Bradlee. As I gamble and give - and take - and fight, my store of experience grows larger, and I learn how to gamble, give and fight with greater effectiveness. The height of effectiveness is when you don't have to gamble and fight anymore, but that day is likely to never come.

Not long ago, in an editorial for The American Reporter I noted that being in the center of the Middle East, as we are with our occupation of Iraq, is really not such a bad thing in fighting the war that we fight today. We are on the borders of our worst enemies, and we know they find it intolerable. We conduct ourselves there in a way that to me is above reproach, and we suffer as lot of casualties as we fight that way.

But there is the other problem in such a fight: One is outnumbered by one's enemies, even if not outgunned. In a long war, guns (short of nuclear finality) will not always out; people - the masses of them that either side can throw into a war, and the degree to which their fight is inspired by their God or gods, determine the victor in the long run. In the short run - which is to say the next few years - the battle might be better fought probing and disarming those surrounding enemies than in taking them on directly by engaging their troops with greater numbers of ours.

But that is not our mandate in Iraq and Afghanistan; our policy is that the War on Terror can go wherever it may take us, but that our war within these nations cannot go across their borders. Yet how long do we have before the surrounding Islamic nations begin to see their borders with Iraq and Afghanistan as just so much diplomatic vapor? Who rules those nations? they will ask. Is it anyone we know? Is it who should rule them? Or are they simply tempting new territories (that historically were ours, they'll note) on which to carry forward the struggle for Islamic domination of the world against American imperialism and Western infidels?

Not long, I suspect. The territorial integrity of any nation at war is by definition up for grabs; we just hope that all of them don't start grabbing at once. Apropos of this, just today U.S. forces captured 80 foreign fighters near the Syrian border from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Sudan.

So, how would I fight such a war? I would do the following:

• I would carry the war to the nations that border Iraq with the aim of leaving them far weaker and more nervous when we finally exit (because this is a strategy for exit, not for staying). and relentlessly engage, probe and disarm them while defending the key centers of commerce and government in Iraq. I would deploy as many troops as I needed to do that.
  
  
• I would recruit and train all-Iraqi and all-Afghani armies, and inculcate a non-sectarian, pro-democratic ideal in those troops, which would replace ours in the ongoing border wars. I would make sure these are well-trained, well-armed military forces superior to any in the region (and I note that the latter goal is a task of five years at a minimum, not of months) and politically in tune with one another via a strong military cooperation pact backed by NATO.
  
  
• I would pledge to the American people that all but a token U.S. military force would be out of Iraq by 2008. That would set the bar for Democrats to battle against if it is not met, and give our country a fundamental promise with respect to the finality of the war there and in Afghanistan. I would estimate the cost to taxpayers at approximately $500 billion, and I would ask the American people to vote my party out of office if I exceed that amount.
  
  
• I would no longer offer financial or military aid to Israel or the Palestinian Authority. I would instead stress our respect and friendship, and make our diplomatic corps respond even-handedly to every new act of retaliation or aggression by either side. I would ask the American people, and American Jews and Muslims, to support me in this decision by reminding them that money only fuels the fire, and that our love for both people precludes our taking sides.
  
  
• I would unequivocally forswear any future repayment from Iraq for our expenditures there, leaving the entire value of their future oil revenues exclusively for their use. It is not so well-known among Americans now that those revenues now have a lien on them levied by the United States for all its costs in fighting the war. Since Iraq did not have any weapons of mass destruction and did not overtly start the war, or have substantial ties to Osama bin Laden and the other authors of Serpt. 11, I would not hold it responsible for the cost of sending hundreds of thousands of Americans there. For my expenditure, I would expect instead to receive instead a century of security founded on pro-democratic, anti-fundamentalist governments that constantly occupy their neighbors' attention and are allied with us in an atmosphere of mutual respect.

Finally, in the United States:

• I would x-ray all air, marine, train and truck shipments of foreign origin.
  
  
• I would discourage all Muslim immigration, and expel as many foreign-born, non-citizen Muslims as possible to reduce the strain and stress on our battered, variegated, canalized culture. (The role of women in Islamic culture is not an acceptable paradigm in the American democracy, period).
  
  
• I would levy a special tax to pay for the War on Terror and devote its proceeds exclusively to hardening our domestic infrastructure against terrorism and supporting our effort in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  
  
• I would also repeal any and all laws that erode our civil liberties in any way, because these are ultimately the victory of terrorism.

Many would say that as a child of the '60s and the Vietnam era, I have not learned the lesson of that conflict well. That is not the case; the lesson of that war was that the rules must not serve the enemy, and that the exit strategy must be certain - no matter what.

And, even as Osama bin Laden warns us on its second anniversary of a terrorist plot that will dwarf the horrors of Sept. 11, our strategy must be one for victory that is certain and complete. -- Joe Shea

  ¶ 9:35 AM