In follow-up to my post of November 2, “Tourism Industry Trashes U.S.”, the Examiner has followed up with a 1-2 punch of columns exposing the back-room machinations. It tells us much about how Washington operates, to fleece taxpayers, to enrich its denizens, dole out pork, and the image of the U.S. be darned.

In my earlier post I wrote,

The tourism industry is in search of more promotional funds and easier entry requirements for foreign visitors….That’s what associations do, promote their industry. But, what is despicable is that this one does so by trashing, incorrectly, the United States, which it is supposed to promote!

Last Saturday, the Examiner published my follow-up, "Why is Disney Bashing America?." (The column is below, with the links of the draft and a paragraph that was omitted for space.) The column addresses the PR technique used by Discover America, an association of the U.S.’s premier companies benefiting from tourism. To garner Democrat support for subsidizing their tourism pork, they disparage U.S. Customs enforcing the border defenses of the Patriot Act.

Today, Examiner columnist Timothy Carney adds valuable inside-D.C. detail to this cozy porky travesty. A rich industry, proven capable of its own promotion, works with Congress to subsidize the tourism industry, and a Congressional staffer gets a plum paycheck. An excerpt (with the entire column below mine, so there will be a one-place record for future researchers.)

The case of the Travel Promotion Act (TPA), however, shows how lawmakers often directly spur the lobbying industry with which they confer over how to distribute taxpayer dollars…. A few months after Delahunt's call on the tourism industry to intensify its lobbying, executives at Disney, Intercontinental Hotels, Loews Hotels, and other industry giants launched the “Discover America Partnership,” with offices just off of K St. in downtown Washington. The Partnership described itself as “an aggressive, Washington, D.C.-based advocacy campaign.” In short, it was a new lobbying powerhouse.

Schwadron, Delahunt’s longtime chief of staff, soon left Congress and joined as a lobbyist for Sher & Blackwell. This year, the Discover America Partnership hired Sher & Blackwell, and deployed Schwadron to Capitol Hill to lobby for them….

The ultimate cost to each taxpayer may be small, but this corporate welfare for the tourism industry piles one more industry subsidy onto the back of the American worker.

The Columns:
Why Is Disney Bashing America?
By Bruce Kesler

Commerce Department officials say more foreigners visited America this summer than ever before, so why would a domestic tourism industry group of major U.S. corporations issue erroneous releases to try to make people think the opposite?

The answer may have something to do with the companies trying to get their hands on $200 million from congressional Democrats who are trying to use tourism promotion against a law national security experts insist is essential to the U.S. effort to prevent terrorist attacks in this country.

The executive director of Discover America, Geoff Freeman, spreads the line that foreigners see US Customs as so onerous that it chases away potential visitors. Discover America says US tourism is depressed since 9/11, and a major cause is America’s poor image. “It's clear what's keeping people away in the post-9/11 environment: it is the perception around the world that travelers aren't welcome.” [The AFP link has expired, but the quote is available at my November 2 post, linked above.]

Discover America calling America an unwelcoming destination, and parroted in the worldwide press, is not boosting tourism, but creating erroneous perceptions harmful to tourism.

The latest example is, “America the Unwelcoming,” by Fareed Zakaria in the November 17 Newsweek. Zakaria cites Discover America to support an argument that foreigners see US customs as so onerous it chases away potential visitors. Discover America says US tourism is depressed since 9/11, and that a major cause is a poor American image abroad.

Discover America misquotes its own polling data when it claimed its poll of “2,011 participants: all non-resident U.S. travelers” said the US was “the worst country in the world” in the way Customs treats foreign visitors. However, the poll was really of “international travelers,” only 29 percent of whom had actually visited the US.

After 9/11 foreign tourism dropped dramatically, but since 2003 it has rebounded and surpassed former levels. The Commerce Department’s latest data: “[T]he summer of 2007 was a record-breaking season for international travel to the United States, with total international visitation and visitor spending surpassing previous records.” Furthermore, “during June, July, and August 14.3 million international travelers visited the United States, delivering the strongest summer on record.”

Discover America says it is, “an effort led by some of America’s foremost business leaders to strengthen America’s image around the globe,” including Disney, Marriott, Anheuser-Busch, American Express, the US Olympic Committee, the National Council of State Tourism Directors, or numerous other sponsors hardly first to mind as America-bashers.

So, it’s curious savvy businesspeople are trying to achieve their goals by issuing erroneous glum statements that reflect negatively upon America, echoed by the global media.

Discover America supports a bill moving through Congress to spend $200 million to support Discover America’s Travel Promotion Act, to establish a fund directed by travel industry leaders, further fed via a fee from all foreign tourists as well as the tourism industry.

The Commerce Department opposes the Travel Promotion Act. Also, an additional fee on foreign travelers’ budgets cannot be encouraging to their travel.

The Executive Director of Discover America is a public relations professional, Geoff Freeman. His biography offers an insight to his approach: he is “an expert in managing complex issue campaigns and developing innovative outreach strategies to increase support among unlikely allies.”

At the Travel Industry Association board meeting in July, Freeman outlined his strategy: “We need to flip the table and change the environment – create a new environment where our industry can thrive.”

The environment Freeman refers to is the Democratic takeover of Congress, most hostile toward the Patriot Act’s added protections against the entry of potentially dangerous foreigners. Thus, a PR campaign emerged of bemoaning such restrictions as a reason to garner congressional funding for Discover America’s wealthy members getting tax funds to add to their profits from tourism.

A $1 trillion industry using tax dollars to fund its promotion, even though already wealthy and able promoters, is blatant “hoggism” at the public trough.

The Government Accountability Office found that last year about 21,000 people whose entry to the US should have been prevented were permitted to enter the US through border checkpoints, while 200,000 others were caught. Some of the 9/11 hijackers entered the US similarly using falsified documents.

That number is small next to the tens of millions who annually enter through legal checkpoints, but it only took a few terrorists to pull off 9/11.

Discover America may have discovered how some PR campaigns work with Congress, but it needs to re-Discover America.

Commentary
Timothy P. Carney: Congress pushes subsidies for tourism industry
2007-11-30

WASHINGTON - Congress moved forward this week on legislation creating a federal program to promote international tourism. Tourism industry leaders are pleased, but perhaps not as pleased as the lawmakers and lobbyists who pushed the industry to call for such a program.

With their rapid rush to pass “lobbying reform” and their regular complaints about “corporate influence” you would think congressmen find lobbyists annoying—or at least you wouldn't expect lawmakers to try and multiply the number of Capitol Hill lobbyists. The case of the Travel Promotion Act (TPA), however, shows how lawmakers often directly spur the lobbying industry with which they confer over how to distribute taxpayer dollars.

This week, senators advanced TPA to create a quasi-governmental agency called the Corporation for Travel Promotion (CTP) - funded partly by tax dollars, partly by new fees on foreign visitors, and partly by a new tax on the tourism industry. The CTP would basically be an overseas advertising firm for tourism in America.

Adherents of the free market and skeptics of big business might ask “why should the government be involved at all in advertising for the tourism industry?” A first glance at federal lobbying records suggests a case of corporate lobbyists shaking down Washington for cash. The story behind this legislation, however, shows a more interesting tale and reveals a more subtle dynamic between Capitol Hill and K St.

On April 20, 2005, Rep. Bill Delahunt, D-MA., spoke at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce before 500 executives in the tourism industry. Delahunt's chief of staff, Steve Schwadron, issued a press release afterwards reporting that the congressman had “called on the industry to wage a more aggressive, bipartisan campaign.”

In short, Delahunt was saying, “lobby me.” This is often how lawmakers push their agenda, they ask business groups to lobby their colleagues. When a congressman asks business executives to do something, it usually gets done.

A few months after Delahunt's call on the tourism industry to intensify its lobbying, executives at Disney, Intercontinental Hotels, Loews Hotels, and other industry giants launched the “Discover America Partnership,” with offices just off of K St. in downtown Washington. The Partnership described itself as “an aggressive, Washington, D.C.-based advocacy campaign.” In short, it was a new lobbying powerhouse.

Schwadron, Delahunt’s longtime chief of staff, soon left Congress and joined as a lobbyist for Sher & Blackwell. This year, the Discover America Partnership hired Sher & Blackwell, and deployed Schwadron to Capitol Hill to lobby for them.

Schwadron already knew the industry well, having been the guest of the Association of Travel-Related Industry Professionals (a predecessor to the Discover America Partnership), in Cancun Mexico, as a Delahunt staffer in 2003.

This year, Delahunt sponsored TPA, which would involve the federal government in an enterprise Americans have typically left to industry, namely, encouraging foreigners to visit the U.S. and spend their money here.

The industry and its Capitol Hill allies argue that TPA imposes no costs on taxpayers, but that’s misleading. The CTP will initially be financed by an interest-free loan from taxpayers, but after that it will be funded through assessments on firms in the travel industry and a new government fee on foreign travelers.

The “assessments” must be approved by a referendum of the industry, with bigger companies receiving more weighted votes, so they amount to a new tax on hotels, car rental agencies, and other companies who would benefit from a tourism surge. Because these assessments are industry-wide and not specific to foreign visitors, Americans who stay in hotels or rent cars domestically will foot most of the bill.

The bill also creates new government offices and jobs in the Department of Commerce, whose salaries and benefits will come from taxpayer wallets. The ultimate cost to each taxpayer may be small, but this corporate welfare for the tourism industry piles one more industry subsidy onto the back of the American worker.
Examiner columnist Timothy P. Carney is senior reporter for the Evans & Novak Political Report.

John Murtha is back from a Thanksgiving trip to Iraq, and is now eating his hat.

"I think the 'surge' is working," the Democrat said in a videoconference from his Johnstown office, describing the president's decision to commit more than 20,000 additional combat troops this year. But the Iraqis "have got to take care of themselves."

His determination to undermine the surge is described, for example, here. Last January, Murtha was determined to cut off funding for the surge.

Allahpundit’s take: “Hell freezes over: “I think the surge is working,” says Murtha,” ends with the question, “Is this the first stirring of the “declare victory and go home” withdrawal strategy?”

That does seem to be the emerging Democrat latest tack on spinning. Allahpundit doesn’t believe it is Bush’s, at least as far as announcing a firm withdrawal schedule.

I think the truth lays somewhere in between. We are beginning the withdrawal of the additional surged troops. Whether the next administration is Democrat or Republican, none of the leading contenders express much enthusiasm for much more than a small continuing force there, nor do any exhibit the steely determination of Bush regarding Iraq.

Our military commanders on scene are careful to be cautious about the prospects of the surge’s gains holding. At the same time, there’s little reason to believe that most Americans are willing to support another surge if that were needed.

So, watch this theme, declare victory and withdraw, to pick up steam.

The New York Times reports that one of our nation's true statesmen and believers of freedom for all people across the globe passed away today: Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois. I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Hyde many times while serving in my various capacities in Washington and there could not have been a kinder or more gentle soul "in the arena." The Washington Post has a more complete obituary here. May God rest his soul.

My colleague Cinnamon Stillwell has a new blog post at Campus Watch on the gloomy atmosphere at the recent annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) in Montreal.

Fear and Trembling at the Annual MESA Meeting

At the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) in Montreal earlier this month, fear and trembling were the order of the day.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education article, "Mideast Scholars, Meeting in Montreal, Worry About a Splinter Group and Academic Freedom," the leading lights of Middle East studies are feeling both "besieged" and "blessed" by the post-9/11 increase in attention to their field. Being forced to contend with the twin horrors of outside criticism and competition from groups such as the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA) must indeed be taking their toll on the delicate sensibilities of these poor, beleaguered academics.

MESA's "Committee on Academic Freedom" is aflutter with cases where the "freedom of scholars" is threatened. Among these, members cite "travel restrictions in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, speech crackdowns in Turkey, and blasphemy lawsuits against professors in Kuwait" in the same breath as "concerns over the American reception of John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt's controversial book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." Who needs foreign government suppression when the encroachments of free speech are at hand?

To read the rest of Cinnamon's post, click here.

Who would assess the Christian response to the letter from Muslim leaders, "A Common Word between Us and You," in the following words:

This is an initiative that I think has some traction. And I know, there's a desire on the part of a critical mass of Muslims who want to move forward, but to be quite frank, I'm concerned about the Christian leadership, and it's how the Christian leadership responds that will affect how this moves forward.

a. Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, whose $20 million donation to Georgetown bought him an eponymous Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding;

b. Sheik Khalid bin Mahfouz, who successfully threatened Cambridge University Press with a lawsuit over the book Alms for Jihad, which CUP pulped;

c. The Dutch Catholic bishop Martinus "Tiny" Muskens, who says that Christians should refer to God as Allah to promote better relations with Muslims;

d. John Esposito, director of the Alwaleed bin Talal Center at Georgetown.

If you guessed "d," you're correct.

Speaking with the Voice of America, Esposito--one of the most prominent professors of Middle East studies in America--remained true to form by blaming the West, in this case Christian leaders, for not responding with, one assumes, sufficient humility to the overture from Islamic leaders.

It is no comment on the letter itself to note that, in the academic arena in which Esposito moves, blaming the West for troubled relations with the Islamic world is a given.

It is a comment on Georgetown, a Jesuit institution that long ago sold its soul for what it perceives is a better reputation in the sea of secular academic opinion, that one of its highest profile professors expresses more concern about the reaction of Christian leaders than about the way his benefactor's billions support the spread of the Wahhabi Islam around the globe--including in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C.

(Cross-posted at Campus Watch.)

Two able observers offer views of the US’s approach to and problems with war that are quite distinct from each other, yet poles of the same issue: How to wield our power and armed might.

They both see the same enemy, international terrorism, but one sees it necessary to play to international opinion in order to engage the enemy while the other believes that our first priority is to maximize our national interest, and international opinions will follow the victor.

I lean toward the latter, because it is what experience has taught. The US’s national interests are not those of ephemeral international opinion. The US has waffled between our interests and whatever the latest international waffle. Thus, our policies have too often been nonproductive and allowed our opinionated enemies to whittle away at our moral authority.

Both observers may be classified as “conservative,” but represent differing strands.

Shelby Steele’s specialization is race relations and multiculturalism. Angelo Cordevilla’s specialization is the wielding of power.

Shelby Steele wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal which says that our war in Iraq is not one of survival of our world, in which all means are legitimate, but one of discipline to retain a status quo – even though part of a larger war of survival. Therefore, Steele writes:

Great power scares unless it is exercised within a painstaking moral framework. Thus, moral authority is the single greatest challenge of American foreign policy. This is especially so in wars of discipline, wars fought far away and for abstract reasons. We argue for such wars as if they were wars of survival because we want the moral authority that comes so automatically to them. But Iraq is a war of discipline, and no more. If we left Iraq tomorrow there would be terrible consequences all around, but we would survive.

Our broader war against terror, on the other hand, is a war of survival. And it is rich in moral authority. September 11 introduced necessity and, in its name, we have an open license to destroy that stateless network of terrorism that attacked us. America is not divided over this. It was Iraq--a war of discipline--that brought us division. This does not mean that the Iraq war is invalid.

Ultimately, it may prove to be a far more important war in preserving a balance of power favorable to America than our war against al Qaeda.

The prime difficulty in Steele’s approach is that he separates Iraq from the wider, existential war. Battles are not fought in a vacuum, but must serve the wider war aims. The attendant difficulty in Steele’s views is that international opinion is largely a shifting mirage, made up of small self-important elites projecting their own, usually leftist and almost always unrealistic and insulated views, whose loyalties rapidly shift with who is powerful and willing to exert power.

That’s where Angelo Codevilla comes in. Codevilla is a student of Machiavelli, who described the rules of the game of power. The rules may be used for good or ill, but to negate the ends accomplished by the necessary means is to create weakness and allow the field to those willing to use the rules for ill ends.

”a prince ... cannot observe all of those virtues for which men are reputed good, because it is often necessary to act against mercy, against faith, against humanity, against frankness, against religion, in order to preserve the state."

Codevilla takes the US severely to task for its failure to follow the rules in Iraq and the broader Middle East. His critique should be read in full. It’s not what most, either conservative or liberal, neocon or realist or defeatist, are accustomed to hearing. But, it cuts to the heart of our bleeding for four years, and the limited best outcomes we face. Codevilla has been consistently opposed to our entering Iraq, seeing bigger game afoot, and the confusion of our aims. He’s been proven correct, so far. His forecast, therefore, should be taken seriously. Most important, his indictment of our befuddled policy class requires a new realism in Washington.

A long article by Codevilla in the Claremont Review says that the US has played to the self-interests of Middle Eastern Sunni despots and to the commercial interests and moral confusion of Western Europeans, rather than to American interests.

Working as they did under the banner of democracy, State and the CIA's limited efforts on behalf of their favored Iraqi group (also that of the Saudis, Egyptians, and Jordanians)—the Sunni Arabs—fostered only vain hopes and fruitless strife. Moreover, few of these half-hearted imperialists realized how thoroughly the religious, social, and cultural identity of Iraq's Shia majority had been subsumed by political movements; nor did they anticipate that the Sunni minority would refuse to accept the loss of political power and socioeconomic primacy inevitable in the fall of the Ba'ath party dictatorship—their dictatorship. In short, the authors of the occupation imagined that the Iraqis could easily be induced to forget the things that were most precious to them, and to reconcile themselves to a regime invented for them in Washington….

The U.S. foreign policy establishment's vision of Iraq was of a country united and governed by a secular elite that would transcend confessional and racial differences. But those differences would not be transcended, except by violence. A vision at odds with reality could not be the basis of an agenda….

The U.S. government knew well enough that nearly all of those shooting at U.S. soldiers were Sunni Arabs, usually attached to Saddam's Ba'ath party, who were using foreign Wahabi suicide bombers—usually Saudis—as ordnance. Nevertheless, its response to the Sunni insurgency has been to try to co-opt it by arming and empowering those Sunni Ba'athist military figures who promise somehow to temper attacks on Americans. This purchase of truces as if there were no tomorrow was the hallmark of General David Petraeus's 2003 command in Mosul. It was the thinking behind turning Fallujah over to a Ba'athist general in 2004, who, in turn, made it into the insurrection's citadel. It is also, alas, the thinking behind the plan for extricating U.S. forces while maintaining a veneer of success that Petraeus was sent to execute in 2007, especially in Anbar province. The plan consisted of sending some 35,000 additional U.S. troops to provide "security" in Anbar province by working with some Sunnis, and in Baghdad by working against some Shia. Achieving lower U.S. body counts would underpin claims of success. But because one side's security is another's insecurity, troops on the ground know that "security" is inherently meaningless. This demoralized them, strengthened America's worst enemies among the Sunnis, and convinced the majority Shia that America was intent on double-crossing them. Whatever tactical victories the surge may bring, it is a formula for strategic defeat. Refusing to choose sides, the U.S. armed forces end up the enemy of all—and, surely worst of all, feared by none….

Statecraft would have required viewing Iraq's realities—which reflected the growing worldwide enmity between Sunni and Shia, between Arabs and Persians—from the standpoint of what America could do to crush or cow regimes that export terror, whether Arab or Persian, Sunni or Shia. After the invasion, only our occupation prevented Iraq's Shia majority from ripping out the Ba'ath party's last bloody roots, both to avenge its tyranny and because it is Sunni. Had the Shia done this, the Arab world's Sunni regimes would have begged America not to let the same fate befall them. The Shia, for their part, would not have had to be persuaded by what America had done for them, but would have been impressed by what it could let happen to them. The lesson for all would have been that America turns its enemies over to their enemies' tender mercies. In short, statecraft would have meant subordinating the wishes of the Iranian, Turk, and Arab regimes to American interests—not fighting their battles for them or trying to compose their differences. America fights only its own enemies. Only by denying the logic of statecraft did occupying Iraq make sense. But once the occupation commenced and reality began to bite, only a double denial of statecraft's logic prevented our establishment from enabling one side's victory over the others, or crushing all….

U.S. establishmentarians, who regard all religion as hokum, cannot fathom the differences between the Sunni and Shia variants of Islam, which mean so much to Muslims. Hence our experts have also been unable to tell the difference between serious Muslims and the secular legions that clothe their hate and contempt for us in Muslim garb. Our establishment thinks that because religion is the mother of strife, the enemy of modernity, it must be humored and subdued in the short term, then marginalized and eventually eliminated. This mindset prevents intelligent judgment about why we might prefer some religious expressions to others, and ensures the enmity of all who believe in God….

What follows from the foreign policy establishment's apolitical division of mankind into "moderates" and "extremists" is an art of politics, if that's the right term, that prevents considering what anyone is, or should be, moderate or extreme about. It abstracts from right and wrong, honor and shame. It leads to moderation in pursuit of America's interests. Then, in the hope of avoiding worse threats to our modest interests, it leads to finding moderation in those who threaten us. It becomes the promotion of "moderation" for its own sake, and then boils down to coaxing "extremists" into "moderation" by involving them in profitable and (supposedly) addictive arrangements. Our establishmentarians imagine they can moderate our enemies by promising them that they can get most of what they want through cooperation; and tell the American people that if we were to forcefully oppose our enemies, that would only radicalize them further….

The establishment behaved toward Arab terrorist states as it did toward terrorist individuals and groups. After all, inspiration, money, and organization for anti-American terrorism does not come from Mars. It comes from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Qatar, Iran, and elsewhere; until 2003 it came from Iraq. The official disclaimer that these states' media, schools, and private wealth and infrastructure enable terrorism, independent of government authority, is as incredible as the PLO's. These regimes embody anti-American causes. If they treated anti-U.S. terrorism as they do terrorism against themselves, the world would sleep safely. One reason they do not is that the U.S. designates them as "moderates," making their activities acceptable and their goals generally praiseworthy. Indeed, preserving these regimes' health and comfort has been one of the U.S. establishment's prime concerns. By contrast, statecraft is about our national interest….

When, after 9/11, the Bush Administration decided once and for all to rid America of Saddam, it did not at the same time rid itself of the approach to international affairs that had turned military victory into strategic defeat in 1990-91. Rhetoric aside, its strategic priorities in 2003 were identical to those of the previous decade: catering to the Sunni Arab world's supposedly "moderate" interests. Arab governments strongly opposed the invasion. But once it happened, they just as strongly demanded, for the same reason, that the U.S. occupy Iraq: above all, they wanted Iraq's Shia majority to be kept under some sort of Sunni control. That meant keeping Iraq together, but keeping its majority from ruling. Our establishment answered the call by occupying Iraq for half a decade, tergiversating between democracy, meaning Shia power, and "national unity," code for re-empowering Sunnis. No surprise then that the U.S. government's penultimate act in Iraq, the "surge" begun in 2007, aimed to arm as many Sunni militias as would take U.S. arms, ostensibly to fight other Sunnis we choose to call al-Qaeda, and to forcefully suppress some Shia militias in Baghdad. The media have passed along the U.S. government's ignorant acceptance of some terrorists' baseless self-identification as al-Qaeda, and "Liaison Services" reports that this or that group is part of al-Qaeda. The original al-Qaeda, made up of "Afghan Arabs," was never much and is mostly gone. But countless people use the name to frighten America and to shield their sponsors. Labeling Sunni violence al-Qaeda lets the U.S. government pretend that the struggle in Iraq is not between Iraqis for Iraqi stakes, with Sunnis supported by Arabs and Shia supported by Persians. Credulity covers its continuing effort to co-opt the Sunnis. Thus did our establishment further enable Iraq's factions to fight one another, and motivate all to fight us.

But note well: all of the above policies work against the interest of the United States, which is to force Arab rulers to clamp down on any and all who might harm Americans, lest the Arab rulers themselves be killed….

Our establishment's problems in Iraq stem from its crazy commitment to the Saudis' and other Sunnis' struggle against Shia Iran. Designating the Sunni world as Islam's "moderate" wing, despite the increasing influence of Saudi Wahabism within it, takes no small dishonesty. So does forgetting that the overwhelming majority of anti-American terrorists, their media, and their money come from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Gulf states, and Palestine—the Sunni world. Nor will the excuse wash that appeasing the Sunni world is some kind of shield against Iran's soon-to-be nuclear armament. How could that be? Moreover, Iran's nukes would be directed at the Sunni world foremost—just as a hypothetical Egyptian or Saudi bomb would be directed against Iran. Israel seems to have followed us in a de facto alliance with the Sunni world against Iran. But that the Saudis, et al., might shield Israel against Iran is even less plausible than that they might shield America. Since we Americans have even less control than we have interest in this struggle, we should not make it ours nor export silly notions.

Our interest lies in being feared and respected by both sides.

It’s a bloody ending to our occupation of Iraq, actually after our occupation, that Codevilla foresees. Codevilla sees the US’s interests best served by letting that confrontation put some real fear into the neighboring Sunni satraps, to stop their double-dealing and actually end the terrorism they foster on the rest of the world and their fellow Arabs.

AND, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial notices that the Sunni Arab states, source of most human-explosive-devices, fail to post ambassadors to Iraq, perhaps noting that, “A functional Muslim democracy -- federalized, pluralist, majority-led and imposed by American arms -- is a worrying precedent for the autocratic houses of Assad, Saud and Mubarak.” Similarly, they play at peace at Annapolis while continuing to insist on self-demolition by Israel. The US’s participation in their charade is simply ridiculous, not to mention scandalous, that our youth should shed their blood and our nation its honor in furthering their agendas rather than our own. Our primary interest is in their stopping their furtherance of international terrorism, and that’s little happening as long as we permit them to get away with it, brazenly.

San Diego, like most metropolitan areas, has a liberal center surrounded by a more conservative suburbia, in San Diego’s case a bit less liberal in-all than most. Its major newspaper, the San Diego Union-Tribune exhibits similar tendencies, its reporting mostly drawn from liberal newswires (although often blended to get better info) but its editorial and opinion pages containing less liberal lock-step than most.

This has been played out in its recent editorials on Iraq, exhibiting the lack of clear-sightedness that plagues our media, and how secondary markets are affected by the leading memes that emanate from New York and Washington newswires.

On September 13, in a major switch from cautious support for the prospects of the US mission in Iraq, the collective wisdom of a majority of the San Diego Union-Tribune’s editorial board switched sides. The September 13 editorial bemoaned, as Democrats and the New York Times led the charge,

Bush appears determined to press ahead on the very same path he has pursued without success for the last four years, which is to count on U.S. military forces to install a stable democracy in Iraq. …The anguishing dilemma in Iraq cannot be solved by military means, but rather only by political accommodations worked out among Iraqis themselves. The president's failure to heed this reality has left U.S. forces stranded in a civil war in which Shiites and Sunnis attack each other without restraint – and both sides attack U.S. forces… Congress alone has the authority to chart a different course.

The Letters page of the San Diego Union-Tribune is said to reflect the proportions of opinions received. By 2 to 1, the letters were critical of this editorial. Mine said,

The editorial “More of the same/Bush war strategy offers slim hope of success” (Sept. 13) ignores and denies all the news of change of strategy and of resulting progress in Iraq, including its acknowledgment even by critics of our former course. There are even beginnings of political accommodations now among sects now that security is improving, and isolation of the extremists.

The Democrats insisted on high benchmarks to reach after only a few months of “surge,” so no one should be surprised that a complete reformation has not occurred yet. All, however, are surprised at how far the security improvements have come, including previously written-off Anbar covering roughly a third of Iraq. As often with frustrated critics, the Union-Tribune ends by asking “to chart a different course” without a clue what that is outside of abandonment, even though all recognize that would create a worse regional firestorm to fill the resulting vacuum.

Today’s editorial in the San Diego Union-Tribune reverses course, as have many editorial pages and much reporting in other papers, as the lack of progress meme crumbles. The editorial admits,

We counted ourselves skeptics on the surge strategy but it's difficult to argue with the results to date.

Sunday opinion section editor Robert Caldwell offers why it’s “Now A Winnable War”:

The stunning turnaround in U.S. military fortunes in Iraq is now so obvious that it's getting page-one treatment and network/cable broadcast time by an American press long preoccupied with reporting this war's negatives. There are lessons here for anyone who will examine the facts in Iraq, perhaps even for Democrats in Congress and those running for president whose unchanging mantra remains “we've lost, get out now.”…

So, what do we learn from all this?…

Caldwell presents the military successes, the turning on Al Quaeda, the distribution of oil revenues on a per capita basis even though legislation isn’t yet passed. But, most important, Caldwell points to the psychological reinforcement of the “surge” to Iraqis that the US is committed to their peaceful ends.

It’s a similar story at home in the US. The opponents of the war keep scratching for negatives, while Americans become more aware that the opponents are wrong about the trend. Some media are begrudgingly following their customers into lessened negativity, while others “hang weak.” The declining audience for the major media ought to be a telling indicator of how lessening the regard major media is held by more and more Americans. As the race for 2008 picks up speed, it will be interesting to see whether major media are learning anything on other issues from the fallout from their evident erroneous slant on Iraq.

The Associated Press tried to ignore the black eye it garnered for its repeated use of stories from Iraq by Jamil Hussein, created from whole cloth as disingenuous propaganda to discredit the US. As I wrote last January, “AP says UP Yours: Newspaper Unaccountability”:

The latest response by Associated Press executive editor Kathleen Carroll to the inability of any independent investigation to unearth the AP’s ghost informant, Jamil Hussein, should be headlined, “AP says UP yours,” instead of the E&P’s “Continues to Stand by Reporting.”

Ms. Carroll, apparently, feels well insulated from the public as she is from verifiable facts or accountability….

One wonders how to penetrate the insularity of such media barons like Carroll.

The Associated Press does not have an ombudsman, a representative of the public customers, nor does it present a complaint line, nor email addresses for its Board. The public’s sole recourse is via the owners of local newspapers who subscribe to the AP wire. It is only through that very attenuated route that a reader may hope to have any impact.

The US has now turned AP photographer Bilal Hussein over to the Iraqis for trial:

In Washington, Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell explained the decision to bring charges now by saying “new evidence has come to light” about Hussein, but said the information would remain in government hands until the formal complaint is filed with Iraqi authorities.

Morrell asserted the military has “convincing and irrefutable evidence that Bilal Hussein is a threat to stability and security in Iraq as a link to insurgent activity” and called Hussein “a terrorist operative who infiltrated the AP.”

Now, comes this blast from the president and chief executive of Associated Press, Tom Curley, in defense of its photographer in Iraq, Bilal Hussein:

We believe Bilal's crime was taking photographs the U.S. government did not want its citizens to see. That he was part of a team of AP photographers who had just won a Pulitzer Prize for work in Iraq may have made Bilal even more of a marked man.

In the 19 months since he was picked up, Bilal has not been charged with any crime, although the military has sent out a flurry of ever-changing claims. Every claim we've checked out has proved to be false, overblown or microscopic in significance. Now, suddenly, the military plans to seek a criminal case against Bilal in the Iraqi court system in just days. But the military won't tell us what the charges are, what evidence it will be submitting or even when the hearing will be held….

Perhaps it is not surprising that the operators of the world's largest prison-camp network have found a way to provide access to due process in a form that actually looks more unjust than indefinite imprisonment without charges.

But this is a poor example -- and not the first of its kind -- of the way our government honors the democratic principles and values it says it wants to share with the Iraqi people.

Actually, quite a bit is known about Bilal Hussein. Michelle Malkin presents a useful summary, with Hussein's "convenient" photos, and John Hinderaker at Powerline neatly asks, “How stupid does the Associated Press think we are?” Bob Owens provides further information about the legal process and AP grandstanding.

The coming trial of Bilal Hussein may yet again exhibit why the Associated Press should both avoid Husseins, and should get new management with journalistic integrity instead of journalistic bombastity and self-righteous, self-defensive impermeability to following the facts.

Last year’s Thanksgiving message to readers was a quote from Albert Schweitzer:

To educate yourself for the feeling of gratitude means to take nothing for granted, but to always seek out and value the kind that will stand behind the action. Nothing that is done for you is a matter of course. Everything originates in a will for the good, which is directed at you. Train yourself never to put off the word or action for the expression of gratitude.
---------Albert Schweitzer

When I was in Vietnam, I made a pledge with G-d: Please help me to return home safely and you’ll never hear another complaint. Neither broke the pledge.

An assignment from my 7-year old son’s 2nd grade class is to ask Dad what he’s thankful for on Thanksgiving. I told him that I always celebrate my birthday (I’m amazed, 60 on Sunday, and still feel only part-way there toward keeping my purpose in life.) on Thanksgiving, so I’m thankful for life and the opportunities it brings to be useful and helpful. My son’s reaction: “So you’re thankful for giving and not getting.”

Schweitzer’s quote is to this point, at its most basic: Gratitude is directed at those who “stand behind the action.” Another quote from Schweitzer may clarify:

At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person.
Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.

Thanksgiving is a good time to “pass it on,” and think of ways to rekindle others’ flames within, from those laid low by misfortune or oppression, to those on high who may have forgotten their obligations to those who depend upon they using their resources to spread dignity and freedom to be.

The vast majority of Americans don’t want convicted terrorists or terrorist sympathizers teaching their kids. But a City University of New York faculty union leader, Susan O’Malley is suing Dr. Sharad Karkhanis, CUNY professor emeritus for criticizing her for being obsessed with “finding jobs for terrorists” at CUNY. However, she is surely not the only one “recruiting terrorists” on campus. CUNY faculty and Professional Staff Congress (PSC) leaders besides O’Malley have been defending convicted terrorists’ right to teach and donating to their legal funds using the members’ union dues for these and numerous other political causes. Now, CUNY professor Francis Fox Piven, from the New Caucus of the PSC, has stepped up to defend South African scholar Adam Habib who was accused of engaging in a terrorist activity and barred from entering the United States by the State Department. Professor Piven said “(w)e think this is a clear violation of academic freedom” and invited him to him to speak at the American Sociological Association's annual conference, saying “(h)e would be much in demand” at a number of CUNY campuses.

Sharad Karkhanis will not be silenced. He continues to speak out with a louder voice than ever and will fight to uphold his constitutional rights that are now in jeopardy. Fortunately in America we have the First Amendment right to criticize, satirize and dissent, as he has done with great verve in The Patriot Returns, blasting such preposterous appeals to bring convicted terrorists into the classroom. Defenders of the free speech rights of Karkhanis maintain that the lawsuit is a frivolous one, since O’Malley, one of the targets of Karkhanis’ political satire, was merely offended, as I have argued. The lawsuit has no constitutional basis since there is no law in the United States against being offended. Numerous blogs and articles in support of Karkhanis have been pouring in to the Free Speech at CUNY weblog expressing outrage at the academic elites who seek to silence all criticism and crush dissenting points of view. Professor Mitchell Langbert has been blogging up a storm as well. He brought up some interesting points about the incongruity of lawsuits and collegiality challenging PSC President Barbara Bowen to answer whether she believes it is within the bounds of collegiality for colleagues to sue one another.

While searching for a definition for “collegiality” I found an article that resonates with Langbert’s contention. Dr. Nicholas T. Kouchoukos, past president of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons, laments the disappearance of collegiality from his field. He defines collegiality as “respect for one's colleagues and for their professional endeavors,” and citing a case in point of its loss, he revealed professionals within the same specialty slugging it out in malpractice suits in court. One seems to find rotten apples in every barrel.

President Bowen never answered Langbert’s question, however he did get a very telling response from a defender of O’Malley, a CUNY Professor named David Arnow, who is on the Brooklyn College PSC executive committee and has been a member of the University Faculty Senate (UFS):

Defenders of Karkhanis just don't have the moral high ground to invoke 'collegiality'. As for law suits: for all its faults, the U.S. system of law towers over that of any other country I know. Law suits that redress wrongs are part of that system. If there really is a wrong, it ought to be redressed, shouldn't it? How would you right a wrong? Fisticuffs?

I don't know the details of Libel law, but I know that it is happily fairly limited, compared say to the U.K., and so the absurd lies you spin for the Sun are protected-- as they should be. Still, repeated false public accusations of specific criminal acts might satisfy the definition of libel. Your buddy may have crossed the line. Not to worry, I'm sure that the people you and he work for have very deep pockets.

Now, answer the questions that I posed below. Don't try to wriggle out of them: My first question for you is: Have you stopped molesting small children yet? And my second question is: Supposed I posed this question everywhere. Would you sue? Or would you take it in the collegial, satirical sense that it was perhaps intended?

Aside from innuendo, hypothetical molestation conundrums, and the lecture on libel law, it’s the first sentence that is so stunning in its pomposity that I need to address. The mention of the “moral high ground” betrays the elitism and phony righteousness so symptomatic of the PSC leadership who think they are on a mission to save the world. But the moral high ground is held by neither leftwing nor rightwing ideologues, who claim to determine the truth for everyone. Rather, it’s the other way around: the majority of the people of America determine the moral high ground. These fringe ideologues who think they hold the monopoly on truth and are smarter than the rest of us, are the same academic elites who would sue and silence outspoken pests like Karkhanis rather than offering a “collegial” rebuttal or debate. After Langbert offered him an opportunity for intelligent debate on the issues with a series of challenging questions, Arnow, in typical elitist fashion, shut down all further discussion with the following response:

You can put my email anywhere you like, but the gibberish above again evades my questions about whether you've stopped molesting small children and I am not going to waste any more time writing to you. I'm adding you to my spam filter.

From the lofty perch of his claim to the moral high ground, Arnow must believe defenders of Karkhanis, whom he claims are on the moral low ground just don’t merit a response. But it’s the lowly professor Karkhanis and his defenders who speak for the majority of Americans who hold the moral high ground. These are the decent hard working people who pay a lot of money to send their kids to college. They don’t want their kids to be lectured by convicted terrorists. Weather Underground terrorist Susan Rosenberg, convicted terrorist conspirator Mohammad Yousry, Lynne Stewart, Sami Al-Arian, Lori Berenson, Adam Habib and their ilk shouldn’t be promoting their bloodstained ideology in the classroom. The majority of Americans are disgusted with an academic elite that crushes dissent and free speech. Americans who want colleges free from this vermin and who want to ensure free speech for Sharad Karkahnis, are the ones who are now rallying to his side.

Karkhanis speaks for the vast majority of Americans from within the cloistered walls of an elitist institution that silences dissenting points of view. He exposes the clandestine shenanigans of the CUNY faculty union, the PSC, for all Americans to read on the pages of The Patriot Returns and he will never be silenced. The majority of Americans are on his side. Sharad Karkhanis indeed stands on the moral high ground.

Stop arguing with your liberal friends about what a dangerous place the world is, and just send them this website. A friend just sent it to me. It’s called Global Incident Map: A Global Display of Terrorism and Other Suspicious Events.

You have to see it to believe it, and I really mean to believe it: The world is a very dangerous place.

There’s nothing I’ve ever experienced – short of actually experiencing war or terrorist incidents --that so brings the message home, literally, right to your computer, and so comprehensively, about the need to be vigilant.

Give thanks this Thanksgiving, and every day, and express the same wishes to your friends, that you’re not in those places abroad. But, also, note the incidents in the U.S.

Through some programming wizardry, the site refreshes every 7 minutes, scanning every nook and cranny of the globe for terrorist incidents and events that may be, provides the links to the stories, and hooks up to Google to map them. You can search by time period, by location, by type of incident, and much more.

Simply amazing. Belongs on everyone’s computer screen.

The editor of Newsweek International, Fareed Zakaria, writes in his latest column – spread around the world – about “America the Unwelcoming.” Zakaria says that international tourism to the US is lagging, mostly due to foreigners complaining about onerous US Customs.

Zakaria is parroting the line fed by an organized disinformation campaign by the US tourism industry, meant to get a $200-million tourism fund out of the US Congress, appealing to anti-Patriot Act Democrats there by bashing necessary border controls. This manipulative grab for corporate welfare pork is despicable, and even moreso when launched by a wealthy industry well capable of promoting its own interests.

I wrote about it a few weeks ago. The post is below. I’ll have more from my investigation shortly.

November 2, 2007

Tourism Industry Trashes U.S.

AFP newswire delivers an unexamined press release from the “Discover America” tourism association that, “'Unwelcoming' US sees sharp fall in visitors since 9/11.”

Chairman Stevan Porter lamented the "extraordinary decline" in the number of overseas visitors to the United States, while the advocacy group's executive director, Geoff Freeman, blamed the slump on the shabby welcome many foreigners feel they get in the United States.

"It's clear what's keeping people away in the post-9/11 environment: it is the perception around the world that travelers aren't welcome," Freeman told AFP.

The tourism industry is in search of more promotional funds and easier entry requirements for foreign visitors. “"The United States has to do what every other nation in the world does, and that is to promote itself to visitors," Freeman said.”

That’s what associations do, promote their industry. But, what is despicable is that this one does so by trashing, incorrectly, the United States, which it is supposed to promote!

The association’s executive director Freeman was already debunked last year at the University of Southern California’s Public Diplomacy blog.

Adam Clayton Powell III presented that:

In fact, quite the reverse is correct: the percentage of international travelers coming to the U.S. increased for the second straight year, exceeded only by France and Spain.

To which Freeman admitted:

It is true that the U.S. will welcome more visitors in 2006 than it did in 2005 or at any point since 9/11. In fact, the U.S. is expected in 2006 to return to its pre-9/11 total of approximately 50 million visitors. That’s good news -- economically and diplomatically.

Freeman, however, said the mix had tilted toward Canadians and Mexicans. “Today’s "increase" in travelers is driven almost entirely by Canadians and Mexicans.”

Powell rebutted with real numbers:

BTW since this was posted, I have received feedback from State, reporting that, based on actual (legal) admissions to the US, the number of visitors has "unquestionably" surged since 9/11 - and not just Canada and Mexico. The increase from the UK, for example, is much larger than Mexico. Visitors from Japan alone surged by almost a million in the past three years - and in 2005 were almost as numerous as (legal) visitors from Mexico.

AFP says:

The Discover America Partnership was set up by US business leaders last year to try to redress the flagging image of the United States through a campaign of public diplomacy, waged equally by the government, business and public.

A trade association that can’t and won’t get its facts straight is disreputable. When it tries to lie to get funding by trashing its ultimate client, that’s despicable, and stupid. "Discover America" is seriously off the reservation on its mission and needs to be hauled back immediately.

Another Link: Office of Travel & Tourism Industries to obtain real data.

MORE Zakaria nonsense:
Zakaria makes much of a declining share of international tourists visiting the US. In fact, as Forbes reports, most usual prior destination countries are losing international market share, to Asia.

At the Travel and Tourism Research Association Conference in Las Vegas this June, Helen Marano, Director of the Office of Travel and Tourism Industries and Alan Waddell, Chief Operating Officer of The Visit USA Association (U.K.), tried to dispel a myth that the U.S. stands alone in global market share loss. Four of the top five—and 15 of the top 19—international destinations have lost market share over the past 5 years, they said, predicting these destinations would lose more share over the next five years while Asian countries gained.

Top novel National Book Award winner for 2007 is Tree of Smoke, that USA Today calls a “dark novel about the calamities of the Vietnam War." "Reading it feels like a careening journey into our national subconscious," the judges said.

That “subconscious” is not national, except among our literary and media elites.

Tree of Smoke author Denis Johnson was a drugged-out street-person in the ‘60’s, hardly a background qualifying him to pass judgment on the troops who served in Vietnam, or to be taken seriously by anyone with any sense, or sense of decency.

The Washington Post’s columnist on foreign affairs, David Ignatius, whose entire career has been within the media, without practical experience, wrote a glowing review of this 600-page novel. It is indicative of what passes for truthiness among these circles. Ignatius finds the drug-addled mind of Johnson as a realistic indicator of our troops’ minds in Vietnam, and guide to our troops’ minds in Iraq.

To write a fat novel about the Vietnam War nearly 35 years after it ended is an act of literary bravado. To do so as brilliantly as Denis Johnson has in Tree of Smoke is positively a miracle…. to its sheer ambition to be definitive for the Vietnam generation…. This is war as hallucination. It's a story of the decomposition and degradation of the characters and, by implication, Vietnam…. by the end he is a wild outcast running guns in Southeast Asia. "I quit working for the giant-size criminals," he says, "and started working for the medium size. Lousy hours and no fringe benefits, but the ethics are clearer."… "This isn't a war. It's a disease. A plague." That is one of the most powerful themes of the book: Vietnam fed a national craving. We couldn't get out, we couldn't stay in; the war was controlling us rather than the other way around. Johnson's skill in rendering the dialect of war was earned the hard way -- during the years in which he was, by his own account, a drug addict….

As a serious war novel, Tree of Smoke is implicitly a story about all wars. And a reader cannot travel this journey without thinking about America's current war in Iraq. Officers and politicians speak of the nobility of this war, as they do of all wars. But when you talk to soldiers in Baghdad or Anbar, you know that it is about surviving, counting down the days, believing in the people on your left and right rather than in the loftier mission statements that emanate from the Green Zone. And those are the lucky soldiers who stay sane. For the vulnerable ones, war takes away these human instincts of survival and replaces them with crazy ones….

Something similar must have happened with the mercifully few U.S. soldiers who were involved in America's worst moments in Iraq -- at Abu Ghraib, Haditha and other places we will hear about later. They were damaged people -- addicted to war, feeding on it in a frenzy, being made crazy by it….

It's a war turned upside down. If we could hear the inner voices of soldiers in Ramadi and Baqubah, behind those wraparound shades they would be thinking about coming home. The decent ones, that is. Those corrupted by war would want to stay on forever, as do Johnson's unforgettable, war-deranged cast of characters.

I had a previous run-in with Ignatius regarding the major media’s failure to report for duty in Iraq for Iraq war reporting.

Tree of Smoke author Johnson says, in a 2003 interview, he can’t even manage to cash a check without his wife’s help.

Fourteen years of substance abuse may have affected the writer's mind, so he relies, like Ozzy [Osbourne], on a practical wife to keep him grounded. "Cindy handles all the finances. That's crucial," he says. Last December, for example, he went with her to cash one of his own royalty checks at the bank. "She showed the lady some ID, and I said, 'Shouldn't I show her my ID?' And she said, 'You don't have an account here.'"

Johnson’s wife picked up the National Book Award for him, as Johnson is currently in Iraq.

I’m sure he will find himself in much friendly company among other home-bound pundits like Ignatius and other writers and editors whose conception of Iraq and our troops was shaped by a misinformed myth adopted about Vietnam and our troops. Many such are writing new myths about Iraq and our troops, and are probably looking forward to validation of their imaginings from drug-addled Johnson.

My friend, Thomas Lipscomb (bio), is a Senior Fellow of the University of Southern California Annenberg Center For The Digital Future, was founding President of Times Books, magazine publisher, widely published investigative journalist, and much more.

Lipscomb offers his take on this and other National Book Awards:

As a publisher and editor who has had a number of the books I had published over the past 40 years win Pulitzers and National Book Awards, the 2007 NBA award to TREE OF SMOKE is part of a dismal pattern. While NBA winners 30 years ago were often best-sellers, practically none are at present. There is a reason for that. The prize committees have drifted farther and farther from any recognizable American roots.

When I went into publishing in the late 60s, there was little doubt that the prevailing left wing politics of the publishing and academic communities influenced the awarding of prizes. But there was also room for well-argued and written books that didn’t have to carry clear evidence that a politically correct catechism had been mastered by their authors.

But as time went on, evidence of the catechism has become more important in many cases than the excellence of the book. For example, the last book to win a nonfiction NBA about a Republican was more than a quarter century ago in the 1980 Edmund Morris THE RISE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT. Unless you count James Carroll’s 1996 AN AMERICAN REQUIEM (which also won the Lucian K. Truscott IV Ingrate Son Award), IF his CIA father was one of the rare GOPers in the CIA.

And there were no other winners on a Republican in the past 50 years and we don’t even need to go near the fiction list. And yet Republicans have held the presidency for the majority of that time. But the list of winners covers the predictable liberal waterfront, from the Great Depression, to FDR, LBJ, Civil Rights, Jefferson, Vietnam, etc., etc.

The problem with political correctness of right or left is that it makes everything so predictable, including literary awards. Talent, the most unpredictable thing of all, diminishes as a major factor in the award.

In the early days of printing in Roman Catholic countries the church’s fear of general literacy required the imprimatur of the local cardinal or bishop be included in a printed book to allow it to be legally sold in his community. Having freed literacy from one tyranny, we are heading back where we started.

And what could have been more predictable than that the coveted Bancroft Prize in History should be awarded to a work fraudulent on the face of it to anyone who wasn’t living in an academic cocoon, Michael Bellesiles ARMING AMERICA. Before someone spent 10 seconds actually checking Bellesiles research, his central thesis that guns were about as rare in colonial America as astolabes (hence there was no historical basis for the 2nd Amendment) seemed just plain loony to a normal American. There clearly were guns hanging over the fireplace of every American colonial hovel, not peace pipes. At least an embarrassed Columbia University revoked the prize in 2002.

Henri Stendal, as acerbic a critic of social climbers as ever lived, created a scene in which his young Sammy Glick was amazed to be given his first award and ribbon by his patron and employer, the Marquis de la Mole.
“But what did I do to earn it?” the young man asked, losing his cool totally.

The Marquis was vastly amused. “Awards, my boy, are not earned, They are bestowed.”

Many a veteran of shooting wars and literary wars can testify to that.

AND Homeless Druggie Chic Is “In”.

ADD IN more Ignatius drivel, this time on Israel.

My latest essay, which appears this morning at FrontPage Magazine, satirizes the Middle East Studies Association's (MESA) refusal to run an advertisement for Campus Watch in the program for their annual convention, which begins tomorrow in Montreal.

Here are the first few paragraphs:

In a surprising act of corporate courage, the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) has dismissed an attempt by Philadelphia-based Campus Watch to place an ad in the program for MESA's upcoming annual conference in Montreal.

The text of the rejected ad read:

Campus Watch: Working to Improve Middle East Studies since 2002.

The bad news arrived in the form of a terse email from Amy W. Newhall, Ph.D., the executive director of MESA. She wrote from her office at the University of Arizona:

MESA's advertising policy states, ‘MESA reserves the right to refuse ads it deems inappropriate or in conflict with MESA's objectives.' On this basis, we will not accept the ad from your organization.

Sincerely,

Amy W. Newhall

MESA is the umbrella organization for practitioners of Middle East studies (MES) in North America. Based in the Arizona desert, insiders say it breaks through the wall of silence imposed on its members by Campus Watch through stealth outreach efforts that include: frequent appearances on national and international broadcast and cable news networks and radio; articles and citations in newspapers and magazines from around the world; countless classes involving thousands of students on thousands of university campuses worldwide; thousands of publications, including academic and non-academic journals and books; and frequent public speaking gigs in every state and province and scores of foreign countries.

The organization is known to be a fearless defender of academic freedom, even in the face of intense internal pressure to increase its intellectual diversity. This spirit is exemplified by former MESA president Juan Cole of the University of Michigan, who once said, "The FBI should investigate how [Walid] Phares, an undistinguished academic with links to far right-wing Lebanese groups and the Likud clique, became the ‘terrorism analyst' at MSNBC."

To read the rest, go here.

CBS says it takes an absence from reality to take Dan Rather’s lawsuit against CBS seriously that he was dismissed in a widespread conspiracy to cover up for Bush among CBS’ liberal management.

In CBS’s response to New York’s Supreme Court, the network says as much:

"The Complaint is predicated on allegations of a bizarre 'scheme' extending from the White House to an array of CBS executives including Sumner Redstone, CBS's Executive Chairman, Leslie Moonves, CBS's Chief Executive Officer, and Andrew Heyward, formerly president of CBS News, all of whom, according to Rather, colluded to harm Rather's reputation and keep him off the air," add CBS lawyers. "Of course, there was no such nefarious scheme, and Rather's allegations bear no resemblance to reality. CBS and its executives are not now, and never have been, out to get Dan Rather."

CBS also says,

"If we are required to proceed beyond this point, we will defend the case vigorously and demonstrate that the lawsuit is wholly without merit, and that the bizarre allegations by Mr. Rather are untrue."

I’d love to be Mike Wallace showing up at Dan Rather’s door to ask a few questions, but I’m sure that CBS’ lawyers can do an admirable job of exposing the Rather sham.

The Silicon Alley Insider, a NY digital business blog, comments: “The company took the predictable stance: Dan Rather was once a great man and a valued colleague. It's too bad he has since gone insane.”

See this summary, to refresh on the saga of Rather’s unwinding.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS leaves out the juicy quotes from CBS. So much for fraternal nuttiness.

Friday morning update:
The New York Times, also, doesn’t find space for CBS’ quotes, no surprise there, but entertainment’s Variety recognizes a looney Rather script.

Neither Republicans nor Democrats dispute that governments at all levels are generally spending more than they’re taking in, that favored programs are strained, or that fixes are needed. Republicans generally call for tempered spending, particularly on social programs, and creating more tax revenues through increasing incentives to produce, particularly through lowered taxes. Democrats generally call for increased spending, particularly on social programs, and paying for it through increasing taxes on our most productive.

It’s not difficult to see that as Democrat promises run up against budget deficits and increased resistance to more taxes from stressed taxpayers that Democrats have a problem in fulfilling the expectations of their constituency. It’s more difficult to see what Republicans can do with that.

Mark Tapscott writes that,

We have created a federal Leviathan that promises to deliver something for everybody, with its regulations and taxation directing virtually every corner of daily life. There is no way any government can do that, so failures are inevitable. But over a period of time, as the failures in particular arenas multiply, there comes a point when the many specific failures merge into one general mood of dissatisfaction.

Within the next decade, as the seriousness of the entitlement crisis becomes more evident, it is likely that the general dissatisfaction with government that promises everything and delivers nothing but higher taxes, more waste and policy paralysis is going to grow more intense and deeper rooted.

This widespread dissatisfaction with the inability of Big Government to deliver on its promises presents conservatives with an historic opportunity to refocus public debate to redefine what is expected of government, to slim it down to more manageable proportions so that it can deliver on the most important things.

In short, the coming decade could be the greatest opportunity this generation is likely to see to make the case for a rejuvenated federalism of limited government. We simply have to find new ways to speak the timeless message of Ronald Reagan's first inaugural:
…"Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it is not my intention to do away with government. It is, rather, to make it work -- work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it."

In an exchange of emails with Mark, I pointed out that all the beneficiaries of government spending defend their own. Mark replied that, “when everybody is mad, they are more open to a discussion about priorities.”

That may be so, but experience shows that, more often, anger leads to more entrenched defenses. Rather, Reagan's optimism and focus on enlarging the pie was and is a winner.

For example, California – as usual leading the nation – has spent its increasing revenues of the past prosperous decade faster than tax revenues have grown, falling into serious deficit.

The new outlook from nonpartisan Legislative Analyst Elizabeth Hill is for a $1.9 billion shortfall this fiscal year and an $8 billion gap in the following year.

“The key thing to remember is that all the easy solutions are gone,” Hill said, referring to years of tight budgets. “To get revenue and spending lines into balance will require some really tough choices.”

California’s deficit is supposed to be frightening its legislators and interest groups into greater responsibility. If you believe that, I've a bridge over San Francisco Bay for sale.

In recent years, a strong economy and a surge in personal income taxes had brought extra cash to state coffers, helping to mask the imbalance. State spending is projected to increase 7 percent next year while revenue will grow only 4 percent….

Assemblyman Roger Niello, R-Fair Oaks, vice chairman of the Assembly Budget Committee, called the forecast a wake-up call for lawmakers.

"We cannot continue to put off the tough decisions required to get our fiscal house in order without facing serious consequences for our state," Niello said.

Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, D-Oakland, said in a statement the governor and lawmakers should begin "an honest dialogue" that "must include exploring all options."

We’ve heard this hollow talk before, from Washington to the state capitals. But, when it comes down to actually doing something, borrowings increase – to be paid by our children, taxes increase – increasingly burdening the middle-class where most of the money is, and the neediest suffer – as social programs are trimmed.

The San Diego Union-Tribune’s editorial today points out the main culprits:

The budget crisis inevitably is going to turn into a nasty partisan scrap. It won't be long before Democrats depict their objections to a slowdown in spending as a noble attempt to protect California's neediest.

Don't believe this self-serving posturing for a second. Perhaps the most underreported state government story of all is how the Democrats who run the Legislature left the needy out during their recent spending binge.

Over the last five years, the budget for the state Department of Social Services – which handles child and family welfare programs, aid to the blind and deaf, food stamps and more – has gone from $8.15 billion to $9 billion. But, after adjusting for inflation, the budget for the needy folks served by this department is actually less than it was in 2002-03.

Over the same span, however, the education budget went up 42 percent and the prisons budget went up a staggering 88 percent.

In public, Democrats may say the poor and the disabled are California's neediest people. In practice, however, they act as if the neediest are the teachers and prison guards represented by powerful unions.

Of note is that the fastest growing unions are public employee unions, now about half of all union members in the U.S.

California teacher unions are set to scrap over which’s members will benefit from a stressed budget. It’s indicative of the shape of more budget battles, between Democrat constituencies.

The community college measure on the Feb. 5 ballot is shaping up to be a battle royale between California’s biggest teachers unions.

On one side is the California Federation of Teachers, the state’s second largest teachers union, which has been the biggest financial backer of the campaign to lower community college fees and set aside a percentage of the budget for community colleges…. On the other is the California Teachers Association, the largest teachers group in the state…

Tapscott may be correct that anger will lead to greater reason, but this example -- and many other experiences -- isn’t promising. There’s little reason to believe that tigers will change spots. There is, however, reason to believe that onlookers – especially when likely to get mauled – may cage the tigers.

The Republican message that resonates is not one of bile, which stirs partisans but doesn’t persuade fence-sitters. The Republican message that resonates is of a bigger pie that comes from enlarged opportunities and ability to profit from them.

That doesn’t just mean lower taxes. It requires a positive program of enlarging opportunities. When Republicans have focused on that, they’ve been rewarded at the ballot box. When Republicans just grumble about spending, especially when it’s evident they’ve been loose with spending, it has allowed the field to Democrat promises, no matter how empty or fallacious.

Some Republicans will argue that programs that enlarge opportunities are short-hand for more spending, and proponents are RINO’s. There may be some validity in that for unimaginative “me-too” proposals.

However, that’s just a reflection of how bereft of imagination most Republican leaders are, and how timid to confront the tigers. Then, there’s enough, and growing, pie for the rest of us.

Mark Tapscott Replies:

Hmmm. Since I absolutely agree with that last graph [one about expanded opportunities over bile], maybe I need to go back and rephrase some things to make clear that I am not simply recommending the traditional green eyeshade GOP approach of complaining about deficit spending.

What I am talking about is recapturing the ability to make the case that government should work for people, not lord it over them. For example, forget about cutting spending on one massive federal welfare program. I'm talking about creating and empowering thousands of community based welfare programs at the local level that represent a partnership between individuals, local officials and the organizations - churches and private charities - that are closest to the people in need and most familiar with how best to help them.

And, I almost absolutely agree with that last paragraph, as long as we tighten up on tax-deductible charities, to ensure that those who are supposed to be helped actually are. The IRS “May Step Up Efforts To Identify Ineffective Charities,” according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy. And, the IRS is meeting resistance from some in this well-organized interest grouping. Here’s an example of a Republican, Senator Grassley, who has been leading the fight for more accountability, which taxpayers and donors should applaud in itself, and to expand opportunities for the neediest.

My Campus Watch colleague Cinnamon Stillwell has a new post up that skewers UCLA professor of anthropology and women's studies Sondra Hale.

Last year, Hale had this advice (among much else) on how to solve the mass killing of black Africans by Arab Islamists in Darfur, Sudan:

So many people throughout the world are trained in mediation, negotiation, healing and psychotherapy. We could send in a force of these professionals to work with people when tensions are building up.

As Cinnamon says, maybe a group hug would do the trick?

Read the rest of the post here.

There are numerous armchair generals and diplomats among bloggers, and precious few reporters with military or diplomatic expertise in an era of media shucking foreign bureaus and expertise beyond local news. No wonder that this morning’s Memeorandum is full of snits and snark but no mention of today’s real must read: Max Boot’s New York Times op-ed “Send the State Department to War.”

Max Boot, an exception to ignorance, is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of “War Made New: Weapons, Warriors and the Making of the Modern World.” Boot, also, blogs at Contentions, Commentary’s essential-to-read blog.

Of course, read the whole op-ed. Here’s a taste:

While maintaining military power remains important, even more crucial goals are aiding moderate Muslims, countering enemy propaganda, promoting economic growth, flexing our political and diplomatic muscles to achieve vital objectives peacefully, gathering intelligence, promoting international cooperation, and building the rule of law in ungoverned lands.

The government developed expertise in many of these areas during the cold war, but those skills were lost as budgets were slashed and jobs eliminated during the “peace dividend” decade of the 1990s. Because civilian capacity has been so anemic, an undue burden has fallen on the military — something that soldiers understandably resent….

Modern management theory holds that small, tightly focused organizations are likely to be more effective than large conglomerates that try to do a million different things....

James R. Locher, a former Congressional aide who helped draft the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act that brought greater coordination among the different branches of the military, is now leading a nonpartisan consortium of Washington policy and research groups that is trying to devise legislation to enhance the “unity of effort” among different branches of the government.

Instead of acting with the alacrity of the post-World War II presidency and Congress that reshaped our tools of foreign policy to meet the Cold War, this administration and Congress have been AWOL on organizing for what experts call “unified action.” Six years after 9/11, a former congressional aide is leading the way!

Spurred by Austin Bay’s post about a meeting with former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, (another by Bay here) I wrote about the need here. My friend Mark Safranski followed up with a guest post.

Otherwise, there’s been precious little media or blog attention to “unified action” and charting a course better suited to avoid military involvement abroad and to be more effective if the military is necessary.

Instead we’ve had UnUnified InAction.

This disgrace cuts across the administration, Congress, the major and alternative media. America, its security, economy and place in the world, our troops, the fate of those around the world who wish to avoid oppression, suffer.

This time it didn’t take the New York Times 5-days to discover that U.S. troops are in Iraq, not Iran. It took one-day for the New York Times to discover that “the British partitioned colonial India into the states of India and Pakistan. It was not granted independence by India.” With geopolitical acumen like that speeding up at the New York Times, when can we expect it to admit what the rest of the major media is being forced to realize, that the “surge” in Iraq is working.

Correction: November 10, 2007

An article yesterday about the anger on the streets of Pakistan over President Pervez Musharraf’s declaration of emergency rule misstated the circumstances of Pakistan’s independence 60 years ago. It was created when the British partitioned colonial India into the states of India and Pakistan. It was not granted independence by India.

I read “Slandering the American Soldier: An American media tradition,” by Mackubin Thomas Owens and passed on to other articles this morning. Until I came across this one in Britain’s Leftist New Statesman: ”What I saw in Fallujah,” by Dahr Jamail (Published 01 November 2007). This Jamail is a former Denali national park mountain guide, of Lebanese extraction, of no military experience. Jamail writes:

The second assault on Fallujah was a monument to brutality and atrocity made in the United States of America. Like the Spanish city of Guernica during the 1930s, and Grozny in the 1990s, Fallujah is our monument of excess and overkill. It was soon to become, even for many in the US military, a textbook case of the wrong way to handle a resistance movement. Another case of winning the battle and losing the war.

Owens, by contrast, writes:

On this Veterans Day, media folk predisposed to believe the worst about the American fighting man when the evidence is so clearly in his favor need to get out and meet a few more.

Two authors who have are Patrick O’Donnell, who embedded with First Platoon, Lima Company, Third Battalion, First Marine Regiment in the November 2004 second battle of Fallujah, and wrote about it in We Were One: Shoulder to Shoulder with the Marines
Who Took Fallujah. Another is Bing West, who wrote about it in No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah, which even Iraq war critic Tom Ricks of the Washington Post called, “"the best book on the U.S. military in Iraq to emerge so far."

To recall, (links here and here) Fallujah in early 2004 was the epitome of the failing and faltering U.S. military effort in Iraq, until cleared in ferocious house-to-house battle in November 2004.

Today, we hear little in the major media about Fallujah. So, here’s an update from a recent visitor to Camp Fallujah.

It's one of the cruel tricks of history that those who are making it don't know they are at the time. The same holds true for these guys. To say that what they're doing is amazing would be to criminally understate the facts.

These Marines live, work, sleep, eat and bathe in the same neighborhoods they are helping to stabilize. In doing so, they're no longer driving in from a forward operating base, or FOB, outside the city and conducting patrols. Instead, they wake up in the morning, plan a patrol, then walk out into the neighborhood and greet the men and women sweeping their sidewalks or tending their shops. They're literally swarmed with children wanting a high five or a piece of chocolate. They visit schools, markets and local infrastructure projects to see how things are going. There are no interrogations or mean faces, just a neighborly walk through their district to check on the locals who sometimes know them by name.

Patrolling in Fallujah now, to welcoming faces.

War is brutal. So is slander of our warriors. Our major media focuses on the first, and too often furthers the latter.

UPDATE:
Here, the Washington Post writes about Jeremiah Workman.

The Washington Post tells an honest story.
Here’s the rest of the story.

My friend Phil Napoli (see here for his 5-year study of Vietnam veterans) replies:

My good friend Jeremiah Workman, a young Marine and Navy Cross winner in the Battle of Fallujah, said at a Marine Corps birthday dinner here last week that he had been in Fallujah in the past month. The last time he was there, he rescued 8 Marines from an insurgent-held house. This time, the place was quiet, clean, and safe. So safe that the Sgt. Major of the USMC could walk the streets without feeling the least bit threatened. Unbelievable.

Unbelievable, only if one solely depends upon the New York Times for coverage.

"The Vietnam experience; courage, compassion, and pain" is the theme of this beautifully sculpted, lifelike bronze statue by noted artist Eileen Barry.
The Rensselaer County Vietnam Veterans' Memorial, Troy, N.Y.

In 2006, there were 23.9 million veterans in the U.S. One-third of them are Vietnam-era veterans. For much of the past five years, my friend Phil Napoli, Assistant Professor of history at my alma mater, Brooklyn College, has chronicled in their own words the post-Vietnam lives of veterans from New York. His book, New York's Vietnam, is to be published next year by Hill and Wang. It’s appropriate that on this Veterans Day weekend, Professor Napoli convey what he has found, with application to the veterans who have served since the Gulf War.

I'm a 47 year old academic and oral historian at Brooklyn College.

As I have conducted my interviews and talked casually with people about my work, I continue to hear Vietnam veterans referred to as "murderers" and "baby killers" among certain segments of the population, and occasionally find myself having to defend my interest in the stories of Vietnam veterans even in this day and age, 32 years after the official end of the war and 25 years after the creation of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC.

My oral histories trace the impact of the war on the lives of New York residents, past and present. The stories the veterans tell confront the place the war occupies in the lives of New Yorkers; how they remember the war and what it did to them, as well as what they elect to forget. Naturally, my interviews have revealed a wide range of opinions about the war. But the absence of agreement about the war among the people I have interviewed does not preclude me from drawing conclusions on the basis of this testimony. Indeed, I believe that there are important lessons – both historical and political -- to be learned here.

Let me put it simply: These interviews have afforded me the privilege to become acquainted with some of the finest people I have ever met in my life. These men and women are intensely committed to their communities, public-service oriented to an extraordinary degree, and have greater moral integrity than many, many of my peers. That simple fact may have profound implications for our nation.

Now, obviously, to see all Vietnam veterans as heroes is unquestionably false. Of the 2.9 million men who served in-theater during the Vietnam War, some committed crimes and did things they look back upon now with shame. However, the stunning thing for me has been to find that so many of these men and women (despite whatever trouble they might have had earlier in their lives) have found ways to create for themselves, in the language of psychologist Erik Erikson, generative lives. They have struggled through their pain and healed their scars, and done things. In whatever way they have elected to do so, these Vietnam veterans contribute, give back, and make the world around them a better place to live in. Vietnam veterans are an active, important and productive segment of American society.

I am wary of substituting one myth for another; the myth of the crazy Vietnam veteran for the myth of the veteran redeemed. Still, it is impossible to ignore the evidence I have collected. These men and women tell stories of ordinary living; they talk of marriages that fail and marriages that succeed; of raising children who grow up to become exceptionally well educated; of fathers who lose daughters in accidents at summer camp, and yet nevertheless are able to maintain their faith in God and their position within the community. They also talk of establishing chapters of their local veterans groups, of volunteering in public schools, synagogues and churches, of becoming teachers, police officers, firefighters, public servants and more.

These may appear to be small achievements. But they are the chievements of a group of men and women we as a society once looked down upon, sneered at and cast aside. In short they refused the role that our American culture thrust on them, and forged an identity at odds with the media myth. It is my sincere hope that my work will force people to re-think their views on Vietnam veterans.

But beyond the question of status and role of the Vietnam veteran lies what I think is a more important issue. Vietnam-era soldiers are geriatric soldiers. The oldest of them are in their 80s; the youngest in their 50s. In a real sense, their time is past.

Nevertheless we have a new generation of men and women headed home now from a difficult war in a far away place. It, like the Vietnam War, is a war that most Americans don't understand clearly. It, like the Vietnam War, appears endless. Like Vietnam too, there appears no "easy" way out. And I greatly fear that as a result we may be one Abu Ghraib or My Lai away from vilifying this generation of warriors just as was done to the soldiers of the Vietnam era. But I earnestly believe that we as a society can't afford to do to these younger people what was done to the Vietnam veteran 40 years ago and continues to be done today. It is crucial that we be careful about how we treat our newest veterans. For on them, I think, may well rest the future of much that we love about this country; the fact that so many of our neighbors take it upon themselves to act in ways that reveal their selflessness, community mindedness, and a dedication to the common good.

NOTE: On December 14 of this year an exhibition of my oral histories, accompanied by beautiful digital photographs on canvas by photographer Alison Cornyn of Picture-Projects, entitled "In their Own Words: Portraits of Brooklyn's Vietnam Veterans," will open at the Brooklyn Historical Society in downtown Brooklyn.

Here’s a Newsday article about the Vietnam veterans oral history project.

The following op-ed appeared in this morning’s San Diego Union-Tribune.

Diplomats are doing well in war zone

By Johann Schmonsees
November 9, 2007

When the director-general of the Foreign Service announced last week that the State Department may order its personnel to serve in Iraq, many of our critics took this as a sign that we are unwilling to face the hardships and dangers encountered by our military colleagues.

A little perspective is needed here. In the four-and-a-half years since the fall of Saddam Hussein, more than 1,500 Foreign Service personnel have voluntarily deployed to Iraq, out of a total service of 11,467 employees. Three of us have been killed in Iraq.

The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, the Provincial Reconstruction Teams, or PRTs, that dot Iraq's provinces, and other U.S. diplomatic facilities in Iraq have been staffed entirely by volunteers. No one has been ordered, against their wishes, to work in Iraq. This, in a service whose members have a major role in choosing their assignments, is a remarkable record of patriotic Americans stepping up to serve their country.

Even now, more than 200 Foreign Service positions that are available for a summer 2008 start have been filled by employees who have volunteered to come to Iraq for one-year tours. They agreed to leave their families behind, travel to a war zone, bunk down in trailers or other shared lodgings, and work in a 24-hour operation in which there is no such thing as a weekend, a holiday or a day off-duty. Both in the International Zone and in many of our Provincial Reconstruction Teams, our diplomats live side by side with our military colleagues, sharing many of the hardships and dangers they face.

This is not the tea-sipping world of 19th-century diplomacy. This is dirty, hot, gritty and dangerous work. It doesn't stop when night falls, the workplace becomes unsafe, or you get sick. Even with our country's celebrated work ethic, few Americans will ever work as hard or as determinedly as our diplomats and military in Iraq, or under such difficult conditions.

What are they doing? Our mission is to transform Iraq into a stable and secure country that can govern itself, sustain itself, and be a partner in the war on terror in the heart of the Middle East.

America's diplomats contribute to that mission with the same skills they employ in other places: by forging strong relationships with foreign leaders and their peoples, to influence them in ways that benefit American interests.

If that means moving out “beyond the wire” of our bases, we get on helicopters and Humvees and go. If it means rolling up our sleeves to fix a water project or a school, we do that, too. We might spend the day negotiating with a leader who was once an enemy of our coalition, and then spend all night reporting the encounter back to Washington.
If we can help Iraq to achieve reconciliation, pass legislation, provide services to its people, banish terrorists and militias and engage more of the international community in these efforts, we will have done all that diplomats can be asked to do.

Famously, 48 positions remain open for the new crop of diplomats who will arrive in Iraq next summer. That is what the current personnel exercise is about. The department is still asking for volunteers, and has approached more than 200 people who possess the qualifications or the employment history making them candidates for these positions.

We understand that many have already answered that call, and hope that all 48 positions will eventually be filled by volunteers. After all, our “worldwide availability” means that my colleagues routinely work for years at a time in far-flung countries wracked by terrorism and war; in cities where the water is dirty enough to kill you; where there isn't an adequate hospital for hundreds of miles; or where their spouses and children can't follow. Their assignments to these places are by their choice.

We possess a rich pool of talent, dedication and daring, and we have no doubt that we will staff our Iraq mission with willing professionals. They may come forward for a variety of reasons: patriotism, community service, professional advancement, personal fulfillment, the promise of a particular assignment after their Iraq service, or even something as prosaic as danger pay.

They may volunteer for the main reason I did – as a foreign policy professional, I wanted to work on our most prominent foreign policy issue. But if our four-year experience in Iraq tells us anything, it is that our colleagues will step up to meet the challenge.

Schmonsees is a Foreign Service officer in Baghdad. This article was endorsed by more than 60 currently serving Foreign Service personnel at the Embassy in Baghdad, its subsidiary offices and Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Iraq.

Tomorrow is the 232nd birthday of the United States Marine Corps. We’re known for ever carrying in our hearts our pride in Corps and country and love of our comrades. For this Marine, you need look no further than his right eye.

NATALIE BOROWSKI SCOTT/ Union-Tribune
Gunnery Sgt. Nick Popaditch’s prosthetic eye is etched with the Marine Corps’ eagle-globe-and-anchor emblem.

Residence: San Diego
Unit: Company C, 1st Tank Battalion, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division
Medal: Silver Star
Earned: For actions April 6 and 7, 2004, in Fallujah, Iraq

Read his story, below. The famed tenacity and adaptability of Marines is not an accident but a choice to engage in the toughest training and dedication to give all. That giving doesn’t stop, as seen in his next step. (Also, see this Marine's giving.)

HOME OF THE BRAVE
Marine tank sergeant's innovation in combat saved day in Fallujah

By Steve Liewer
STAFF WRITER
November 9, 2007
Marine Gunnery Sgt. Nick Popaditch didn't like what he saw ahead of his tank in Fallujah, Iraq.

It was late afternoon April 6, 2004, two days into an offensive to retake the city and avenge the four U.S. contractors whose burned bodies had been hung from a train trestle. Popaditch commanded a pair of tanks sent to relieve an infantry unit.

A tanker truck, probably booby-trapped, was blocking an alley. Insurgents had strung a spider's web of electrical wires across the entrance to a nearby courtyard.
Popaditch knew he was moving into the kill zone of an ambush. He wouldn't turn back and abandon the grunts who needed him, but to bull forward meant suicide.

So he called for an airstrike. An AC-130 blew up the tanker truck, the power lines and an insurgent post packed with weapons.

With those obstacles cleared, Popaditch received permission to push forward with the gunship overhead – an untested tactic at the time. Together, his tanks and the AC-130 cleared block after block of insurgents and relieved pressure on the embattled infantry platoon.

“(We were) just inflicting a devastating number of casualties on the enemy, and we did it in a way that no one had ever done before,” Popaditch said.

The thrill of victory soon gave way to gruesome injury. As Popaditch stood in the turret of his tank during a battle the next day, a rocket-propelled grenade exploded next to his head.

“(I saw) a really bright light, like a flash, and then nothing,” he said. “It was like getting hit in the head with a sledgehammer.”

Popaditch continued to guide the movements of his tank and called for a medical evacuation despite being blinded and temporarily deafened.
Shrapnel from the blast fractured his skull and lodged around his eyes and nose. Physicians couldn't save his right eye, and they barely salvaged the left.

For his innovative combat tactics and leadership even when wounded, Popaditch received the Silver Star, the military's third-highest award for valor.

Though legally blind, Popaditch has learned to use the 8 percent of sight he has left. He's aided by tools such as a video screen that enlarges printed materials and a pair of what he calls “telescope glasses.”

But as much as he loves the Marine Corps, he found he couldn't stay in.

“I didn't want to be a straphanger,” he said. “The military is not an adaptive world, and it shouldn't be.”

So in 2005, Popaditch left the Marines for college. He's now a junior at San Diego State University. Inspired by his time as a Marine drill instructor, he is aiming to become a high school teacher.

“You do a lot of teaching when you're a DI, along with everything else. (At a high school), you may be teaching algebra or the War of 1812, but it's all teaching,” said Popaditch, 40, who lives in Linda Vista with his wife, April, and son, Nick Jr.

His Marine Corps career began nearly 22 years ago, when a recruiter talked him into enlisting after high school graduation. Popaditch quickly took to the life of brotherhood and discipline, even though he describes himself as having been bookish and shy as a boy growing up in Indiana.

He commanded a tank in the Persian Gulf War. By the time of the Iraq war, he was serving as a gunnery sergeant – an elite enlisted class that is revered in the Marine Corps.

Popaditch's tank platoon was among the first few to cross the Kuwait-Iraq border and reach the Iraqi capital of Baghdad in March 2003.

A news photographer snapped a picture of him smoking a victory cigar in his tank turret in front of a statue of then-President Saddam Hussein just as it was being toppled. The photo became a symbol of the heady early days of the war.

Popaditch's unit returned to Twentynine Palms in July 2003. He then volunteered to go back to Iraq the following winter. His battalion took responsibility for the Fallujah area a couple of weeks before the attack that wounded him.

Popaditch now speaks frequently to military groups, and he has joined SDSU's student veterans organization.

What will he do when he graduates? Maybe smoke a cigar.

"All men are created equal -- then, a few be