Mudville Gazette
December 17, 2004
That's the Spirit!
From the Orlando Sentinal, a story headlined American Spirit Takes Root In Iraq:
'Tis the season, and Americans deserve some holiday cheer. Herewith some of the good things happening in Iraq, beginning with Omar and Mohammed.
Regular travelers of the blogosphere, that rare and wonderful new universe where bloggers post news, commentary and other ruminations on the Web, may be familiar with the names Omar and Mohammed.
They, too, are bloggers. In Iraq with brother Ali, they created a blog called Iraq The Model, through which they've kept the blogosphere abreast of events from their native, on-the-ground perspective.
Last week, Omar, 24, and Mohammed, 35, both dentists, came to the United States to meet their American blogging counterparts and to shake hands with someone they hold in high esteem -- President George W. Bush. They wanted to thank him.
The two Iraqi brothers, who are Sunni, came to the United States under the sponsorship of Spirit of America, a nonprofit organization founded by technology entrepreneur Jim Hake that helps Americans serving abroad improve the lives of others.
A great article, and appearing in several sources, including the Chicago Tribune, where the headline has been altered to read "Freedom's spirit takes root in Iraq".
We'll assume they think that means the same thing.
Meanwhile, Jim Hake emails:
BLOGGER CHALLENGE
Our Blogger Challenge ended at midnight on Wednesday. Nearly 200 bloggers joined the effort and, as I type, raised $90,247. Incredible!!! There was a great flurry of activity in the final hours and, in amazing come-from-behind effort, Iraq the Model, jumped into the lead. Iraq the Model has raised $17,140 . The leading team is the Northern Alliance of Blogs. The Alliance has raised $12,135. Thanks to the bloggers we now have more than 11,000 contributors. A 10% increase in 2 weeks.
We are still accepting checks and will have a final total and rankings next week. Thank you to all the bloggers that participated. It is an enormous contribution. Woooohoooooo!! We even had two foreign teams (that I know of) - from Canada and Spain. Please click here to see all the bloggers that joined the effort and thank them, too:
PRESIDENT BUSH
Last Thursday, I met with President Bush for 1/2 hour in the Oval Office along with SoA's Kerry Dupont, Omar and Mohammed from Iraq the Model and Friends of Democracy. The meeting came as a surprise. We received a call in our taxi while we were headed back to our hotel asking if we could be at the White House in 25 minutes. I'm told those close to the President thought it would be good for him to hear from "ordinary" Iraqis and to hear about Spirit of America. Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secy of Defense, and a staff member from the National Security Council were also there.
I found the President to be focused, interested, intelligent and committed. He also has a good sense of humor, which he employed liberally. Let me assure you, Spirit is not, and never will be, a political or policy organization. We view the work we are doing as something that people of every political persuasion should support. We're not going to blow it by playing politics. Nonetheless, we have one President. He is the Commander in Chief of the servicemen and women we are helping in Iraq and Afghanistan. We should want his support and now I'm glad we now have it.
The first part of the meeting focused on Omar and Mohammed's views of Iraq. Then we talked about Spirit of America. After hearing about what we are doing, the President turned to Omar and Mohammed and said, "You see gentlemen, that is the beauty of America. I never met this man before but he's out there helping to win this war on terror just as much as 'Wolfie' here." I would have expected President Bush to have kind words for what we are doing. I wasn't sure if he would see the strategic importance of what we are doing but I'm very happy he does. He went on to talk about the importance of private-sector, grass roots activities - people helping people, saying "that's what I believe in." Of course, that's what Spirit of America is about.
For you dog lovers, as we left, we met Barney - the President's dog - and learned that Barney is getting a sister named Beasley.
GENERAL TOMMY FRANKS
Unlike the serendipitous meeting with Pres. Bush, the meeting with Tommy Franks had been in the works for a while. I'm happy to say that he also understands the value of what we're doing. This is best relayed by paraphrasing what he said. Gen Franks makes an important distinction between terrorists and terrorism. He said the military can deal with terrorists pretty well with a 9mm bullet. But terrorism was a whole different, more complex thing. He said he thought that Spirit of America and the America people had a better opportunity to deal with/reduce/defeat (I forget the exact word) terrorism than the U.S. Government bureaucracy. Of course, the commitment of the U.S. Government is essential. His point, I believe, was to highlight the importance of the American people and the particular approach of Spirit of America.
I hope General Franks will be able to be involved in some of our activities moving forward. Either way, we have a great new friend.
Here in Mudville it was Mrs G who led the charge, and though we joined rather late in the effort I'm amazed and grateful to the readers who contributed. Thanks to you all! If you requested pogs and Dinar, they'll get to you. The Mrs has her work cut out for her, and holiday mail being what it is (from around the world, no less), your patience is appreciated.
Saturday, December 18, 2004
Thursday, December 16, 2004
Power Line: Iraqis Eagerly Await Election
Power Line: Iraqis Eagerly Await Election: "Iraqis Eagerly Await Election
Last night, the Trunk and I (authors of the Powerline Blog) taped a television show. We waited for the taping to start in a green room that included a couple of liberals who derided the 'disaster' in Iraq and sneered at next month's elections. Why? Beats me. Arabs are about to vote in an election, I believe, for the first time in world history (except in Israel, of course). Why isn't that worth celebrating?
Haider Ajani has translated the results of a poll of 5,000 Iraqis, taken in and around Baghdad, that appeared yesterday in the Arabic newspaper Alsabah:
What will you base your vote on?
Political agenda----------------------------65%
Factional origin----------------------------14%
Party Affiliation---------------------------- 4%
National Background----------------------12%
Other reasons--------------------------------5%
Do you support dialog with the deposed Baathists?
Yes-------------------------------------------15%
No--------------------------------------------84%
Do not know----------------------------------1%
Do you support the postponing the election?
Yes-------------------------------------------18%
No--------------------------------------------80%
Do not know---------------------------------2%
Do you think the elections will take place as scheduled?
Yes-------------------------------------------83%
No--------------------------------------------13%
Do not know---------------------------------4%
As we've said before, the only people who want the elections postponed are the ones who want them never to take place. The vast majority of Iraqis can't wait to begin exercising their privileges as free citizens. And it's good to see that an overwhelming majority expect the U.S. to stand by its commitment to January elections, rather than giving in to the terrorists and Democrats. They have learned, I guess, that President Bush is a man who says what he means and means what he says. As, thankfully, have we."
Last night, the Trunk and I (authors of the Powerline Blog) taped a television show. We waited for the taping to start in a green room that included a couple of liberals who derided the 'disaster' in Iraq and sneered at next month's elections. Why? Beats me. Arabs are about to vote in an election, I believe, for the first time in world history (except in Israel, of course). Why isn't that worth celebrating?
Haider Ajani has translated the results of a poll of 5,000 Iraqis, taken in and around Baghdad, that appeared yesterday in the Arabic newspaper Alsabah:
What will you base your vote on?
Political agenda----------------------------65%
Factional origin----------------------------14%
Party Affiliation---------------------------- 4%
National Background----------------------12%
Other reasons--------------------------------5%
Do you support dialog with the deposed Baathists?
Yes-------------------------------------------15%
No--------------------------------------------84%
Do not know----------------------------------1%
Do you support the postponing the election?
Yes-------------------------------------------18%
No--------------------------------------------80%
Do not know---------------------------------2%
Do you think the elections will take place as scheduled?
Yes-------------------------------------------83%
No--------------------------------------------13%
Do not know---------------------------------4%
As we've said before, the only people who want the elections postponed are the ones who want them never to take place. The vast majority of Iraqis can't wait to begin exercising their privileges as free citizens. And it's good to see that an overwhelming majority expect the U.S. to stand by its commitment to January elections, rather than giving in to the terrorists and Democrats. They have learned, I guess, that President Bush is a man who says what he means and means what he says. As, thankfully, have we."
Wednesday, December 15, 2004
Belmont Club
Belmont Club
Austin Bay, returned from Iraq begins with this provocative leader:
Mark it on your calendar: Next month, the Arab Middle East will revolt. ...
Put a circle around Jan. 9. That's the day Palestinians go to the polls to elect a president. ... Draw another circle around Jan. 30. That's Iraq's first election day. Underline the two weeks prior to Jan. 30. That will be a savage fortnight in which terror campaigns and political campaigns collide. Democratic candidates will be assassinated and polling stations will be blown to bits, as Saddamite and Al Qaeda reactionaries -- the Middle East's ancien regime of tyrant and terrorist -- attempt to force an oppressed people to submit one more time to the yoke of fear.
But they are going to fail.
And earlier Belmont Club post linked to a Marc Ruel Gerecht article which argues much the same thing in principle: that a new Iraqi state represents a real threat to the Mullahs in Iran. He explains why.
Which brings us to the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq. Clerical Iran's primary objective is to ensure that Iraq remains destabilized, incapable of coalescing around a democratically elected government. Such a government supported by Iraq's Shiite establishment is a dagger aimed at Tehran's clerical dictatorship. ... What clerical Iran ideally wants to see next door is strife that can produce an Iraqi Hezbollah. ... The birth of the Lebanese Hezbollah, which Iran's ruling mullahs view as their greatest--only--foreign success, required a civil war and an Israeli invasion. In Iraq, Iran's ruling clerics have an American invasion. What they lack is civil war. ...
If the neighboring one-man, one-vote clerics can be downed and America can be physically and spiritually drained in Iraq, then the two most feared, disruptive forces in Iranian politics--Western-oriented Iranian youth and pro-democracy dissident clerics--can be further weakened. ... In Iraq, the U.S. ought to have two obvious goals. To crush the Sunni insurgency before it can provoke the birth of an exclusive, angry Shiite political identity willing to do to the Arab Sunnis what the Baath once did to the Shia. If such an identity is born, it is most unlikely democracy can prevail. Washington must thus ensure that the democratic process in Iraq, regardless of the violence, keeps on rolling. As long as it does, clerical Iran will not be able to gain much traction inside the country.
The really fascinating aspect of both men's analysis is the idea that freedom and politics are really going to be the agents of destruction for the "ancien regime of tyrant and terrorist", not as a figure of speech but as literal truth. The role of the US military would be strategically indirect and subtle: to ensure that the old regimes cannot contain the forces that would naturally spring up against them.
In this view, victory against terror need not take the form of the 101st Airborne marching into Teheran. It would be enough to merely hold the ring in Iraq to win over the Mullahs. Nations often return to strategies which they are most familiar with. Iran instinctively turned to the Lebanese experience to model its confrontation with America. It was natural that the United States might remember Europe and Korea when at war again. In both cases America won a decisive victory not by marching into Moscow or Pyongyang, but by merely ensuring that Western Europe and South Korea developed separately. In Iraq the old was new again.
John Burns of the New York Times describes the potential of the Iraqi election to rock Damascus, Teheran and even Washington.
On a list of 228 candidates submitted by a powerful Shiite-led political alliance to Iraq's electoral commission last week, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim's name was entered as No. 1. It was the clearest indication yet that in the Jan. 30 election, with Iraq's Shiite majority likely to heavily outnumber Sunni voters, Mr. Hakim may emerge as the country's most powerful political figure.
Mr. Hakim, in his early 50's, is a pre-eminent example of a class of Iraqi Shiite leaders with close ties to Iran's ruling ayatollahs. He spent nearly a quarter of a century in exile in Iran. His political party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, was founded in Tehran, and its military wing fought alongside Iranian troops during the Iran-Iraq war. American intelligence officials say he had close ties with Iran's secret services.
For the United States, and for Jordan and Saudi Arabia, which have Sunni Muslim majorities, the prospect of Mr. Hakim and his associates coming to power raises in stark form the brooding issue of Iran's future influence in Iraq.
It was the Americans who seem most confident about the possible outcomes. "They say Iraqi clerics are generally wary of the idea of religious government, partly because of an entrenched doctrinal opposition among Iraq's Shiite religious leaders to direct rule by clerics, and partly because they recognize that Iraq's Sunni Muslims would fiercely resist it." Hakim himself has publicly said that clerics should keep out of politics and remain in the mosques.
In addition, Iraqi and American officials say, the ethnic and cultural divisions that have carved deep historical fissures between Iran and Iraq militate against Iraq becoming a client state of Iran. ... American and Iraqi officials said polls commissioned by the American occupation authority, and more recently by the interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, have shown that ordinary Iraqis, including Shiites, are deeply suspicious of Iran's religious leadership and strongly averse to a government dominated by religious figures. ...
Many American and Iraqi officials say the talk of Iranian influence here reflects what they call a more plausible fear: that Shiite dominance in Iraq, coupled with Shiite rule in Iran, would reshape the geopolitical map of the Middle East. The development would be particularly threatening to Sunni-ruled states that border Iraq and run down the Persian Gulf, the officials say, carrying as it would the threat of increasing unrest among long-suppressed Shiite populations.
The outcome is far from foregone. The great likelihood is that the Palestinian and Iraqi elections, far from pouring oil to calm the waters, is likely to ignite them. While there may be a reduction in physical violence, the elections herald a shift in the ethnic balance of power and inaugurate a new standard for a political change in the Middle East. The US is calculating that its armed forces and political process will give it the edge in the tectonic upheavals that it will itself provoke.
Austin Bay, returned from Iraq begins with this provocative leader:
Mark it on your calendar: Next month, the Arab Middle East will revolt. ...
Put a circle around Jan. 9. That's the day Palestinians go to the polls to elect a president. ... Draw another circle around Jan. 30. That's Iraq's first election day. Underline the two weeks prior to Jan. 30. That will be a savage fortnight in which terror campaigns and political campaigns collide. Democratic candidates will be assassinated and polling stations will be blown to bits, as Saddamite and Al Qaeda reactionaries -- the Middle East's ancien regime of tyrant and terrorist -- attempt to force an oppressed people to submit one more time to the yoke of fear.
But they are going to fail.
And earlier Belmont Club post linked to a Marc Ruel Gerecht article which argues much the same thing in principle: that a new Iraqi state represents a real threat to the Mullahs in Iran. He explains why.
Which brings us to the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq. Clerical Iran's primary objective is to ensure that Iraq remains destabilized, incapable of coalescing around a democratically elected government. Such a government supported by Iraq's Shiite establishment is a dagger aimed at Tehran's clerical dictatorship. ... What clerical Iran ideally wants to see next door is strife that can produce an Iraqi Hezbollah. ... The birth of the Lebanese Hezbollah, which Iran's ruling mullahs view as their greatest--only--foreign success, required a civil war and an Israeli invasion. In Iraq, Iran's ruling clerics have an American invasion. What they lack is civil war. ...
If the neighboring one-man, one-vote clerics can be downed and America can be physically and spiritually drained in Iraq, then the two most feared, disruptive forces in Iranian politics--Western-oriented Iranian youth and pro-democracy dissident clerics--can be further weakened. ... In Iraq, the U.S. ought to have two obvious goals. To crush the Sunni insurgency before it can provoke the birth of an exclusive, angry Shiite political identity willing to do to the Arab Sunnis what the Baath once did to the Shia. If such an identity is born, it is most unlikely democracy can prevail. Washington must thus ensure that the democratic process in Iraq, regardless of the violence, keeps on rolling. As long as it does, clerical Iran will not be able to gain much traction inside the country.
The really fascinating aspect of both men's analysis is the idea that freedom and politics are really going to be the agents of destruction for the "ancien regime of tyrant and terrorist", not as a figure of speech but as literal truth. The role of the US military would be strategically indirect and subtle: to ensure that the old regimes cannot contain the forces that would naturally spring up against them.
In this view, victory against terror need not take the form of the 101st Airborne marching into Teheran. It would be enough to merely hold the ring in Iraq to win over the Mullahs. Nations often return to strategies which they are most familiar with. Iran instinctively turned to the Lebanese experience to model its confrontation with America. It was natural that the United States might remember Europe and Korea when at war again. In both cases America won a decisive victory not by marching into Moscow or Pyongyang, but by merely ensuring that Western Europe and South Korea developed separately. In Iraq the old was new again.
John Burns of the New York Times describes the potential of the Iraqi election to rock Damascus, Teheran and even Washington.
On a list of 228 candidates submitted by a powerful Shiite-led political alliance to Iraq's electoral commission last week, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim's name was entered as No. 1. It was the clearest indication yet that in the Jan. 30 election, with Iraq's Shiite majority likely to heavily outnumber Sunni voters, Mr. Hakim may emerge as the country's most powerful political figure.
Mr. Hakim, in his early 50's, is a pre-eminent example of a class of Iraqi Shiite leaders with close ties to Iran's ruling ayatollahs. He spent nearly a quarter of a century in exile in Iran. His political party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, was founded in Tehran, and its military wing fought alongside Iranian troops during the Iran-Iraq war. American intelligence officials say he had close ties with Iran's secret services.
For the United States, and for Jordan and Saudi Arabia, which have Sunni Muslim majorities, the prospect of Mr. Hakim and his associates coming to power raises in stark form the brooding issue of Iran's future influence in Iraq.
It was the Americans who seem most confident about the possible outcomes. "They say Iraqi clerics are generally wary of the idea of religious government, partly because of an entrenched doctrinal opposition among Iraq's Shiite religious leaders to direct rule by clerics, and partly because they recognize that Iraq's Sunni Muslims would fiercely resist it." Hakim himself has publicly said that clerics should keep out of politics and remain in the mosques.
In addition, Iraqi and American officials say, the ethnic and cultural divisions that have carved deep historical fissures between Iran and Iraq militate against Iraq becoming a client state of Iran. ... American and Iraqi officials said polls commissioned by the American occupation authority, and more recently by the interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, have shown that ordinary Iraqis, including Shiites, are deeply suspicious of Iran's religious leadership and strongly averse to a government dominated by religious figures. ...
Many American and Iraqi officials say the talk of Iranian influence here reflects what they call a more plausible fear: that Shiite dominance in Iraq, coupled with Shiite rule in Iran, would reshape the geopolitical map of the Middle East. The development would be particularly threatening to Sunni-ruled states that border Iraq and run down the Persian Gulf, the officials say, carrying as it would the threat of increasing unrest among long-suppressed Shiite populations.
The outcome is far from foregone. The great likelihood is that the Palestinian and Iraqi elections, far from pouring oil to calm the waters, is likely to ignite them. While there may be a reduction in physical violence, the elections herald a shift in the ethnic balance of power and inaugurate a new standard for a political change in the Middle East. The US is calculating that its armed forces and political process will give it the edge in the tectonic upheavals that it will itself provoke.
Power Line: Missile Defense "Failure"? MSM Exageration!
Power Line: Missile Defense "Failure"?
The MSM will continue to denounce missile defense as impossible--I think they've given up on the argument that it would be "destabilizing"--right up to the moment when it is successfully deployed.
The MSM will continue to denounce missile defense as impossible--I think they've given up on the argument that it would be "destabilizing"--right up to the moment when it is successfully deployed.
Andrew Olmsted dot com: There Is Just One More Thing...
Andrew Olmsted dot com: There Is Just One More Thing...: "Over at the Angry Bear you can see a graph displaying the projected surpluses and deficits in Social Security and the General Fund (i.e., the rest of the federal budget) through 2012. The Bear's point is well taken: for the next fifteen years, at least, the bigger problem we're facing is the fact our government is spending a lot more every year than it takes in in taxes, a spending plan that seems a bit more urgent to address.
On the one hand, this can be construed as another example of the you're f'd up syndrome I discussed the other day. The fact that we've got a serious problem living within our means doesn't mean we can't also address the question of how to deal with Social Security's problems.
On the other hand, if we don't get federal spending under control, we're probably going to run off the rails well before 2017. In this instance, I think the Bear wins on points. I'd prefer to fix both problems, but we don't live in a perfect world, and the budget problem is more significant than the Social Security problem.
Posted at 07:14 AM | Politics | TrackBack (0)
"
On the one hand, this can be construed as another example of the you're f'd up syndrome I discussed the other day. The fact that we've got a serious problem living within our means doesn't mean we can't also address the question of how to deal with Social Security's problems.
On the other hand, if we don't get federal spending under control, we're probably going to run off the rails well before 2017. In this instance, I think the Bear wins on points. I'd prefer to fix both problems, but we don't live in a perfect world, and the budget problem is more significant than the Social Security problem.
Posted at 07:14 AM | Politics | TrackBack (0)
"
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
Sunday, December 12, 2004
Right Wing Spic: Please don't ridicule Kwanzaa, the made-up holiday.
Right Wing Spic: Please don't ridicule Kwanzaa, the made-up holiday.: "A Brief History of Kwanzaa
Kwanzaa was invented in 1966 by Dr. Maulana 'Ron' Karenga, a former black militant, Marxist and convicted felon. Claiming to have the unity of black people in mind, Karenga committed most of his crimes against blacks (click the headline above). Approximately five years after Karenga invented Kwanzaa, he was convicted of torturing two black women by stripping them naked, beating them with electrical cords, placing a hot iron into the mouth of one and mangling the toe of the other in a vice. During the ordeal, he forced them to drink detergent.
For some reason, most Kwanzaa greeting cards don't mention this information. I assure you they would if I were designing them.
According to Karenga, Christianity is a myth: 'Belief in spooks who threaten us if we don't worship them and demand we turn over our destiny and daily lives must be categorized as spookism and condemned.' Now he claims that the purpose of Kwanzaa is to give 'reverence to the Creator.' That's interesting - is he referring to the same creator whose existence he flat-out denied just a few years earlier? I'm confused.
According to the article linked above, Karenga has concocted some bits of lore, lingo, and mumbo-jumbo that are intended to make Kwanzaa look like something out of Africa instead of something from Los Angeles County (its true origins), but his efforts have been feeble. If you scan The Official Kwanzaa Web Site you'll read that the origins of Kwanzaa lie in 'the first harvest celebrations of Africa,' which allegedly 'are recorded in African history as far back as ancient Egypt and Nubia' -- but there is no explanation of why any ancient Egyptians or Nubians might have held harvest festivals around the time of the winter solstice, and there is no identification of the crops that they harvested. Karenga's formula for celebrating Kwanzaa requires the use of two ears of maize -- but maize is a New World plant, and it wasn't known at all in ancient Africa. Whoops.
Again, I urge you not to make fun of this spiritual, deeply serious holiday. Stop laughing, I'm trying to be multicultural."
Kwanzaa was invented in 1966 by Dr. Maulana 'Ron' Karenga, a former black militant, Marxist and convicted felon. Claiming to have the unity of black people in mind, Karenga committed most of his crimes against blacks (click the headline above). Approximately five years after Karenga invented Kwanzaa, he was convicted of torturing two black women by stripping them naked, beating them with electrical cords, placing a hot iron into the mouth of one and mangling the toe of the other in a vice. During the ordeal, he forced them to drink detergent.
For some reason, most Kwanzaa greeting cards don't mention this information. I assure you they would if I were designing them.
According to Karenga, Christianity is a myth: 'Belief in spooks who threaten us if we don't worship them and demand we turn over our destiny and daily lives must be categorized as spookism and condemned.' Now he claims that the purpose of Kwanzaa is to give 'reverence to the Creator.' That's interesting - is he referring to the same creator whose existence he flat-out denied just a few years earlier? I'm confused.
According to the article linked above, Karenga has concocted some bits of lore, lingo, and mumbo-jumbo that are intended to make Kwanzaa look like something out of Africa instead of something from Los Angeles County (its true origins), but his efforts have been feeble. If you scan The Official Kwanzaa Web Site you'll read that the origins of Kwanzaa lie in 'the first harvest celebrations of Africa,' which allegedly 'are recorded in African history as far back as ancient Egypt and Nubia' -- but there is no explanation of why any ancient Egyptians or Nubians might have held harvest festivals around the time of the winter solstice, and there is no identification of the crops that they harvested. Karenga's formula for celebrating Kwanzaa requires the use of two ears of maize -- but maize is a New World plant, and it wasn't known at all in ancient Africa. Whoops.
Again, I urge you not to make fun of this spiritual, deeply serious holiday. Stop laughing, I'm trying to be multicultural."
Andrew Olmsted dot com: Politics and War
Andrew Olmsted dot com: Politics and War: "Would it be better to make sure that every soldier we send into battle is equipped with the latest and greatest equipment available? Absolutely. But we're not willing to pay that price, and with good reason. One uparmored HMMWV runs $155,000, and the military needs close to 10,000 for operations in Iraq. That would mean we would have needed a stockpile of $1,550,000,000 worth of HMMWVs alone standing by for the operation (and probably more, but call it $1.5 billion for argument's sake). Add to that the costs of maintaining a fleet of uparmored HMMWVs (since they require additional maintenance and training to operate), and you're talking a nontrivial addition to the defense budget. In retrospect it seems cheap, a few billion dollars, but in peacetime any expenditure on the military frequently is seen as expendable when balanced against more constituent-pleasing expenditures like, well, take your pick."
Thursday, December 09, 2004
BLACKFIVE: The President That You Never Hear About
BLACKFIVE: The President That You Never Hear About: "Here is a report about the President's recent visit to Camp Pendleton on Tuesday to speak to the Marines and their families. It is certainly worth the read.
(From the San Diego Union Tribune)
In all of the stories about the President's visit, there are many soundbites and a lot of quotes of the President praising Marines for a job well done in Iraq.
But what you may not know from the MSM is that he was at Camp Pendleton for another reason. Some of the articles touch briefly on that reason, but they don't (or won't) do it justice. This is from a Marine Colonel at Pendleton who writes of the President's visit:
...we had the lead for the POTUS visit and I was privileged to spend much of the day with him. Let me tell you something that was, very deliberately, not in the news. President Bush came here for two reasons. To thank the Marines and sailors of Camp Pendleton for all they do, and to meet with the families of our fallen warriors. The first part was public. The second - and I believe far more important - was to meet privately with 170 family members who had lost a loved one. He forbade the press corps from viewing or photographing any of it.
The Plt Sgt Mitchell Paige Fieldhouse (a brand new $12.5m facility) has two basketball courts. One was curtained off and decks covered where he met with them together. Then, he met with the family members of each fallen Marine in the other gym individually. Having had the duty of a Casualty Assistance and Notification Officer many times in the past, I know how emotionally draining it is to talk to even one family at a time. When we put the President back on Marine One some three hours later, he was as somber and drained as I've ever seen him. It took an emotional toll on everyone involved.
Obviously, he did not have to make this visit. He could have delegated that task to anyone to do it for him. I have great respect for ones that will do the 'right' thing, regardless of how tough it is.
Just thought you would like to hear a bit of the background."
(From the San Diego Union Tribune)
In all of the stories about the President's visit, there are many soundbites and a lot of quotes of the President praising Marines for a job well done in Iraq.
But what you may not know from the MSM is that he was at Camp Pendleton for another reason. Some of the articles touch briefly on that reason, but they don't (or won't) do it justice. This is from a Marine Colonel at Pendleton who writes of the President's visit:
...we had the lead for the POTUS visit and I was privileged to spend much of the day with him. Let me tell you something that was, very deliberately, not in the news. President Bush came here for two reasons. To thank the Marines and sailors of Camp Pendleton for all they do, and to meet with the families of our fallen warriors. The first part was public. The second - and I believe far more important - was to meet privately with 170 family members who had lost a loved one. He forbade the press corps from viewing or photographing any of it.
The Plt Sgt Mitchell Paige Fieldhouse (a brand new $12.5m facility) has two basketball courts. One was curtained off and decks covered where he met with them together. Then, he met with the family members of each fallen Marine in the other gym individually. Having had the duty of a Casualty Assistance and Notification Officer many times in the past, I know how emotionally draining it is to talk to even one family at a time. When we put the President back on Marine One some three hours later, he was as somber and drained as I've ever seen him. It took an emotional toll on everyone involved.
Obviously, he did not have to make this visit. He could have delegated that task to anyone to do it for him. I have great respect for ones that will do the 'right' thing, regardless of how tough it is.
Just thought you would like to hear a bit of the background."
BLACKFIVE: Warrior's Last Request - We Need Your Help! WOW!
BLACKFIVE: Warrior's Last Request - We Need Your Help!Please help with this one.
Damn, just damn. Specialist David Mahlenbrock was killed by an IED on December 3rd in Kirkuk, Iraq.
I received this email via Soldier's Angels. It's from David's Squad in Bravo, 65th Engineers and they are forwarding a request from David. It appears that David had a special letter sent to his squad in the event of his death. Hold on to your seats, folks:
Dear 1st Squad,
If you’re reading this, then I’ve died for our country. I just hope it wasn’t for nothing.
After the IED went off yesterday, I wanted to write this in case something happens to me. There are a few more letters that I’d like you to give my wife and family.
I’d like to have a military funeral, but, if you can work please make sure that Toby Keith’s “American Soldier” is played at the ceremony in addition to the bagpipes. If they won’t let it happen, that’s ok, thanks for trying…...
I know that all the belongings I have here will go to Melissa, but there are a few more things I’d like for you guys to make sure she gets. I have a dog tag w/ our picture on it along w/ some pictures and an American flag in my left breast pocket. There is also a can that says “Son” on it that Melissa’s parents gave me that I’d like for them to have, and that angel stone should go to her grandma and grandpa Snow.
Now if I died w/ blue eyes (one blew that way and one blew the other way) and there’s nothing really left of me, that’s ok, I know you meant well.
Alright, enough with the dead guy’s last request, there’s a lot of thank you’s I wanna say to you fellas……
Specialist David Mahlenbrock will be laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetary on Wednesday, December 15th at 10AM EST. David's family and friends are asking radio stations to play Toby Keith's "American Soldier" on the 15th at 1pm EST with a dedication to Specialist David Mahlenbrock.
Let's see what we can do. Email or call the radio stations in your area and ask them to play this dedication to David. Feel free to copy this post to send to them.
The biggest and best country music station in the world is here in Chicago (US 99). I'm calling them and others right now.
Damn, just damn. Specialist David Mahlenbrock was killed by an IED on December 3rd in Kirkuk, Iraq.
I received this email via Soldier's Angels. It's from David's Squad in Bravo, 65th Engineers and they are forwarding a request from David. It appears that David had a special letter sent to his squad in the event of his death. Hold on to your seats, folks:
Dear 1st Squad,
If you’re reading this, then I’ve died for our country. I just hope it wasn’t for nothing.
After the IED went off yesterday, I wanted to write this in case something happens to me. There are a few more letters that I’d like you to give my wife and family.
I’d like to have a military funeral, but, if you can work please make sure that Toby Keith’s “American Soldier” is played at the ceremony in addition to the bagpipes. If they won’t let it happen, that’s ok, thanks for trying…...
I know that all the belongings I have here will go to Melissa, but there are a few more things I’d like for you guys to make sure she gets. I have a dog tag w/ our picture on it along w/ some pictures and an American flag in my left breast pocket. There is also a can that says “Son” on it that Melissa’s parents gave me that I’d like for them to have, and that angel stone should go to her grandma and grandpa Snow.
Now if I died w/ blue eyes (one blew that way and one blew the other way) and there’s nothing really left of me, that’s ok, I know you meant well.
Alright, enough with the dead guy’s last request, there’s a lot of thank you’s I wanna say to you fellas……
Specialist David Mahlenbrock will be laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetary on Wednesday, December 15th at 10AM EST. David's family and friends are asking radio stations to play Toby Keith's "American Soldier" on the 15th at 1pm EST with a dedication to Specialist David Mahlenbrock.
Let's see what we can do. Email or call the radio stations in your area and ask them to play this dedication to David. Feel free to copy this post to send to them.
The biggest and best country music station in the world is here in Chicago (US 99). I'm calling them and others right now.
Tuesday, December 07, 2004
2Slick's Forum: Let's Remember Pearl Harbor
2Slick's Forum: Let's Remember Pearl Harbor: "Why did the United States go to war with Germany in WWII? Those certainly weren't German Stukas and NAZI pilots over Pearl Harbor on December 7th. It was because Hitler supported Japan-not because they ever attacked us or had plans to do so. Pearl Harbor was specifically the result of a US oil embargo placed upon Japan as a result of the Japanese occupation of formerly French Indochina�an occupation permitted by the Germans who had recently conquered France and controlled its holdings-but the embargo was place upon Japan-not Germany. So, how did the United States interpret the 12/7 attacks as a final step into war with both Japan AND with Germany if Germany had nothing to do with 12/7?"
Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | This is their civil war
Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | This is their civil war: "In 1864, 11 of the 36 states did not participate in the American presidential election. Was Lincoln's election therefore illegitimate?
In 1868, three years after the security situation had, shall we say, stabilised, three states (and not insignificant ones: Texas, Virginia and Mississippi) did not participate in the election. Was Grant's election illegitimate?
There has been much talk that if the Iraqi election is held and some Sunni Arab provinces (perhaps three of the 18) do not participate, the election will be illegitimate. Nonsense. The election should be held. It should be open to everyone. If Iraq's Sunni Arabs - barely 20% of the population - decide that they cannot abide giving up their 80 years of minority rule, which ended with 30 years of Saddam Hussein's atrocious tyranny, then tough luck. They forfeit their chance to shape and to participate in the new Iraq.
Americans are dying right now to give them that very chance. The US is making a costly last-ditch effort to midwife a new, unitary Iraq. The Falluja offensive and related actions are designed to reduce the brutal intimidation of the Sunni population by the dead-end Ba'athists and others seeking to retake the power that they enjoyed under Saddam. But when those offensives are over, the Sunnis themselves - ordinary people who, out of either fear or sympathy, have been giving refuge and support to the terrorist insurgents - will have to make a choice. Either they join the new Iraq by participating in the coming election, or they institutionalise the civil war that their side has already begun.
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Visit inStore by AOL�, the new quick and simple way of...
instore.com
Compare Desktops Prices & Buy Onli"
In 1868, three years after the security situation had, shall we say, stabilised, three states (and not insignificant ones: Texas, Virginia and Mississippi) did not participate in the election. Was Grant's election illegitimate?
There has been much talk that if the Iraqi election is held and some Sunni Arab provinces (perhaps three of the 18) do not participate, the election will be illegitimate. Nonsense. The election should be held. It should be open to everyone. If Iraq's Sunni Arabs - barely 20% of the population - decide that they cannot abide giving up their 80 years of minority rule, which ended with 30 years of Saddam Hussein's atrocious tyranny, then tough luck. They forfeit their chance to shape and to participate in the new Iraq.
Americans are dying right now to give them that very chance. The US is making a costly last-ditch effort to midwife a new, unitary Iraq. The Falluja offensive and related actions are designed to reduce the brutal intimidation of the Sunni population by the dead-end Ba'athists and others seeking to retake the power that they enjoyed under Saddam. But when those offensives are over, the Sunnis themselves - ordinary people who, out of either fear or sympathy, have been giving refuge and support to the terrorist insurgents - will have to make a choice. Either they join the new Iraq by participating in the coming election, or they institutionalise the civil war that their side has already begun.
Advertiser links
Shop for Desktops at inStore
Visit inStore by AOL�, the new quick and simple way of...
instore.com
Compare Desktops Prices & Buy Onli"
Power Line: Pearl Harbor Day 2004
Power Line: Pearl Harbor Day 2004: "The day after the devastating Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt addressed the Congress with his eloquent speech requesting a declaration of war. The clarity of his words remains bracing, even 63 years after the horrible day: "
Power Line: Pearl Harbor Day 2004
Power Line: Pearl Harbor Day 2004: "The day after the devastating Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt addressed the Congress with his eloquent speech requesting a declaration of war. The clarity of his words remains bracing, even 63 years after the horrible day: "
Power Line: Pearl Harbor Day 2004
Power Line: Pearl Harbor Day 2004: "The day after the devastating Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt addressed the Congress with his eloquent speech requesting a declaration of war. The clarity of his words remains bracing, even 63 years after the horrible day: " > > >
Power Line: Pearl Harbor Day 2004
Power Line: Pearl Harbor Day 2004: "The day after the devastating Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt addressed the Congress with his eloquent speech requesting a declaration of war. The clarity of his words remains bracing, even 63 years after the horrible day: " > > >
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Power Line: Pearl Harbor Day 2004
Power Line: Pearl Harbor Day 2004: "The day after the devastating Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt addressed the Congress with his eloquent speech requesting a declaration of war. The clarity of his words remains bracing, even 63 years after the horrible day: " > > >
* * *
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Power Line: Pearl Harbor Day 2004
Power Line: Pearl Harbor Day 2004: "The day after the devastating Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt addressed the Congress with his eloquent speech requesting a declaration of war. The clarity of his words remains bracing, even 63 years after the horrible day: " > > >
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Monday, December 06, 2004
Small Town Veteran: It's still Sept. 12, and it will be for quite a while.
Small Town Veteran: It's still Sept. 12, and it will be for quite a while.: "It's September 12th. For some of us, it will be for a long time to come. For other's, it was September 10th again before the WTC even quit smoking. If you're back in that September 10th world, here are some links I hope you'll click to refresh your memory.
Read how Lila remembers that day.
Read how Greyhawk remembers it.
Read about young Sara's grasp of the situation.
Did you see the poster Michele and Lisa put together? Look at it again.
Maybe Charles Johnson's slideshow will refresh your memory.
Or how about a short movie?
Didn't enjoy that one? How about this one?"
Read how Lila remembers that day.
Read how Greyhawk remembers it.
Read about young Sara's grasp of the situation.
Did you see the poster Michele and Lisa put together? Look at it again.
Maybe Charles Johnson's slideshow will refresh your memory.
Or how about a short movie?
Didn't enjoy that one? How about this one?"
Saturday, December 04, 2004
Itzaz� Around Here!
Itzaz� Around Here!WHAT IS A "CONSERVATIVE" Thursday, December 02, 2004
WHAT IS A "CONSERVATIVE"
Let me explain what a conservative is.
A conservative believes that not only should the Supreme Court strictly construe the Constitution, but so should the president, the House, the Senate, governors, mayors and everybody else. . . . To strictly construe the Constitution is to recognize that it is not a ‘living document’ to be amended by interpretation, but rather is a contract between the states and the federal government. To be properly construed, it must be read in the context of the times in which it was written and adopted.
A conservative is against foreign aid. Nowhere in the Constitution is Congress authorized to tax the American people and then hand their money to a foreign government as either a gift or a loan. Nowhere in the Constitution is the federal government authorized to provide welfare, health care, housing or education. Nowhere in the Constitution does it mention abortion or gay marriage. Nowhere in the Constitution is the federal government authorized to subsidize either individuals or corporations.
Philosophical and moral issues are to be decided by the legislatures of the states, not by federal courts or even by Congress, whose duties and powers are strictly limited by the Constitution. Whether homosexuals should be allowed to marry or form civil unions and whether abortion should be legal or illegal are both questions to be decided by the state legislatures. No state or federal judge should have a say in the matter, and Congress likewise has no authority to intervene one way or the other.
A conservative Christian believes that his own soul is not imperiled if other people down the street decide to do some sinning. A conservative Christian recognizes that he is commanded to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and comfort the sick and dying. He is not commanded to shift this responsibility to government. He is not commanded to judge other people's lives and to regulate their behavior. A conservative Christian recognizes that something does not have to be illegal in order for him to refrain from doing it.
A conservative believes in the real, traditional values of this country: courage, hard work, self-reliance, frugality, chastity before marriage, faithfulness after marriage, loyalty to family and loyalty to the Constitution. Loyalty to a political party or to a politician is profoundly un-American.
- Columnist Charley Reese
WHAT IS A "CONSERVATIVE"
Let me explain what a conservative is.
A conservative believes that not only should the Supreme Court strictly construe the Constitution, but so should the president, the House, the Senate, governors, mayors and everybody else. . . . To strictly construe the Constitution is to recognize that it is not a ‘living document’ to be amended by interpretation, but rather is a contract between the states and the federal government. To be properly construed, it must be read in the context of the times in which it was written and adopted.
A conservative is against foreign aid. Nowhere in the Constitution is Congress authorized to tax the American people and then hand their money to a foreign government as either a gift or a loan. Nowhere in the Constitution is the federal government authorized to provide welfare, health care, housing or education. Nowhere in the Constitution does it mention abortion or gay marriage. Nowhere in the Constitution is the federal government authorized to subsidize either individuals or corporations.
Philosophical and moral issues are to be decided by the legislatures of the states, not by federal courts or even by Congress, whose duties and powers are strictly limited by the Constitution. Whether homosexuals should be allowed to marry or form civil unions and whether abortion should be legal or illegal are both questions to be decided by the state legislatures. No state or federal judge should have a say in the matter, and Congress likewise has no authority to intervene one way or the other.
A conservative Christian believes that his own soul is not imperiled if other people down the street decide to do some sinning. A conservative Christian recognizes that he is commanded to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and comfort the sick and dying. He is not commanded to shift this responsibility to government. He is not commanded to judge other people's lives and to regulate their behavior. A conservative Christian recognizes that something does not have to be illegal in order for him to refrain from doing it.
A conservative believes in the real, traditional values of this country: courage, hard work, self-reliance, frugality, chastity before marriage, faithfulness after marriage, loyalty to family and loyalty to the Constitution. Loyalty to a political party or to a politician is profoundly un-American.
- Columnist Charley Reese
WHAT IS A "CONSERVATIVE"
Itzaz� Around Here!Thursday, December 02, 2004
WHAT IS A "CONSERVATIVE"
Let me explain what a conservative is.
A conservative believes that not only should the Supreme Court strictly construe the Constitution, but so should the president, the House, the Senate, governors, mayors and everybody else. . . . To strictly construe the Constitution is to recognize that it is not a ‘living document’ to be amended by interpretation, but rather is a contract between the states and the federal government. To be properly construed, it must be read in the context of the times in which it was written and adopted.
A conservative is against foreign aid. Nowhere in the Constitution is Congress authorized to tax the American people and then hand their money to a foreign government as either a gift or a loan. Nowhere in the Constitution is the federal government authorized to provide welfare, health care, housing or education. Nowhere in the Constitution does it mention abortion or gay marriage. Nowhere in the Constitution is the federal government authorized to subsidize either individuals or corporations.
Philosophical and moral issues are to be decided by the legislatures of the states, not by federal courts or even by Congress, whose duties and powers are strictly limited by the Constitution. Whether homosexuals should be allowed to marry or form civil unions and whether abortion should be legal or illegal are both questions to be decided by the state legislatures. No state or federal judge should have a say in the matter, and Congress likewise has no authority to intervene one way or the other.
A conservative Christian believes that his own soul is not imperiled if other people down the street decide to do some sinning. A conservative Christian recognizes that he is commanded to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and comfort the sick and dying. He is not commanded to shift this responsibility to government. He is not commanded to judge other people's lives and to regulate their behavior. A conservative Christian recognizes that something does not have to be illegal in order for him to refrain from doing it.
A conservative believes in the real, traditional values of this country: courage, hard work, self-reliance, frugality, chastity before marriage, faithfulness after marriage, loyalty to family and loyalty to the Constitution. Loyalty to a political party or to a politician is profoundly un-American.
- Columnist Charley Reese
WHAT IS A "CONSERVATIVE"
Let me explain what a conservative is.
A conservative believes that not only should the Supreme Court strictly construe the Constitution, but so should the president, the House, the Senate, governors, mayors and everybody else. . . . To strictly construe the Constitution is to recognize that it is not a ‘living document’ to be amended by interpretation, but rather is a contract between the states and the federal government. To be properly construed, it must be read in the context of the times in which it was written and adopted.
A conservative is against foreign aid. Nowhere in the Constitution is Congress authorized to tax the American people and then hand their money to a foreign government as either a gift or a loan. Nowhere in the Constitution is the federal government authorized to provide welfare, health care, housing or education. Nowhere in the Constitution does it mention abortion or gay marriage. Nowhere in the Constitution is the federal government authorized to subsidize either individuals or corporations.
Philosophical and moral issues are to be decided by the legislatures of the states, not by federal courts or even by Congress, whose duties and powers are strictly limited by the Constitution. Whether homosexuals should be allowed to marry or form civil unions and whether abortion should be legal or illegal are both questions to be decided by the state legislatures. No state or federal judge should have a say in the matter, and Congress likewise has no authority to intervene one way or the other.
A conservative Christian believes that his own soul is not imperiled if other people down the street decide to do some sinning. A conservative Christian recognizes that he is commanded to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and comfort the sick and dying. He is not commanded to shift this responsibility to government. He is not commanded to judge other people's lives and to regulate their behavior. A conservative Christian recognizes that something does not have to be illegal in order for him to refrain from doing it.
A conservative believes in the real, traditional values of this country: courage, hard work, self-reliance, frugality, chastity before marriage, faithfulness after marriage, loyalty to family and loyalty to the Constitution. Loyalty to a political party or to a politician is profoundly un-American.
- Columnist Charley Reese
Thursday, December 02, 2004
WorldNetDaily: The Age of Immorality Hal Lindsey
WorldNetDaily: The Age of Immorality: "In 1980, Air Canada flight attendant Gaetan Dugas was diagnosed with the first North American case of AIDS. Dugas was a notoriously promiscuous homosexual who reputedly had sex with as many as 250 partners a year in gay 'bathhouses.'
By the end of that year, there were 31 deaths in the United States, confined within the homosexual community. (Dugas himself survived until 1984, by which time AIDS had begun reaching epidemic proportions.)
Currently, it is estimated that almost 1 million Americans are now infected with the HIV virus that causes AIDS. And women account for almost half of all HIV victims."
By the end of that year, there were 31 deaths in the United States, confined within the homosexual community. (Dugas himself survived until 1984, by which time AIDS had begun reaching epidemic proportions.)
Currently, it is estimated that almost 1 million Americans are now infected with the HIV virus that causes AIDS. And women account for almost half of all HIV victims."
The Seattle Times: Opinion: Think Canada's the place to be? Think again
The Seattle Times: Opinion: Think Canada's the place to be? Think again: "Think Canada's the place to be? Think again"
Kinsey was without a doubt one of the most vile Researchers!!!
The American Thinker
Kinsey is without a doubt one of the most vile, destructive and perverted individuals I have ever had the displeasure of studying. It’s quite obvious to me that his misbegotten pseudo-scientific endeavors were simply a vehicle through which he could indulge his perversion, make money, and work to destroy the traditional standard of morality that condemned the dark sins for which he had developed such an affinity. And to buttress this point I’ll quote the Intercollegiate Review one last time: “[this was] a pervert's attempt to demonstrate that perversion is statistically ‘normal.’”
Kinsey is without a doubt one of the most vile, destructive and perverted individuals I have ever had the displeasure of studying. It’s quite obvious to me that his misbegotten pseudo-scientific endeavors were simply a vehicle through which he could indulge his perversion, make money, and work to destroy the traditional standard of morality that condemned the dark sins for which he had developed such an affinity. And to buttress this point I’ll quote the Intercollegiate Review one last time: “[this was] a pervert's attempt to demonstrate that perversion is statistically ‘normal.’”
The Adventures of Chester!!!!!
The Adventures of Chester: "Former Marine officer who participated in the Iraqi campaign."
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
Monday, November 29, 2004
Yahoo! News - U.S. General Warns Iran Against Exploiting U.S.
Yahoo! News - U.S. General Warns Iran Against Exploiting U.S.: "U.S. General Warns Iran Against Exploiting U.S.
Mon Nov 29, 7:20 AM ET
Add to My Yahoo! Top Stories - Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The top U.S. commander in Iraq (news - web sites) warned Iran and others in comments published on Monday to think twice before trying to take advantage of the U.S. military at a time when it is fighting in both Iraq and Afghanistan (news - web sites).
Photo
Reuters Photo
Special Coverages
Latest headlines:
� Saddam Aides to Appear Before Tribunal Next Month
Reuters - 18 minutes ago
� Powell Confident Iraq Elections Will Go Ahead
Reuters - 25 minutes ago
� 'No reason' Iraqi polls should be delayed, Powell says
AFP - 48 minutes ago
Special Coverage
'Why the Iranians would want to move against us in an overt manner that would cause us to use our air or naval power against them would be beyond me,' Army Gen. John Abizaid, head of U.S. Central Command, said in an interview with USA Today.
Abizaid, who was speaking in Qatar, was asked about concerns in Congress that a shortage of U.S. troops might tempt nations such as Iran or North Korea (news - web sites), both accused by Washington of trying to develop nuclear weapons.
Abizaid, the top U.S. military commander for Iraq and Afghanistan, said the armed forces were not overextended.
The United States has 138,000 troops in Iraq and more than 18,000 in Afghanistan, with others deployed in Kuwait, Japan, Germany, Africa, South Korea (news - web sites) and Bosnia.
'We can generate more military power per square inch than anybody else on Earth, and everybody knows it,' Abizaid said. 'If you ever even contemplate our nuclear capability, it should give everybody the clear understanding that there is no power that can match the United States militarily.'
Washington and some Iraqi officials have accused Iran of supplying Iraqi insurgents with money, arms and militants, but on Sunday Tehran said it was ready to co-operate with Iraq to stop militants crossing their mountainous 1,000-mile border.
'We have no intention of interfering in Iraq's state matters. Iraq's stability is necessary for Iran's security,' Iran's deputy interior minister for security affairs, Ali Asghar Ahmadi, said in Tehran.
He told a news conference Iran was ready to help train Iraqi security forces."
Mon Nov 29, 7:20 AM ET
Add to My Yahoo! Top Stories - Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The top U.S. commander in Iraq (news - web sites) warned Iran and others in comments published on Monday to think twice before trying to take advantage of the U.S. military at a time when it is fighting in both Iraq and Afghanistan (news - web sites).
Photo
Reuters Photo
Special Coverages
Latest headlines:
� Saddam Aides to Appear Before Tribunal Next Month
Reuters - 18 minutes ago
� Powell Confident Iraq Elections Will Go Ahead
Reuters - 25 minutes ago
� 'No reason' Iraqi polls should be delayed, Powell says
AFP - 48 minutes ago
Special Coverage
'Why the Iranians would want to move against us in an overt manner that would cause us to use our air or naval power against them would be beyond me,' Army Gen. John Abizaid, head of U.S. Central Command, said in an interview with USA Today.
Abizaid, who was speaking in Qatar, was asked about concerns in Congress that a shortage of U.S. troops might tempt nations such as Iran or North Korea (news - web sites), both accused by Washington of trying to develop nuclear weapons.
Abizaid, the top U.S. military commander for Iraq and Afghanistan, said the armed forces were not overextended.
The United States has 138,000 troops in Iraq and more than 18,000 in Afghanistan, with others deployed in Kuwait, Japan, Germany, Africa, South Korea (news - web sites) and Bosnia.
'We can generate more military power per square inch than anybody else on Earth, and everybody knows it,' Abizaid said. 'If you ever even contemplate our nuclear capability, it should give everybody the clear understanding that there is no power that can match the United States militarily.'
Washington and some Iraqi officials have accused Iran of supplying Iraqi insurgents with money, arms and militants, but on Sunday Tehran said it was ready to co-operate with Iraq to stop militants crossing their mountainous 1,000-mile border.
'We have no intention of interfering in Iraq's state matters. Iraq's stability is necessary for Iran's security,' Iran's deputy interior minister for security affairs, Ali Asghar Ahmadi, said in Tehran.
He told a news conference Iran was ready to help train Iraqi security forces."
NewsMax.com: Inside Cover Story
NewsMax.com: Inside Cover Story: "Saturday, Nov. 27, 2004 12:53 p.m. EST
Zarqawi: U.S. 'Infidels' Have Us on the Ropes
The world's most dangerous terrorist, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, announced on Wednesday that the battle of Fallujah was a massive defeat for the Iraqi insurgency, blaming the debacle on Sunni Muslim clerics who failed to support his reign of terror.
'Hundreds of thousands of the nation's sons are being slaughtered at the hands of the infidels because of your silence,' Zarqawi said in an audiotape posted on an Islamic Web site known as al-Qala'a, which has been a mailbox for Islamic militant groups.
Story Continues Below
'You have let us down in the darkest circumstances and handed us over to the enemy,' the notorious mass murderer complained. 'You have stopped supporting the holy warriors.'
The finger-pointing tape from Zarqawi is the clearest indication yet that the U.S. offensive in Fallujah has been a massive success and could be the beginning of a rout for terrorist forces in Iraq.
The tape reveals the Jordanian-born terrorist sounding desperate as he admits that his forces are 'surrounded' by U.S. troops, who are 'cutting the throats of the holy warriors.'
'Are your hearts not shaken by the scenes of your brothers being surrounded and hurt by your enemy?' he asks plaintively.
'How long will you continue to abandon the nation to the tyrants of the east and of the west, who are inflicting the worst suffering, cutting the throats of the holy warriors, the best children of the nation, and taking its riches? ...
'You made peace with the tyranny and handed over the country and its people to the Jews and Crusaders by resorting to silence on their crimes and preventing our youth from heading to the battlefields in order to defend our religion,' he complained.
Though the Zarqawi tape is the best news to come out of Iraq since Saddam Hussein's capture last year, the American press has downplayed the story.
The New York Times, for instance, covered the top terrorist's stunning admission on page A22 of its little-read Thanksgiving Day edition.
The Washington Post buried the bombshell news in a Thanksgiving Day report headlined 'American Envoy Killed in Baghdad,' where quotes from the Zarqawi tape weren't even mentioned until the 17th paragraph."
Zarqawi: U.S. 'Infidels' Have Us on the Ropes
The world's most dangerous terrorist, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, announced on Wednesday that the battle of Fallujah was a massive defeat for the Iraqi insurgency, blaming the debacle on Sunni Muslim clerics who failed to support his reign of terror.
'Hundreds of thousands of the nation's sons are being slaughtered at the hands of the infidels because of your silence,' Zarqawi said in an audiotape posted on an Islamic Web site known as al-Qala'a, which has been a mailbox for Islamic militant groups.
Story Continues Below
'You have let us down in the darkest circumstances and handed us over to the enemy,' the notorious mass murderer complained. 'You have stopped supporting the holy warriors.'
The finger-pointing tape from Zarqawi is the clearest indication yet that the U.S. offensive in Fallujah has been a massive success and could be the beginning of a rout for terrorist forces in Iraq.
The tape reveals the Jordanian-born terrorist sounding desperate as he admits that his forces are 'surrounded' by U.S. troops, who are 'cutting the throats of the holy warriors.'
'Are your hearts not shaken by the scenes of your brothers being surrounded and hurt by your enemy?' he asks plaintively.
'How long will you continue to abandon the nation to the tyrants of the east and of the west, who are inflicting the worst suffering, cutting the throats of the holy warriors, the best children of the nation, and taking its riches? ...
'You made peace with the tyranny and handed over the country and its people to the Jews and Crusaders by resorting to silence on their crimes and preventing our youth from heading to the battlefields in order to defend our religion,' he complained.
Though the Zarqawi tape is the best news to come out of Iraq since Saddam Hussein's capture last year, the American press has downplayed the story.
The New York Times, for instance, covered the top terrorist's stunning admission on page A22 of its little-read Thanksgiving Day edition.
The Washington Post buried the bombshell news in a Thanksgiving Day report headlined 'American Envoy Killed in Baghdad,' where quotes from the Zarqawi tape weren't even mentioned until the 17th paragraph."
Yahoo! News - U.S. Sends in Secret Weapon: Saddam's Old Commandos
Yahoo! News - U.S. Sends in Secret Weapon: Saddam's Old Commandos
U.S. Sends in Secret Weapon: Saddam's Old Commandos
Sat Nov 27, 2:12 PM ET
By Alastair Macdonald
NEAR ISKANDARIYA, Iraq (Reuters) - Twenty months after toppling Saddam Hussein (news - web sites), U.S. troops still battling his followers in the heartland of Iraq (news - web sites)'s old arms industry are hitting back with a new weapon -- ex-members of Saddam's special forces.
For five months, Iraqi police commandos calling themselves the Black Scorpions have been based with U.S. Marines in the region along the Euphrates south of Baghdad, which roadside bombs, ambushes and kidnaps have turned into a no-go areas and earned it the melodramatic description "triangle of death."
"All of them were previously officers in the Iraqi army or special forces," the Scorpions' commander, Colonel Salaam Trad, said at the Marines' Kalsu base near Iskandariya on Saturday.
"But Saddam was dirty and no good for Iraq."
The performance of this SWAT team, as the Americans call it, could be a critical test of how U.S. forces can hand over to Iraqis to meet their goal of withdrawing from a stable Iraq. U. S. officers in the area say they are increasingly optimistic.
"The hardest fighters we have are the former special forces from Saddam's days," Colonel Ron Johnson, commander of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, told reporters.
Praising their local knowledge and fighting skills, Johnson singled out one man who fought against him at Nassiriya, the hardest battle of last year's brief war against Saddam's army.
"If I could have an Iraqi security force guy who's honest, reliable and dependable, it's worth five Marines," he added.
Captain Tad Douglas, who leads almost daily raids with the Scorpions, said he believed it was a unique experiment that made use of the Iraqis' feel for their home province of Babylon.
"Ninety-five percent of our intelligence is from the SWAT," he said. "They can put a guy in a cafe in the way we never could ... They have a good finger on the pulse."
NO HARD FEELINGS
U.S. officers are reluctant to discuss how big the SWAT team is and Trad and Douglas brush off questions on what they may or not have done to each other in last year's war.
"It doesn't matter to me what they did. They're staunchly anti-insurgent," said Douglas, who dismissed suggestions their training under Saddam might have made them too violent.
"We just had to polish them up a bit," he said. This week, Johnson has stepped up raids against insurgents in an operation code-named Plymouth Rock, hoping to keep pressure on Sunni rebels after their rout at Falluja to the northwest.
Of Johnson's 5,000-strong force in the region, which was once the heart of Saddam's arms industry and base of the Medina armored division of the elite Republican Guard, more than 2,000 are Marines, 850 British soldiers and the rest Iraqi.
At the camp 30 miles south of Baghdad, the Scorpions are very visible, wearing the khaki jumpsuits of Marine special forces and black mustaches traditional in the Iraqi military.
Occupying powers have a long and patchy history of creating local units and Iraqi forces in other regions have had mixed success. This month, thousands of police in the northern city of Mosul fled or changed sides when Sunni insurgents took charge.
Johnson acknowledges the loyalties of some Iraqis in his force may be divided but says they "want to be on the winning side" and is confident that U.S.-led troops can end what he sees as limited and decentralized violence by at most a few thousand disgruntled Saddam supporters and local bandits.
Iraqi police here have stuck to their posts despite killings of comrades in bomb attacks and murders of off-duty officers: " They don't cut and run, despite their losses," Johnson said.
Clearly exasperated by the "triangle of death" tag, he said: "I'm getting more optimistic every day."
As for Colonel Salaam, a small, wiry man of 32, he shrugs off insurgent threats to himself and his family and says what he wants is: "Freedom, a new Iraq, peace."
U.S. Sends in Secret Weapon: Saddam's Old Commandos
Sat Nov 27, 2:12 PM ET
By Alastair Macdonald
NEAR ISKANDARIYA, Iraq (Reuters) - Twenty months after toppling Saddam Hussein (news - web sites), U.S. troops still battling his followers in the heartland of Iraq (news - web sites)'s old arms industry are hitting back with a new weapon -- ex-members of Saddam's special forces.
For five months, Iraqi police commandos calling themselves the Black Scorpions have been based with U.S. Marines in the region along the Euphrates south of Baghdad, which roadside bombs, ambushes and kidnaps have turned into a no-go areas and earned it the melodramatic description "triangle of death."
"All of them were previously officers in the Iraqi army or special forces," the Scorpions' commander, Colonel Salaam Trad, said at the Marines' Kalsu base near Iskandariya on Saturday.
"But Saddam was dirty and no good for Iraq."
The performance of this SWAT team, as the Americans call it, could be a critical test of how U.S. forces can hand over to Iraqis to meet their goal of withdrawing from a stable Iraq. U. S. officers in the area say they are increasingly optimistic.
"The hardest fighters we have are the former special forces from Saddam's days," Colonel Ron Johnson, commander of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, told reporters.
Praising their local knowledge and fighting skills, Johnson singled out one man who fought against him at Nassiriya, the hardest battle of last year's brief war against Saddam's army.
"If I could have an Iraqi security force guy who's honest, reliable and dependable, it's worth five Marines," he added.
Captain Tad Douglas, who leads almost daily raids with the Scorpions, said he believed it was a unique experiment that made use of the Iraqis' feel for their home province of Babylon.
"Ninety-five percent of our intelligence is from the SWAT," he said. "They can put a guy in a cafe in the way we never could ... They have a good finger on the pulse."
NO HARD FEELINGS
U.S. officers are reluctant to discuss how big the SWAT team is and Trad and Douglas brush off questions on what they may or not have done to each other in last year's war.
"It doesn't matter to me what they did. They're staunchly anti-insurgent," said Douglas, who dismissed suggestions their training under Saddam might have made them too violent.
"We just had to polish them up a bit," he said. This week, Johnson has stepped up raids against insurgents in an operation code-named Plymouth Rock, hoping to keep pressure on Sunni rebels after their rout at Falluja to the northwest.
Of Johnson's 5,000-strong force in the region, which was once the heart of Saddam's arms industry and base of the Medina armored division of the elite Republican Guard, more than 2,000 are Marines, 850 British soldiers and the rest Iraqi.
At the camp 30 miles south of Baghdad, the Scorpions are very visible, wearing the khaki jumpsuits of Marine special forces and black mustaches traditional in the Iraqi military.
Occupying powers have a long and patchy history of creating local units and Iraqi forces in other regions have had mixed success. This month, thousands of police in the northern city of Mosul fled or changed sides when Sunni insurgents took charge.
Johnson acknowledges the loyalties of some Iraqis in his force may be divided but says they "want to be on the winning side" and is confident that U.S.-led troops can end what he sees as limited and decentralized violence by at most a few thousand disgruntled Saddam supporters and local bandits.
Iraqi police here have stuck to their posts despite killings of comrades in bomb attacks and murders of off-duty officers: " They don't cut and run, despite their losses," Johnson said.
Clearly exasperated by the "triangle of death" tag, he said: "I'm getting more optimistic every day."
As for Colonel Salaam, a small, wiry man of 32, he shrugs off insurgent threats to himself and his family and says what he wants is: "Freedom, a new Iraq, peace."
Yahoo! News - U.S. Sends in Secret Weapon: Saddam's Old Commandos
Yahoo! News - U.S. Sends in Secret Weapon: Saddam's Old CommandosU.S. Sends in Secret Weapon: Saddam's Old Commandos
Sat Nov 27, 2:12 PM ET
By Alastair Macdonald
NEAR ISKANDARIYA, Iraq (Reuters) - Twenty months after toppling Saddam Hussein (news - web sites), U.S. troops still battling his followers in the heartland of Iraq (news - web sites)'s old arms industry are hitting back with a new weapon -- ex-members of Saddam's special forces.
For five months, Iraqi police commandos calling themselves the Black Scorpions have been based with U.S. Marines in the region along the Euphrates south of Baghdad, which roadside bombs, ambushes and kidnaps have turned into a no-go areas and earned it the melodramatic description "triangle of death."
"All of them were previously officers in the Iraqi army or special forces," the Scorpions' commander, Colonel Salaam Trad, said at the Marines' Kalsu base near Iskandariya on Saturday.
"But Saddam was dirty and no good for Iraq."
The performance of this SWAT team, as the Americans call it, could be a critical test of how U.S. forces can hand over to Iraqis to meet their goal of withdrawing from a stable Iraq. U. S. officers in the area say they are increasingly optimistic.
"The hardest fighters we have are the former special forces from Saddam's days," Colonel Ron Johnson, commander of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, told reporters.
Praising their local knowledge and fighting skills, Johnson singled out one man who fought against him at Nassiriya, the hardest battle of last year's brief war against Saddam's army.
"If I could have an Iraqi security force guy who's honest, reliable and dependable, it's worth five Marines," he added.
Captain Tad Douglas, who leads almost daily raids with the Scorpions, said he believed it was a unique experiment that made use of the Iraqis' feel for their home province of Babylon.
"Ninety-five percent of our intelligence is from the SWAT," he said. "They can put a guy in a cafe in the way we never could ... They have a good finger on the pulse."
NO HARD FEELINGS
U.S. officers are reluctant to discuss how big the SWAT team is and Trad and Douglas brush off questions on what they may or not have done to each other in last year's war.
"It doesn't matter to me what they did. They're staunchly anti-insurgent," said Douglas, who dismissed suggestions their training under Saddam might have made them too violent.
"We just had to polish them up a bit," he said. This week, Johnson has stepped up raids against insurgents in an operation code-named Plymouth Rock, hoping to keep pressure on Sunni rebels after their rout at Falluja to the northwest.
Of Johnson's 5,000-strong force in the region, which was once the heart of Saddam's arms industry and base of the Medina armored division of the elite Republican Guard, more than 2,000 are Marines, 850 British soldiers and the rest Iraqi.
At the camp 30 miles south of Baghdad, the Scorpions are very visible, wearing the khaki jumpsuits of Marine special forces and black mustaches traditional in the Iraqi military.
Occupying powers have a long and patchy history of creating local units and Iraqi forces in other regions have had mixed success. This month, thousands of police in the northern city of Mosul fled or changed sides when Sunni insurgents took charge.
Johnson acknowledges the loyalties of some Iraqis in his force may be divided but says they "want to be on the winning side" and is confident that U.S.-led troops can end what he sees as limited and decentralized violence by at most a few thousand disgruntled Saddam supporters and local bandits.
Iraqi police here have stuck to their posts despite killings of comrades in bomb attacks and murders of off-duty officers: " They don't cut and run, despite their losses," Johnson said.
Clearly exasperated by the "triangle of death" tag, he said: "I'm getting more optimistic every day."
As for Colonel Salaam, a small, wiry man of 32, he shrugs off insurgent threats to himself and his family and says what he wants is: "Freedom, a new Iraq, peace."
Sat Nov 27, 2:12 PM ET
By Alastair Macdonald
NEAR ISKANDARIYA, Iraq (Reuters) - Twenty months after toppling Saddam Hussein (news - web sites), U.S. troops still battling his followers in the heartland of Iraq (news - web sites)'s old arms industry are hitting back with a new weapon -- ex-members of Saddam's special forces.
For five months, Iraqi police commandos calling themselves the Black Scorpions have been based with U.S. Marines in the region along the Euphrates south of Baghdad, which roadside bombs, ambushes and kidnaps have turned into a no-go areas and earned it the melodramatic description "triangle of death."
"All of them were previously officers in the Iraqi army or special forces," the Scorpions' commander, Colonel Salaam Trad, said at the Marines' Kalsu base near Iskandariya on Saturday.
"But Saddam was dirty and no good for Iraq."
The performance of this SWAT team, as the Americans call it, could be a critical test of how U.S. forces can hand over to Iraqis to meet their goal of withdrawing from a stable Iraq. U. S. officers in the area say they are increasingly optimistic.
"The hardest fighters we have are the former special forces from Saddam's days," Colonel Ron Johnson, commander of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, told reporters.
Praising their local knowledge and fighting skills, Johnson singled out one man who fought against him at Nassiriya, the hardest battle of last year's brief war against Saddam's army.
"If I could have an Iraqi security force guy who's honest, reliable and dependable, it's worth five Marines," he added.
Captain Tad Douglas, who leads almost daily raids with the Scorpions, said he believed it was a unique experiment that made use of the Iraqis' feel for their home province of Babylon.
"Ninety-five percent of our intelligence is from the SWAT," he said. "They can put a guy in a cafe in the way we never could ... They have a good finger on the pulse."
NO HARD FEELINGS
U.S. officers are reluctant to discuss how big the SWAT team is and Trad and Douglas brush off questions on what they may or not have done to each other in last year's war.
"It doesn't matter to me what they did. They're staunchly anti-insurgent," said Douglas, who dismissed suggestions their training under Saddam might have made them too violent.
"We just had to polish them up a bit," he said. This week, Johnson has stepped up raids against insurgents in an operation code-named Plymouth Rock, hoping to keep pressure on Sunni rebels after their rout at Falluja to the northwest.
Of Johnson's 5,000-strong force in the region, which was once the heart of Saddam's arms industry and base of the Medina armored division of the elite Republican Guard, more than 2,000 are Marines, 850 British soldiers and the rest Iraqi.
At the camp 30 miles south of Baghdad, the Scorpions are very visible, wearing the khaki jumpsuits of Marine special forces and black mustaches traditional in the Iraqi military.
Occupying powers have a long and patchy history of creating local units and Iraqi forces in other regions have had mixed success. This month, thousands of police in the northern city of Mosul fled or changed sides when Sunni insurgents took charge.
Johnson acknowledges the loyalties of some Iraqis in his force may be divided but says they "want to be on the winning side" and is confident that U.S.-led troops can end what he sees as limited and decentralized violence by at most a few thousand disgruntled Saddam supporters and local bandits.
Iraqi police here have stuck to their posts despite killings of comrades in bomb attacks and murders of off-duty officers: " They don't cut and run, despite their losses," Johnson said.
Clearly exasperated by the "triangle of death" tag, he said: "I'm getting more optimistic every day."
As for Colonel Salaam, a small, wiry man of 32, he shrugs off insurgent threats to himself and his family and says what he wants is: "Freedom, a new Iraq, peace."
Sunday, November 28, 2004
Identifying Moderate Muslims - article by Daniel Pipes
Identifying Moderate Muslims - article by Daniel Pipes: "Identifying Moderate Muslims"
2004 Weblog Awards: Nominations - Best Military Blog (* New *)
2004 Weblog Awards: Nominations - Best Military Blog (* New *): "Nominations - Best Military Blog"
Telegraph | News | Revealed: the full story of the Ukrainian election fraud
Telegraph | News | Revealed: the full story of the Ukrainian election fraud: "the full story of the Ukrainian election fraud"
Saturday, November 27, 2004
the evangelical outpost: Sin on a Bun:
The Forgotten Vice of Gluttony
the evangelical outpost: Sin on a Bun:
The Forgotten Vice of GluttonySin on a Bun:
The Forgotten Vice of Gluttony
The appetite for sex, thought C.S. Lewis, is in “ludicrous and preposterous excess of its function.” How else, he wondered, can we explain the fascination men have with watching a girl publicly undress on a stage? The “strip-tease” shows the absurdity of our propensity for sexual titillation:
Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?
One critic said that if he found a country in which such striptease acts with food were popular, he would conclude that the people of that country were starving. I agree with him that if, in some strange land, we found that similar acts with mutton chops were popular, one of the possible explanations which would occur to me would be famine. But the next step would be to test our hypothesis by finding out whether, in fact, much or little food was being consumed in that country.
...
Nor is the hypothesis of 'starvation' the only one we can imagine. Everyone knows that the sexual appetite, like our other appetites, grows by indulgence. Starving men may think much about food, but so do gluttons; the gorged, as well as the famished, like titillations.
In a country that spends more money on “adult entertainment” than pro-football, basketball and baseball combined, we shouldn’t be surprised that other appetites are also prone to overindulgence. While we may not have special theaters where food in seductively unveiled (at least not yet), there is certainly something “queer about the state” of the food instinct in America. Take, for example, the introduction of the MONSTER THICKBURGER™ by the fast-food chain Hardee’s.burger.bmp
Described as a “monument to decadence”, the burger contains an artery-clogging 1,420 calories and 107 grams of fat. When combined in a “combo meal” with large fries and a medium drink, the total tips the scales at 2,285 calories. Such a meal would comprise 77% of the daily caloric intake for the average male (175 lbs., moderately active) and 99% for the average female (150 lb, moderately active). To work off those calories a person would need to jog for over 3 hours, walk briskly for 7.5 hours, or simply sit in front of the TV for 31 hours straight.
The MONSTER THICKBURGER™ is an iconic representation of America’s embrace of gluttony, a sin that has long been forgotten. While many churchgoers have heard sermons warning against the dangers of sexual sins such as adultery or fornication, they’re not likely to have heard their pastor speak out against gluttony. It’s doubtful that many Christians would even consider it a sin. An openly homosexual couple attempting to join the congregation would be looked down upon by the obese deacon showing them to the door; and no one in the pews would even recognize the irony. The stink of our hypocrisy is so overwhelming that it’s amazing we can hold down our order of Super Size fries.
Gluttony was once listed among the seven deadly sins. But now it's considered, when it's thought about at all, as a private health matter. We may realize that overeating has led to weight gain, a change in appearance, or diminished health. But we never recognize it as a spiritual problem.
Oddly enough, with the exception of those related to sex, American Christians tend to take an antinomian view of “physical sins.” We act as if corrupting our bodies will have no impact on our souls. Such an an un-Biblical view, however, must be rejected by anyone who acknowledges that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.
Lest we start to feel superiour to the obese, though, we should remember that not all gluttons are overweight. I’m 5’10”, 165 lbs and, thanks to the Marine Corps preoccupation with physical activity, in relatively good shape. But while my waistline may not expose my shame, I’m prone to overindulging in food. I eat several snacks between meals. I eat when I’m in my car. I eat when I’m bored. I eat when I’m restless, when I’m frustrated, when I’m watching TV, when I’m on the computer…I eat constantly for no other reason than that I can.
In stuffing my face, I neglect my spiritual life. I turn to the refrigerator instead of turning to prayer. I pause at the vending machine instead of pausing in meditation. I seek out a piece of bread instead of seeking the Bread of Life. I fill my life with food in order to avoid filling it with God.
“Their end is destruction,” the Apostle Paul warned, for those for whom “their god is the belly.” We worship a false idol when we succumb to the sin of gluttony. We replace the focus on the Lord with a focus on our own indulgences. We make a god of our belly and allow our souls to turn softer than the crème filling in our Twinkies.
The Forgotten Vice of GluttonySin on a Bun:
The Forgotten Vice of Gluttony
The appetite for sex, thought C.S. Lewis, is in “ludicrous and preposterous excess of its function.” How else, he wondered, can we explain the fascination men have with watching a girl publicly undress on a stage? The “strip-tease” shows the absurdity of our propensity for sexual titillation:
Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?
One critic said that if he found a country in which such striptease acts with food were popular, he would conclude that the people of that country were starving. I agree with him that if, in some strange land, we found that similar acts with mutton chops were popular, one of the possible explanations which would occur to me would be famine. But the next step would be to test our hypothesis by finding out whether, in fact, much or little food was being consumed in that country.
...
Nor is the hypothesis of 'starvation' the only one we can imagine. Everyone knows that the sexual appetite, like our other appetites, grows by indulgence. Starving men may think much about food, but so do gluttons; the gorged, as well as the famished, like titillations.
In a country that spends more money on “adult entertainment” than pro-football, basketball and baseball combined, we shouldn’t be surprised that other appetites are also prone to overindulgence. While we may not have special theaters where food in seductively unveiled (at least not yet), there is certainly something “queer about the state” of the food instinct in America. Take, for example, the introduction of the MONSTER THICKBURGER™ by the fast-food chain Hardee’s.burger.bmp
Described as a “monument to decadence”, the burger contains an artery-clogging 1,420 calories and 107 grams of fat. When combined in a “combo meal” with large fries and a medium drink, the total tips the scales at 2,285 calories. Such a meal would comprise 77% of the daily caloric intake for the average male (175 lbs., moderately active) and 99% for the average female (150 lb, moderately active). To work off those calories a person would need to jog for over 3 hours, walk briskly for 7.5 hours, or simply sit in front of the TV for 31 hours straight.
The MONSTER THICKBURGER™ is an iconic representation of America’s embrace of gluttony, a sin that has long been forgotten. While many churchgoers have heard sermons warning against the dangers of sexual sins such as adultery or fornication, they’re not likely to have heard their pastor speak out against gluttony. It’s doubtful that many Christians would even consider it a sin. An openly homosexual couple attempting to join the congregation would be looked down upon by the obese deacon showing them to the door; and no one in the pews would even recognize the irony. The stink of our hypocrisy is so overwhelming that it’s amazing we can hold down our order of Super Size fries.
Gluttony was once listed among the seven deadly sins. But now it's considered, when it's thought about at all, as a private health matter. We may realize that overeating has led to weight gain, a change in appearance, or diminished health. But we never recognize it as a spiritual problem.
Oddly enough, with the exception of those related to sex, American Christians tend to take an antinomian view of “physical sins.” We act as if corrupting our bodies will have no impact on our souls. Such an an un-Biblical view, however, must be rejected by anyone who acknowledges that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.
Lest we start to feel superiour to the obese, though, we should remember that not all gluttons are overweight. I’m 5’10”, 165 lbs and, thanks to the Marine Corps preoccupation with physical activity, in relatively good shape. But while my waistline may not expose my shame, I’m prone to overindulging in food. I eat several snacks between meals. I eat when I’m in my car. I eat when I’m bored. I eat when I’m restless, when I’m frustrated, when I’m watching TV, when I’m on the computer…I eat constantly for no other reason than that I can.
In stuffing my face, I neglect my spiritual life. I turn to the refrigerator instead of turning to prayer. I pause at the vending machine instead of pausing in meditation. I seek out a piece of bread instead of seeking the Bread of Life. I fill my life with food in order to avoid filling it with God.
“Their end is destruction,” the Apostle Paul warned, for those for whom “their god is the belly.” We worship a false idol when we succumb to the sin of gluttony. We replace the focus on the Lord with a focus on our own indulgences. We make a god of our belly and allow our souls to turn softer than the crème filling in our Twinkies.
Top 10 Myths About Thanksgiving
Top 10 Myths About Thanksgiving: "Top 10 Myths About Thanksgiving
By Rick Shenkman
Mr. Shenkman is the editor of HNN.
MYTH # 1
The Pilgrims Held the First Thanksgiving
To see what the first Thanksgiving was like you have to go to: Texas. Texans claim the first Thanksgiving in America actually took place in little San Elizario, a community near El Paso, in 1598 -- twenty-three years before the Pilgrims' festival. For several years they have staged a reenactment of the event that culminated in the Thanksgiving celebration: the arrival of Spanish explorer Juan de Onate on the banks of the Rio Grande. De Onate is said to have held a big Thanksgiving festival after leading hundreds of settlers on a grueling 350-mile long trek across the Mexican desert."
By Rick Shenkman
Mr. Shenkman is the editor of HNN.
MYTH # 1
The Pilgrims Held the First Thanksgiving
To see what the first Thanksgiving was like you have to go to: Texas. Texans claim the first Thanksgiving in America actually took place in little San Elizario, a community near El Paso, in 1598 -- twenty-three years before the Pilgrims' festival. For several years they have staged a reenactment of the event that culminated in the Thanksgiving celebration: the arrival of Spanish explorer Juan de Onate on the banks of the Rio Grande. De Onate is said to have held a big Thanksgiving festival after leading hundreds of settlers on a grueling 350-mile long trek across the Mexican desert."
Friday, November 26, 2004
Thursday, November 25, 2004
Thankful for America -- The Washington Times
Thankful for America -- The Washington TimesThankful for America
By David Boaz
Published November 25, 2004
Not long ago a journalist asked me what freedoms we take for granted in America. I spend most of my time sounding the alarm about the freedoms we're losing, but this was a good opportunity to step back and consider how America is different from much of world history -- and why immigrants still flock here.
If we ask how life in the United States is different from life in most of the history of the world -- and still different from much of the world -- a few key elements come to mind:
m Rule of law. Perhaps the greatest achievement in history is the subordination of power to law. That is, in modern America we have created structures that limit and control the arbitrary power of government. No longer can one man -- a king, a priest, a communist party boss -- take another person's life or property at the ruler's whim. Citizens can go about their business, generally confident that they won't be dragged off the streets to disappear forever, and confident that their hard-earned property won't be confiscated without warning. We may take the rule of law for granted, but immigrants from many parts of the world know how rare it is.
m Equality. For most of history people were firmly assigned to a particular status -- kings, lords and serfs. Brahmans, other castes, and untouchables in India. If your father was a noble or a peasant, so would you be. The American Revolution swept away such distinctions. In America all men were created equal. Thomas Jefferson declared "that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God." In America some people may be smarter, richer or more beautiful than others, but "I'm as good as you" is our national creed. We are all citizens, equal before the law, free to rise as far as our talents will take us.
• Equality for women. Throughout much of history women were the property of their fathers or their husbands. They were often barred from owning property, signing contracts or participating in government. Equality for women took longer than equality for men, but today in the civilized parts of the world women have the same legal rights as men.
• Self-government. The Declaration of Independence proclaims that "governments are instituted" to secure the rights of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," and that those governments "derive their just powers from the consent of the governed." Early governments were often formed in the conquest of one people by another, and the right of the rulers to rule was attributed to God's will and passed along from father to son. In a few places -- such as Athens, Rome and medieval Germany -- there were attempts to create a democratic government. Now, after America's example, we take it for granted in civilized countries that governments stand or fall on popular consent.
• Freedom of speech. In a world of Michael Moore, Ann Coulter and cable pornography, it's hard to imagine just how new and how rare free speech is. Lots of people died for the right to say what they believed. In China and Africa and the Arab world, they still do. Fortunately, we've realized that while free speech may irritate each of us at some point, we're all better off for it.
• Freedom of religion. Church and state have been bound together since time immemorial. The state claimed divine sanction, the church got money and power and the combination left little room for freedom. People used to think that a country could only survive if everyone worshipped the one true God in the one true way. The American Founders established religious freedom.
m Property and contract. We owe our unprecedented standard of living to the capitalist freedoms of private property and free markets. When people are able to own property and make contracts, they create wealth. Free markets and contract law make possible vast economic undertakings, ranging from the design and construction of airplanes to worldwide computer networks and ATM systems. But to appreciate the benefits of free markets, we don't have to marvel at skyscrapers while listening to MP3 players. We can just give thanks for enough food to live on, and central heating and the medical care that has lowered the infant mortality rate from about 20 percent to less than 1 percent.
A Kenyan boy who managed to get to the United States told Woman's World magazine that America is "heaven." Compared to countries that lack the rule of law, equality, property rights, free markets, and freedom of speech and worship, it certainly is. A good point to keep in mind this Thanksgiving Day.
David Boaz is executive vice president of the Cato Institute and author of "Libertarianism: A Primer."
By David Boaz
Published November 25, 2004
Not long ago a journalist asked me what freedoms we take for granted in America. I spend most of my time sounding the alarm about the freedoms we're losing, but this was a good opportunity to step back and consider how America is different from much of world history -- and why immigrants still flock here.
If we ask how life in the United States is different from life in most of the history of the world -- and still different from much of the world -- a few key elements come to mind:
m Rule of law. Perhaps the greatest achievement in history is the subordination of power to law. That is, in modern America we have created structures that limit and control the arbitrary power of government. No longer can one man -- a king, a priest, a communist party boss -- take another person's life or property at the ruler's whim. Citizens can go about their business, generally confident that they won't be dragged off the streets to disappear forever, and confident that their hard-earned property won't be confiscated without warning. We may take the rule of law for granted, but immigrants from many parts of the world know how rare it is.
m Equality. For most of history people were firmly assigned to a particular status -- kings, lords and serfs. Brahmans, other castes, and untouchables in India. If your father was a noble or a peasant, so would you be. The American Revolution swept away such distinctions. In America all men were created equal. Thomas Jefferson declared "that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God." In America some people may be smarter, richer or more beautiful than others, but "I'm as good as you" is our national creed. We are all citizens, equal before the law, free to rise as far as our talents will take us.
• Equality for women. Throughout much of history women were the property of their fathers or their husbands. They were often barred from owning property, signing contracts or participating in government. Equality for women took longer than equality for men, but today in the civilized parts of the world women have the same legal rights as men.
• Self-government. The Declaration of Independence proclaims that "governments are instituted" to secure the rights of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," and that those governments "derive their just powers from the consent of the governed." Early governments were often formed in the conquest of one people by another, and the right of the rulers to rule was attributed to God's will and passed along from father to son. In a few places -- such as Athens, Rome and medieval Germany -- there were attempts to create a democratic government. Now, after America's example, we take it for granted in civilized countries that governments stand or fall on popular consent.
• Freedom of speech. In a world of Michael Moore, Ann Coulter and cable pornography, it's hard to imagine just how new and how rare free speech is. Lots of people died for the right to say what they believed. In China and Africa and the Arab world, they still do. Fortunately, we've realized that while free speech may irritate each of us at some point, we're all better off for it.
• Freedom of religion. Church and state have been bound together since time immemorial. The state claimed divine sanction, the church got money and power and the combination left little room for freedom. People used to think that a country could only survive if everyone worshipped the one true God in the one true way. The American Founders established religious freedom.
m Property and contract. We owe our unprecedented standard of living to the capitalist freedoms of private property and free markets. When people are able to own property and make contracts, they create wealth. Free markets and contract law make possible vast economic undertakings, ranging from the design and construction of airplanes to worldwide computer networks and ATM systems. But to appreciate the benefits of free markets, we don't have to marvel at skyscrapers while listening to MP3 players. We can just give thanks for enough food to live on, and central heating and the medical care that has lowered the infant mortality rate from about 20 percent to less than 1 percent.
A Kenyan boy who managed to get to the United States told Woman's World magazine that America is "heaven." Compared to countries that lack the rule of law, equality, property rights, free markets, and freedom of speech and worship, it certainly is. A good point to keep in mind this Thanksgiving Day.
David Boaz is executive vice president of the Cato Institute and author of "Libertarianism: A Primer."
washingtonpost.com: Thankful for the Settlers . . .
washingtonpost.com: Thankful for the Settlers . . .: "washingtonpost.com
Thankful for the Settlers . . .
By George F. Will
Thursday, November 25, 2004; Page A43
When giving thanks this year, think of Lena Woebbecke. She and many others paid a terrible price for misreading the prairie sky on the afternoon of Jan. 12, 1888.
That day was unseasonably balmy, by prairie standards -- some temperatures were in the 20s -- and many children scampered to school without coats or gloves. Then, at about the time schools were adjourning, death, in the shape of a soot-gray cloud, appeared on the horizon of Dakota Territory and Nebraska.
In three minutes the temperature plunged 18 degrees. The next morning hundreds of people, more than 100 of them children, were dead beneath the snow drifts. David Laskin, a Seattle writer, reconstructs this tragedy in a terrifying but beautifully written new book, 'The Children's Blizzard.'
It picks up the many threads of the story in Norway, Ukraine, Germany, Vermont and other tributaries to the river of immigration set in motion partly by the 1862 Homestead Act. In return for an $18 filing fee and five years' farming, the act conferred ownership of 160 acres. By the tens of thousands the homesteaders came, to live in sod houses, heated by burning buffalo chips and twisted hay.
Of immigrants, the saying was that the cowards stayed home and the weak died on the way. One in 10 crossing the Atlantic in steerage did die. But, Laskin says, 'the mystique of the Dakotas' was such that the territory's population nearly quadrupled in the 1880s. Those who made it, with a trunk or two and the clothes on their backs, reached towns that were perishable scratches on the prairie. They got land, freedom and hope.
And prairie fires. And grasshoppers, 100 billion at a time in roaring clouds a mile high and 100 miles across. And iron weather in which children, disoriented by horizontal streams of snow as hard as rock and fine as dust, froze to death groping their way home from a school 150 yards away.
Lena was five in 1882 when her father, a German immigrant, died of smallpox. Her mother remarried twice, having 11 children, eight of whom survived. In August 1887, Lena, her marriage prospects diminished by her smallpox scars, was sent to live with the Woebbeckes and their three children in a two-room house. It was a half-mile from the school where she was, five months later, when a cataclysmic cold front came dropping southeast out of Canada at 45 miles per hour.
'To those standing outside,' Laskin writes, 'it looked like the northwest corner of the sky was suddenly filling and bulging and ripping open.' In 4 1/2 hours the temperature at Helena, Mont., fell 50 degrees. The prairie air tingled with the electricity of a horizontal thunderstorm. All over the region, school teachers, many of them not much older or more educated than their pupils, had to make life-or-death decisions about how to get the children home.
'The fear came first,' Laskin writes, 'but the cold followed so hard on its heels that it was impossible to tell the difference.' In minutes nostrils were clogged by ice. Eyelids were torn by repeated attempts to prevent them from freezing shut. Unable to see their hands in front of their faces, people died wandering a few yards from their houses, unable to hear, over the keening wind, pots being pounded a few yards away to tell them the way to safety.
'For years afterward,' writes Laskin, 'at gatherings of any size in Dakota or Nebraska, there would always be people walking on wooden legs or holding fingerless hands behind their backs or hiding missing ears under hats -- victims of the blizzard.' Lena learned to walk on a wooden foot. In 1901, at 24, she married. At 25 she died, perhaps in childbirth, or perhaps of a complication from the amputation necessitated by frostbite.
'Lena was laid to rest in her wedding dress in the graveyard of the Immanuel Lutheran Church near the country crossroads called Ruby. If there ever was a town called Ruby, it has disappeared, as has the Immanuel Lutheran Church. The church cemetery remains -- a fenced patch of rough grass studded with headstones between two farmhouses not far from the interstate. A tiny island of the dead in the sea of Nebraska agriculture.'
This Thanksgiving, when you have rendered yourself torpid by ingesting an excess of America's agricultural bounties, summon thoughts of thanks for the likes of Lena, those whose hard lives paved the stony road to America's current comforts.
georgewill@washpost.com
"
Thankful for the Settlers . . .
By George F. Will
Thursday, November 25, 2004; Page A43
When giving thanks this year, think of Lena Woebbecke. She and many others paid a terrible price for misreading the prairie sky on the afternoon of Jan. 12, 1888.
That day was unseasonably balmy, by prairie standards -- some temperatures were in the 20s -- and many children scampered to school without coats or gloves. Then, at about the time schools were adjourning, death, in the shape of a soot-gray cloud, appeared on the horizon of Dakota Territory and Nebraska.
In three minutes the temperature plunged 18 degrees. The next morning hundreds of people, more than 100 of them children, were dead beneath the snow drifts. David Laskin, a Seattle writer, reconstructs this tragedy in a terrifying but beautifully written new book, 'The Children's Blizzard.'
It picks up the many threads of the story in Norway, Ukraine, Germany, Vermont and other tributaries to the river of immigration set in motion partly by the 1862 Homestead Act. In return for an $18 filing fee and five years' farming, the act conferred ownership of 160 acres. By the tens of thousands the homesteaders came, to live in sod houses, heated by burning buffalo chips and twisted hay.
Of immigrants, the saying was that the cowards stayed home and the weak died on the way. One in 10 crossing the Atlantic in steerage did die. But, Laskin says, 'the mystique of the Dakotas' was such that the territory's population nearly quadrupled in the 1880s. Those who made it, with a trunk or two and the clothes on their backs, reached towns that were perishable scratches on the prairie. They got land, freedom and hope.
And prairie fires. And grasshoppers, 100 billion at a time in roaring clouds a mile high and 100 miles across. And iron weather in which children, disoriented by horizontal streams of snow as hard as rock and fine as dust, froze to death groping their way home from a school 150 yards away.
Lena was five in 1882 when her father, a German immigrant, died of smallpox. Her mother remarried twice, having 11 children, eight of whom survived. In August 1887, Lena, her marriage prospects diminished by her smallpox scars, was sent to live with the Woebbeckes and their three children in a two-room house. It was a half-mile from the school where she was, five months later, when a cataclysmic cold front came dropping southeast out of Canada at 45 miles per hour.
'To those standing outside,' Laskin writes, 'it looked like the northwest corner of the sky was suddenly filling and bulging and ripping open.' In 4 1/2 hours the temperature at Helena, Mont., fell 50 degrees. The prairie air tingled with the electricity of a horizontal thunderstorm. All over the region, school teachers, many of them not much older or more educated than their pupils, had to make life-or-death decisions about how to get the children home.
'The fear came first,' Laskin writes, 'but the cold followed so hard on its heels that it was impossible to tell the difference.' In minutes nostrils were clogged by ice. Eyelids were torn by repeated attempts to prevent them from freezing shut. Unable to see their hands in front of their faces, people died wandering a few yards from their houses, unable to hear, over the keening wind, pots being pounded a few yards away to tell them the way to safety.
'For years afterward,' writes Laskin, 'at gatherings of any size in Dakota or Nebraska, there would always be people walking on wooden legs or holding fingerless hands behind their backs or hiding missing ears under hats -- victims of the blizzard.' Lena learned to walk on a wooden foot. In 1901, at 24, she married. At 25 she died, perhaps in childbirth, or perhaps of a complication from the amputation necessitated by frostbite.
'Lena was laid to rest in her wedding dress in the graveyard of the Immanuel Lutheran Church near the country crossroads called Ruby. If there ever was a town called Ruby, it has disappeared, as has the Immanuel Lutheran Church. The church cemetery remains -- a fenced patch of rough grass studded with headstones between two farmhouses not far from the interstate. A tiny island of the dead in the sea of Nebraska agriculture.'
This Thanksgiving, when you have rendered yourself torpid by ingesting an excess of America's agricultural bounties, summon thoughts of thanks for the likes of Lena, those whose hard lives paved the stony road to America's current comforts.
georgewill@washpost.com
"
HoustonChronicle.com - An adopted daughter gives thanks to America
HoustonChronicle.com - An adopted daughter gives thanks to AmericaAn adopted daughter gives thanks to America
A child of refugees counts her many blessings
By ANH V. SAWYER
I wish you could have been with me this morning. It was snowing, not heavily, but enough flurries to prevent many of my international friends from coming to our monthly International Wives Club. Most of them came from the other side of the world where the coldest temperature hovers above 60 degrees.
ADVERTISEMENT
There were only 14 of us, half of the normal gathering. Six were Americans and the rest from different parts of the world. Together, we decorated our tables and spread out the food that everyone had brought. Our theme was American Thanksgiving, so I brought a turkey, my first attempt at cooking the giant chicken. The American wives brought pies, and others brought fruit and salads.
Our group leader told us of the history of American Thanksgiving, of the 102 persons who first arrived in Plymouth, Mass., on the Mayflower, of the local Indians' kindness and of the many deaths that followed from the hardship of life in this new place.
When she finished, I asked everyone in the group to share their Thanksgiving thought if they were comfortable doing so. Many of us don't speak English well, and besides, where we came from, we do not always share our hearts so readily like our American friends.
The American wives were thankful for God, families and friends. The foreigners, one after another, with their limited English, wanted to give thanks for this country, for the freedom and peace they have experienced here, for the friendship and unconditional love and help they have received from American friends and strangers. Several had tears roll down their cheeks as they spoke.
Tan, a lovely Mainland Chinese visiting scholar, said: "I wake up so happy every morning. I cannot believe I am here in this country. I feel so free. Sometimes, I have to pinch myself."
Chin, a Taiwanese graduate student, young and gentle, shared with us: "Before I came here, I didn't even know how to open a can. I had a very sheltered life. So when I arrived here, I was very fearful for my life. But the Americans take care of me and teach me many things.
Sandi, a Korean nurse, thoughtful and wise, said, with tears in her eyes: "I want to give thanks to my parents who came here with absolutely nothing. They had to work very hard and sacrificed much for my sister and me. And this country made it possible for them to give us what we have now."
And more I wish you could hear with your own ears.
Many of the International Wives were intrigued to hear that their own beginnings in this country were similar to the Pilgrims. They, too, had a very difficult time with learning English, getting a job and finding a niche for themselves, but after all is said and done they would not trade what they are having to go through here for anything else.
As a former refugee, I, too, want to thank you, dear America, for your love for humanity, for the profound understanding that liberty is indeed the core of genuine humanness, and for sharing your resources, your opportunities and your wonderful heritage with the refugees and immigrants of the world.
You also impart to us a willingness to love and to forgive. These are very vulnerable concepts for many of us foreigners who were bound by traditions of getting even. You know, my Mainland Chinese and Taiwanese friends told me that they don't really get along well with each other, but it was Tan who reached out to Chin and invited her to our gatherings. In our international fellowship, I've often seen Croats break bread with Serbs and people from all over the Middle East — people who would be each others' enemies if they were still in their countries — befriend one another.
I meant to send this article for publication on Veterans Day; but I was worried that I would be misunderstood and categorized as a war-lover. I do not like war or any kind of bloodshed because I myself had to go through that hellish experience for the first 20 years of my life. However, I often ask myself, without the men and women who went to war and laid down their lives, even for the peoples they didn't know, would I be able to taste this precious freedom and liberty?
Sometimes I think of America as the children, and myself as the dog, in one of Jesus' parables: "First, let the children eat all they want," Jesus told her, "for it is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to the dogs.
"Yes, Lord," she replied, "but even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs."
Even with the crumbs, I am grateful and satisfied. However, I long to be one of the children, not because America wouldn't let me, but because after 30 years of living and breathing free in this country, I am still going through a healing process. It continues to be a long journey for me to unlearn the fear I grew up in and to learn to truly enjoy the bread.
It was a struggle to put these words on paper, because deep down I am afraid of retaliation. I think the most wonderful gift America offers is freedom from fear. So, I thank you, America. I am the daughter you have adopted and raised to become someone who has faith in life and lives with real purpose. I now dare to dream and to believe that my dreams can come true. Where I came from, the most important wish a child can have is to bring honor to his or her parents. I hope I will bring honor to America.
Sawyer is a writer and speaker. With her friend Pam Proctor, she wrote "Song of Saigon," published by Warner Books in 2003
A child of refugees counts her many blessings
By ANH V. SAWYER
I wish you could have been with me this morning. It was snowing, not heavily, but enough flurries to prevent many of my international friends from coming to our monthly International Wives Club. Most of them came from the other side of the world where the coldest temperature hovers above 60 degrees.
ADVERTISEMENT
There were only 14 of us, half of the normal gathering. Six were Americans and the rest from different parts of the world. Together, we decorated our tables and spread out the food that everyone had brought. Our theme was American Thanksgiving, so I brought a turkey, my first attempt at cooking the giant chicken. The American wives brought pies, and others brought fruit and salads.
Our group leader told us of the history of American Thanksgiving, of the 102 persons who first arrived in Plymouth, Mass., on the Mayflower, of the local Indians' kindness and of the many deaths that followed from the hardship of life in this new place.
When she finished, I asked everyone in the group to share their Thanksgiving thought if they were comfortable doing so. Many of us don't speak English well, and besides, where we came from, we do not always share our hearts so readily like our American friends.
The American wives were thankful for God, families and friends. The foreigners, one after another, with their limited English, wanted to give thanks for this country, for the freedom and peace they have experienced here, for the friendship and unconditional love and help they have received from American friends and strangers. Several had tears roll down their cheeks as they spoke.
Tan, a lovely Mainland Chinese visiting scholar, said: "I wake up so happy every morning. I cannot believe I am here in this country. I feel so free. Sometimes, I have to pinch myself."
Chin, a Taiwanese graduate student, young and gentle, shared with us: "Before I came here, I didn't even know how to open a can. I had a very sheltered life. So when I arrived here, I was very fearful for my life. But the Americans take care of me and teach me many things.
Sandi, a Korean nurse, thoughtful and wise, said, with tears in her eyes: "I want to give thanks to my parents who came here with absolutely nothing. They had to work very hard and sacrificed much for my sister and me. And this country made it possible for them to give us what we have now."
And more I wish you could hear with your own ears.
Many of the International Wives were intrigued to hear that their own beginnings in this country were similar to the Pilgrims. They, too, had a very difficult time with learning English, getting a job and finding a niche for themselves, but after all is said and done they would not trade what they are having to go through here for anything else.
As a former refugee, I, too, want to thank you, dear America, for your love for humanity, for the profound understanding that liberty is indeed the core of genuine humanness, and for sharing your resources, your opportunities and your wonderful heritage with the refugees and immigrants of the world.
You also impart to us a willingness to love and to forgive. These are very vulnerable concepts for many of us foreigners who were bound by traditions of getting even. You know, my Mainland Chinese and Taiwanese friends told me that they don't really get along well with each other, but it was Tan who reached out to Chin and invited her to our gatherings. In our international fellowship, I've often seen Croats break bread with Serbs and people from all over the Middle East — people who would be each others' enemies if they were still in their countries — befriend one another.
I meant to send this article for publication on Veterans Day; but I was worried that I would be misunderstood and categorized as a war-lover. I do not like war or any kind of bloodshed because I myself had to go through that hellish experience for the first 20 years of my life. However, I often ask myself, without the men and women who went to war and laid down their lives, even for the peoples they didn't know, would I be able to taste this precious freedom and liberty?
Sometimes I think of America as the children, and myself as the dog, in one of Jesus' parables: "First, let the children eat all they want," Jesus told her, "for it is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to the dogs.
"Yes, Lord," she replied, "but even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs."
Even with the crumbs, I am grateful and satisfied. However, I long to be one of the children, not because America wouldn't let me, but because after 30 years of living and breathing free in this country, I am still going through a healing process. It continues to be a long journey for me to unlearn the fear I grew up in and to learn to truly enjoy the bread.
It was a struggle to put these words on paper, because deep down I am afraid of retaliation. I think the most wonderful gift America offers is freedom from fear. So, I thank you, America. I am the daughter you have adopted and raised to become someone who has faith in life and lives with real purpose. I now dare to dream and to believe that my dreams can come true. Where I came from, the most important wish a child can have is to bring honor to his or her parents. I hope I will bring honor to America.
Sawyer is a writer and speaker. With her friend Pam Proctor, she wrote "Song of Saigon," published by Warner Books in 2003
HoustonChronicle.com - An adopted daughter gives thanks to America
HoustonChronicle.com - An adopted daughter gives thanks to AmericaAn adopted daughter gives thanks to America
A child of refugees counts her many blessings
By ANH V. SAWYER
I wish you could have been with me this morning. It was snowing, not heavily, but enough flurries to prevent many of my international friends from coming to our monthly International Wives Club. Most of them came from the other side of the world where the coldest temperature hovers above 60 degrees.
ADVERTISEMENT
There were only 14 of us, half of the normal gathering. Six were Americans and the rest from different parts of the world. Together, we decorated our tables and spread out the food that everyone had brought. Our theme was American Thanksgiving, so I brought a turkey, my first attempt at cooking the giant chicken. The American wives brought pies, and others brought fruit and salads.
Our group leader told us of the history of American Thanksgiving, of the 102 persons who first arrived in Plymouth, Mass., on the Mayflower, of the local Indians' kindness and of the many deaths that followed from the hardship of life in this new place.
When she finished, I asked everyone in the group to share their Thanksgiving thought if they were comfortable doing so. Many of us don't speak English well, and besides, where we came from, we do not always share our hearts so readily like our American friends.
The American wives were thankful for God, families and friends. The foreigners, one after another, with their limited English, wanted to give thanks for this country, for the freedom and peace they have experienced here, for the friendship and unconditional love and help they have received from American friends and strangers. Several had tears roll down their cheeks as they spoke.
Tan, a lovely Mainland Chinese visiting scholar, said: "I wake up so happy every morning. I cannot believe I am here in this country. I feel so free. Sometimes, I have to pinch myself."
Chin, a Taiwanese graduate student, young and gentle, shared with us: "Before I came here, I didn't even know how to open a can. I had a very sheltered life. So when I arrived here, I was very fearful for my life. But the Americans take care of me and teach me many things.
Sandi, a Korean nurse, thoughtful and wise, said, with tears in her eyes: "I want to give thanks to my parents who came here with absolutely nothing. They had to work very hard and sacrificed much for my sister and me. And this country made it possible for them to give us what we have now."
And more I wish you could hear with your own ears.
Many of the International Wives were intrigued to hear that their own beginnings in this country were similar to the Pilgrims. They, too, had a very difficult time with learning English, getting a job and finding a niche for themselves, but after all is said and done they would not trade what they are having to go through here for anything else.
As a former refugee, I, too, want to thank you, dear America, for your love for humanity, for the profound understanding that liberty is indeed the core of genuine humanness, and for sharing your resources, your opportunities and your wonderful heritage with the refugees and immigrants of the world.
You also impart to us a willingness to love and to forgive. These are very vulnerable concepts for many of us foreigners who were bound by traditions of getting even. You know, my Mainland Chinese and Taiwanese friends told me that they don't really get along well with each other, but it was Tan who reached out to Chin and invited her to our gatherings. In our international fellowship, I've often seen Croats break bread with Serbs and people from all over the Middle East — people who would be each others' enemies if they were still in their countries — befriend one another.
I meant to send this article for publication on Veterans Day; but I was worried that I would be misunderstood and categorized as a war-lover. I do not like war or any kind of bloodshed because I myself had to go through that hellish experience for the first 20 years of my life. However, I often ask myself, without the men and women who went to war and laid down their lives, even for the peoples they didn't know, would I be able to taste this precious freedom and liberty?
Sometimes I think of America as the children, and myself as the dog, in one of Jesus' parables: "First, let the children eat all they want," Jesus told her, "for it is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to the dogs.
"Yes, Lord," she replied, "but even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs."
Even with the crumbs, I am grateful and satisfied. However, I long to be one of the children, not because America wouldn't let me, but because after 30 years of living and breathing free in this country, I am still going through a healing process. It continues to be a long journey for me to unlearn the fear I grew up in and to learn to truly enjoy the bread.
It was a struggle to put these words on paper, because deep down I am afraid of retaliation. I think the most wonderful gift America offers is freedom from fear. So, I thank you, America. I am the daughter you have adopted and raised to become someone who has faith in life and lives with real purpose. I now dare to dream and to believe that my dreams can come true. Where I came from, the most important wish a child can have is to bring honor to his or her parents. I hope I will bring honor to America.
Sawyer is a writer and speaker. With her friend Pam Proctor, she wrote "Song of Saigon," published by Warner Books in 2003
A child of refugees counts her many blessings
By ANH V. SAWYER
I wish you could have been with me this morning. It was snowing, not heavily, but enough flurries to prevent many of my international friends from coming to our monthly International Wives Club. Most of them came from the other side of the world where the coldest temperature hovers above 60 degrees.
ADVERTISEMENT
There were only 14 of us, half of the normal gathering. Six were Americans and the rest from different parts of the world. Together, we decorated our tables and spread out the food that everyone had brought. Our theme was American Thanksgiving, so I brought a turkey, my first attempt at cooking the giant chicken. The American wives brought pies, and others brought fruit and salads.
Our group leader told us of the history of American Thanksgiving, of the 102 persons who first arrived in Plymouth, Mass., on the Mayflower, of the local Indians' kindness and of the many deaths that followed from the hardship of life in this new place.
When she finished, I asked everyone in the group to share their Thanksgiving thought if they were comfortable doing so. Many of us don't speak English well, and besides, where we came from, we do not always share our hearts so readily like our American friends.
The American wives were thankful for God, families and friends. The foreigners, one after another, with their limited English, wanted to give thanks for this country, for the freedom and peace they have experienced here, for the friendship and unconditional love and help they have received from American friends and strangers. Several had tears roll down their cheeks as they spoke.
Tan, a lovely Mainland Chinese visiting scholar, said: "I wake up so happy every morning. I cannot believe I am here in this country. I feel so free. Sometimes, I have to pinch myself."
Chin, a Taiwanese graduate student, young and gentle, shared with us: "Before I came here, I didn't even know how to open a can. I had a very sheltered life. So when I arrived here, I was very fearful for my life. But the Americans take care of me and teach me many things.
Sandi, a Korean nurse, thoughtful and wise, said, with tears in her eyes: "I want to give thanks to my parents who came here with absolutely nothing. They had to work very hard and sacrificed much for my sister and me. And this country made it possible for them to give us what we have now."
And more I wish you could hear with your own ears.
Many of the International Wives were intrigued to hear that their own beginnings in this country were similar to the Pilgrims. They, too, had a very difficult time with learning English, getting a job and finding a niche for themselves, but after all is said and done they would not trade what they are having to go through here for anything else.
As a former refugee, I, too, want to thank you, dear America, for your love for humanity, for the profound understanding that liberty is indeed the core of genuine humanness, and for sharing your resources, your opportunities and your wonderful heritage with the refugees and immigrants of the world.
You also impart to us a willingness to love and to forgive. These are very vulnerable concepts for many of us foreigners who were bound by traditions of getting even. You know, my Mainland Chinese and Taiwanese friends told me that they don't really get along well with each other, but it was Tan who reached out to Chin and invited her to our gatherings. In our international fellowship, I've often seen Croats break bread with Serbs and people from all over the Middle East — people who would be each others' enemies if they were still in their countries — befriend one another.
I meant to send this article for publication on Veterans Day; but I was worried that I would be misunderstood and categorized as a war-lover. I do not like war or any kind of bloodshed because I myself had to go through that hellish experience for the first 20 years of my life. However, I often ask myself, without the men and women who went to war and laid down their lives, even for the peoples they didn't know, would I be able to taste this precious freedom and liberty?
Sometimes I think of America as the children, and myself as the dog, in one of Jesus' parables: "First, let the children eat all they want," Jesus told her, "for it is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to the dogs.
"Yes, Lord," she replied, "but even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs."
Even with the crumbs, I am grateful and satisfied. However, I long to be one of the children, not because America wouldn't let me, but because after 30 years of living and breathing free in this country, I am still going through a healing process. It continues to be a long journey for me to unlearn the fear I grew up in and to learn to truly enjoy the bread.
It was a struggle to put these words on paper, because deep down I am afraid of retaliation. I think the most wonderful gift America offers is freedom from fear. So, I thank you, America. I am the daughter you have adopted and raised to become someone who has faith in life and lives with real purpose. I now dare to dream and to believe that my dreams can come true. Where I came from, the most important wish a child can have is to bring honor to his or her parents. I hope I will bring honor to America.
Sawyer is a writer and speaker. With her friend Pam Proctor, she wrote "Song of Saigon," published by Warner Books in 2003
Power Line: In memory of Dimitrios Gavriel
Power Line: In memory of Dimitrios GavrielThe Lance Cpl.Who Left Wall St.
by Sheelah Kolhatkar and Anna Schneider-Mayerson
No one who knew Dimitrios Gavriel, 29, was surprised when he joined the Marines, even though it seemed an unlikely choice for an Ivy League–educated Manhattan research analyst. In 1998, just a few months after moving to New York City, Mr. Gavriel had written in his diary: "I feel like I’m swimming in a sea with sharks working on Wall Street." Mr. Gavriel meant that in a good way.
"The expression was meant to deliver the message that it’s hard here: ‘It’s like swimming in a sea of sharks, but I am not giving up,’" said Mr. Gavriel’s mother, Penelope Gavriel, 55. What her son meant, Ms. Gavriel insisted, was that working in these conditions was a badge of honor.
"It’s only going to make me a better man," Ms. Gavriel said her son told her.
It was that same love of a challenge—combined with a fiery patriotism and a desire to take action after the death of two friends on Sept. 11, 2001—that prompted Mr. Gavriel to enlist in the Marines in October 2003. Last Thursday, Nov. 18, Lance Cpl. Dimitrios Gavriel was killed during a battle in Falluja. His family said he was awarded two Purple Hearts on Tuesday, Nov. 23.
Corporal Gavriel did not fit the image of the prototypical U.S. soldier in Iraq: the baby-faced teen from red-state America, looking for a ticket out of small-town life. "Dimmy," as his friends and family called him, grew up in several different places, but spent his high-school career at Timberlane Regional High School in Plaistow, N.H. His father, an aerospace engineer, and his mother, a corporate quality-control manager for Dunkin’ Donuts, immigrated from Greece in the 1970’s. (He had one younger sister, Christina, 27.)
Mr. Gavriel attended Brown University, where he concentrated in organizational behavior—the closest area of study to a business major at the artsy school. He also wrestled in the heavyweight division for the school, developing a close circle of athletic friends and fraternity brothers.
He went on, as many young men with certain socioeconomic aspirations do, to enter an analyst program at the investment bank PaineWebber after graduating in 1998, where he became an equity analyst in the real-estate department. From there he joined the research department at J.P. Morgan, then bounced with his research team to Credit Suisse First Boston and finally Banc of America, where he put in 16-hour days crunching numbers and writing research reports until he was laid off in 2002. It was then that Mr. Gavriel made the decision to join the Marines.
One of the biggest questions surrounding Mr. Gavriel’s life and the circumstances of his death is the mystery of why he went to Iraq, considering the other options he had and the certain ugliness of the war. And it’s not as though he was suffering from permanent unemployment woes; in fact, the day before he left to start training, he was offered another finance job, after months of looking.
"He was deeply affected by 9/11, but that was a small part of why he went," said Matt McClelland, 30, Mr. Gavriel’s best friend and fraternity brother from Brown. "It wasn’t about revenge and payback. He supported the war but wasn’t happy with how they were handling it. I think the way he looked at it was, no matter what side of the aisle you stand on, that’s the most important place in the world right now, there’s no way to turn back and we had to succeed, and he wanted to be a part of that."
That rationale for volunteering to fight—for wanting to be a part of something important, something unexpected—was very much part of the way Mr. Gavriel envisioned his life and his own abilities. His mother, in compiling a printed eulogy for her son’s memorial service, included these telling excerpts from Mr. Gavriel’s diary, under the title "An American Hero … Our Hero": "I have heard that Great Men often kept journals—I’d like to be great …. They assure me that whatever the situation or circumstance—Honesty—Discipline—Character—Humility—Timing and Luck will lead to a comfortable situation. This belief put me into College—an Ivy League education—It helped me in sports where I held my own against the best in Division 1 Wrestling—it put me in the capital of the world—New York City—and placed me in the water with sharks—Wall Street. When I was younger—each one of these worlds was a magical place, a myth—I have broken into these worlds however—called them home and sanity."
Conversations with Mr. Gavriel’s friends, family members and former colleagues yield a portrait of a man who chose his friends carefully, but who chose them for the long term; who valued loyalty and the idea of brotherhood; who immersed himself wholeheartedly in whatever he did; who was an oddball prankster; who loved sports, fishing and working and living in New York City. And in some ways he was like every other young banker: toiling day and night on Wall Street, crowding the bars of Murray Hill and the Upper West Side on weekends, and courting the occasional girlfriend.
He spent the majority of his four years in New York living in a small studio on 72nd and Columbus, which he referred to as "a box." It was filled with antiques his parents bought for him at New England yard sales, an acoustic guitar he was teaching himself how to play and group shots from the weddings he had attended.
"I’d never seen someone in so many wedding parties," said Anthony Farinha, 29, a house mate from Brown. When his college friends came to town, he’d host them all at his place, and they’d hit the Upper West Side dive bar Yogi’s, his favorite haunt. They’d play Johnny Cash on the juke box, toss peanut shells on the floor. His drink of choice? Jim Beam.
Mr. Gavriel rode his royal blue BMW 1150 motorcycle to work, and occasionally wore his biker boots to the office. "He didn’t show up in a navy blue pinstriped suit and Hermès tie, because every other banker in the world did," said Alexis Hughes, 31, a former colleague from Wall Street. "He showed up at meetings with his motorcycle helmet. And I think that’s something to respect."
This tiny form of uniform rebellion might have represented Mr. Gavriel’s deeper ambivalence about his white-collar world. Prior to being laid off, in fact, Mr. Gavriel had been reconsidering his options. The Henry Blodget–era scandals on Wall Street discouraged him, piercing a hole in his own sense of self-worth.
In his last months at Banc of America, he’d begun to call it a "jobby-job," which his mother described as his version of a nine-to-five job. He wasn’t satisfied.
"Ordinary, everyday man’s expectations—he wasn’t that," she said proudly. Joining the Marines was a way to grow personally and professionally. "He was looking primarily for leadership skills, integrity, honor. It was a good package deal for him. He felt that the military—specifically the Marines—with the regimen and the strict discipline they have, was the best place that he could learn new skills and hone the ones that he had to allow him to become a new leader."
Lee Schalop, his boss at J.P. Morgan, Credit Suisse and Banc of America, remembered Mr. Gavriel as a tireless, motivated worker, but also said he could tell banking wasn’t his ideal fit.
"It’s clear he didn’t love it the way other people did," Mr. Schalop explained. "I just thought, That is so perfect for him. He was a tough, quiet guy and to me … he sort of represented what the Marines were."
To prepare for the Marines, Mr. Gavriel trained for a year—mostly near a friend’s house in New Jersey, where he loved to go fishing—running 10 miles a day and eventually losing more than 40 pounds. But the Marines initially rejected him, citing lingering knee injuries left over from his wrestling career. He lobbied for the Marines to accept him, and eventually shipped off to boot camp last fall.
So when Mr. Gavriel was offered another finance job the day before he left for training (after a year of not working), by then his decision was firm.
"My wife and I went to see him off to boot camp, in Haverhill, Mass., and he said that he felt it was fate playing with him, that he would have been miserable had he not gone [to boot camp]," said Mr. McClelland.
Still, it wasn’t a blind decision. "We all expressed our reservations and hesitations; he knew what the risks were," said Mr. Farinha.
Once in Iraq, his parents were often unsure about what was happening to their son, clinging to the promise Mr. Gavriel had once made: "They have better use for me than having me run around with a gun," he had told his mother. "His biggest worry was that his mother would find out and worry about him," said Mr. McClelland.
But, in fact, Mr. Gavriel was serving as a rifleman in Iraq. According to Mr. McClelland, he heard from Mr. Gavriel not so long ago, after he had caught a clump of shrapnel in his leg from a grenade explosion. About a week later, they were short men for a mission. Though still limping, Mr. Gavriel went into battle in Falluja.
"There’s no way that I would have conceived that this would have been the outcome," said Mr. Farinha. "He was too talented, too strong, too cunning to ever get hurt."
Mr. Gavriel’s funeral will be held Tuesday, Nov. 30, at Holy Apostles Church in Haverhill, Mass. His burial will take place at 1 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 2, at Arlington National Cemetery.
You may reach Sheelah Kolhatkar and Anna Schneider-Mayerson via email at: skolhatkar@observer.com and anna@observer.com.
by Sheelah Kolhatkar and Anna Schneider-Mayerson
No one who knew Dimitrios Gavriel, 29, was surprised when he joined the Marines, even though it seemed an unlikely choice for an Ivy League–educated Manhattan research analyst. In 1998, just a few months after moving to New York City, Mr. Gavriel had written in his diary: "I feel like I’m swimming in a sea with sharks working on Wall Street." Mr. Gavriel meant that in a good way.
"The expression was meant to deliver the message that it’s hard here: ‘It’s like swimming in a sea of sharks, but I am not giving up,’" said Mr. Gavriel’s mother, Penelope Gavriel, 55. What her son meant, Ms. Gavriel insisted, was that working in these conditions was a badge of honor.
"It’s only going to make me a better man," Ms. Gavriel said her son told her.
It was that same love of a challenge—combined with a fiery patriotism and a desire to take action after the death of two friends on Sept. 11, 2001—that prompted Mr. Gavriel to enlist in the Marines in October 2003. Last Thursday, Nov. 18, Lance Cpl. Dimitrios Gavriel was killed during a battle in Falluja. His family said he was awarded two Purple Hearts on Tuesday, Nov. 23.
Corporal Gavriel did not fit the image of the prototypical U.S. soldier in Iraq: the baby-faced teen from red-state America, looking for a ticket out of small-town life. "Dimmy," as his friends and family called him, grew up in several different places, but spent his high-school career at Timberlane Regional High School in Plaistow, N.H. His father, an aerospace engineer, and his mother, a corporate quality-control manager for Dunkin’ Donuts, immigrated from Greece in the 1970’s. (He had one younger sister, Christina, 27.)
Mr. Gavriel attended Brown University, where he concentrated in organizational behavior—the closest area of study to a business major at the artsy school. He also wrestled in the heavyweight division for the school, developing a close circle of athletic friends and fraternity brothers.
He went on, as many young men with certain socioeconomic aspirations do, to enter an analyst program at the investment bank PaineWebber after graduating in 1998, where he became an equity analyst in the real-estate department. From there he joined the research department at J.P. Morgan, then bounced with his research team to Credit Suisse First Boston and finally Banc of America, where he put in 16-hour days crunching numbers and writing research reports until he was laid off in 2002. It was then that Mr. Gavriel made the decision to join the Marines.
One of the biggest questions surrounding Mr. Gavriel’s life and the circumstances of his death is the mystery of why he went to Iraq, considering the other options he had and the certain ugliness of the war. And it’s not as though he was suffering from permanent unemployment woes; in fact, the day before he left to start training, he was offered another finance job, after months of looking.
"He was deeply affected by 9/11, but that was a small part of why he went," said Matt McClelland, 30, Mr. Gavriel’s best friend and fraternity brother from Brown. "It wasn’t about revenge and payback. He supported the war but wasn’t happy with how they were handling it. I think the way he looked at it was, no matter what side of the aisle you stand on, that’s the most important place in the world right now, there’s no way to turn back and we had to succeed, and he wanted to be a part of that."
That rationale for volunteering to fight—for wanting to be a part of something important, something unexpected—was very much part of the way Mr. Gavriel envisioned his life and his own abilities. His mother, in compiling a printed eulogy for her son’s memorial service, included these telling excerpts from Mr. Gavriel’s diary, under the title "An American Hero … Our Hero": "I have heard that Great Men often kept journals—I’d like to be great …. They assure me that whatever the situation or circumstance—Honesty—Discipline—Character—Humility—Timing and Luck will lead to a comfortable situation. This belief put me into College—an Ivy League education—It helped me in sports where I held my own against the best in Division 1 Wrestling—it put me in the capital of the world—New York City—and placed me in the water with sharks—Wall Street. When I was younger—each one of these worlds was a magical place, a myth—I have broken into these worlds however—called them home and sanity."
Conversations with Mr. Gavriel’s friends, family members and former colleagues yield a portrait of a man who chose his friends carefully, but who chose them for the long term; who valued loyalty and the idea of brotherhood; who immersed himself wholeheartedly in whatever he did; who was an oddball prankster; who loved sports, fishing and working and living in New York City. And in some ways he was like every other young banker: toiling day and night on Wall Street, crowding the bars of Murray Hill and the Upper West Side on weekends, and courting the occasional girlfriend.
He spent the majority of his four years in New York living in a small studio on 72nd and Columbus, which he referred to as "a box." It was filled with antiques his parents bought for him at New England yard sales, an acoustic guitar he was teaching himself how to play and group shots from the weddings he had attended.
"I’d never seen someone in so many wedding parties," said Anthony Farinha, 29, a house mate from Brown. When his college friends came to town, he’d host them all at his place, and they’d hit the Upper West Side dive bar Yogi’s, his favorite haunt. They’d play Johnny Cash on the juke box, toss peanut shells on the floor. His drink of choice? Jim Beam.
Mr. Gavriel rode his royal blue BMW 1150 motorcycle to work, and occasionally wore his biker boots to the office. "He didn’t show up in a navy blue pinstriped suit and Hermès tie, because every other banker in the world did," said Alexis Hughes, 31, a former colleague from Wall Street. "He showed up at meetings with his motorcycle helmet. And I think that’s something to respect."
This tiny form of uniform rebellion might have represented Mr. Gavriel’s deeper ambivalence about his white-collar world. Prior to being laid off, in fact, Mr. Gavriel had been reconsidering his options. The Henry Blodget–era scandals on Wall Street discouraged him, piercing a hole in his own sense of self-worth.
In his last months at Banc of America, he’d begun to call it a "jobby-job," which his mother described as his version of a nine-to-five job. He wasn’t satisfied.
"Ordinary, everyday man’s expectations—he wasn’t that," she said proudly. Joining the Marines was a way to grow personally and professionally. "He was looking primarily for leadership skills, integrity, honor. It was a good package deal for him. He felt that the military—specifically the Marines—with the regimen and the strict discipline they have, was the best place that he could learn new skills and hone the ones that he had to allow him to become a new leader."
Lee Schalop, his boss at J.P. Morgan, Credit Suisse and Banc of America, remembered Mr. Gavriel as a tireless, motivated worker, but also said he could tell banking wasn’t his ideal fit.
"It’s clear he didn’t love it the way other people did," Mr. Schalop explained. "I just thought, That is so perfect for him. He was a tough, quiet guy and to me … he sort of represented what the Marines were."
To prepare for the Marines, Mr. Gavriel trained for a year—mostly near a friend’s house in New Jersey, where he loved to go fishing—running 10 miles a day and eventually losing more than 40 pounds. But the Marines initially rejected him, citing lingering knee injuries left over from his wrestling career. He lobbied for the Marines to accept him, and eventually shipped off to boot camp last fall.
So when Mr. Gavriel was offered another finance job the day before he left for training (after a year of not working), by then his decision was firm.
"My wife and I went to see him off to boot camp, in Haverhill, Mass., and he said that he felt it was fate playing with him, that he would have been miserable had he not gone [to boot camp]," said Mr. McClelland.
Still, it wasn’t a blind decision. "We all expressed our reservations and hesitations; he knew what the risks were," said Mr. Farinha.
Once in Iraq, his parents were often unsure about what was happening to their son, clinging to the promise Mr. Gavriel had once made: "They have better use for me than having me run around with a gun," he had told his mother. "His biggest worry was that his mother would find out and worry about him," said Mr. McClelland.
But, in fact, Mr. Gavriel was serving as a rifleman in Iraq. According to Mr. McClelland, he heard from Mr. Gavriel not so long ago, after he had caught a clump of shrapnel in his leg from a grenade explosion. About a week later, they were short men for a mission. Though still limping, Mr. Gavriel went into battle in Falluja.
"There’s no way that I would have conceived that this would have been the outcome," said Mr. Farinha. "He was too talented, too strong, too cunning to ever get hurt."
Mr. Gavriel’s funeral will be held Tuesday, Nov. 30, at Holy Apostles Church in Haverhill, Mass. His burial will take place at 1 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 2, at Arlington National Cemetery.
You may reach Sheelah Kolhatkar and Anna Schneider-Mayerson via email at: skolhatkar@observer.com and anna@observer.com.
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
Itzaz� Around Here!
Itzaz� Around Here!
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
An Open Letter to Europe
November 17, 2004 -
Hi. Are you nuts?
Forgive me for being so blunt, but your reaction to our reelection of President Bush has been so outrageous that I’m wondering if you have quite literally lost your minds. One of Britain’s largest newspapers ran a headline asking “How Can 59 Million Americans Be So Dumb?”, and commentators in France all seemed to use the same word – bizarre -- to explain the election’s outcome to their readers. In Germany the editors of Die Tageszeitung responded to our vote by writing that “Bush belongs at a war tribunal – not in the White House.” And on a London radio talk show last week one Jeremy Hardy described our President and those of us who voted for him as “stupid, crazy, ignorant, bellicose Christian fundamentalists.”
Of course, you are entitled to whatever views about us that you care to hold. (And lucky for you we Americans aren’t like so many of the Muslims on your own continent; as the late Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh just discovered, make one nasty crack about them and you’re likely to get six bullets pumped into your head and a knife plunged into your chest.) But before you write us off as just a bunch of sweaty, hairy-chested, Bible-thumping morons who are more likely to break their fast by dipping a Krispy Kreme into a diet cola than a biscotti into an espresso – and who inexplicably have won more Nobel prizes than all other countries combined, host 25 or 30 of the world’s finest universities and five or six of the world’s best symphonies, produce wines that win prizes at your own tasting competitions, have built the world’s most vibrant economy, are the world’s only military superpower and, so to speak in our spare time, have landed on the moon and sent our robots to Mars – may I suggest you stop frothing at the mouth long enough to consider just what are these ideas we hold that you find so silly and repugnant?
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
An Open Letter to Europe
November 17, 2004 -
Hi. Are you nuts?
Forgive me for being so blunt, but your reaction to our reelection of President Bush has been so outrageous that I’m wondering if you have quite literally lost your minds. One of Britain’s largest newspapers ran a headline asking “How Can 59 Million Americans Be So Dumb?”, and commentators in France all seemed to use the same word – bizarre -- to explain the election’s outcome to their readers. In Germany the editors of Die Tageszeitung responded to our vote by writing that “Bush belongs at a war tribunal – not in the White House.” And on a London radio talk show last week one Jeremy Hardy described our President and those of us who voted for him as “stupid, crazy, ignorant, bellicose Christian fundamentalists.”
Of course, you are entitled to whatever views about us that you care to hold. (And lucky for you we Americans aren’t like so many of the Muslims on your own continent; as the late Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh just discovered, make one nasty crack about them and you’re likely to get six bullets pumped into your head and a knife plunged into your chest.) But before you write us off as just a bunch of sweaty, hairy-chested, Bible-thumping morons who are more likely to break their fast by dipping a Krispy Kreme into a diet cola than a biscotti into an espresso – and who inexplicably have won more Nobel prizes than all other countries combined, host 25 or 30 of the world’s finest universities and five or six of the world’s best symphonies, produce wines that win prizes at your own tasting competitions, have built the world’s most vibrant economy, are the world’s only military superpower and, so to speak in our spare time, have landed on the moon and sent our robots to Mars – may I suggest you stop frothing at the mouth long enough to consider just what are these ideas we hold that you find so silly and repugnant?
IBN_ALRAFIDAIN: Security & Freedom!!!!
IBN_ALRAFIDAIN: Security & Freedom
Monday, November 22, 2004
Security & Freedom
It is known in politics that there is no permanent friendship but mutual interests. I’ve been thinking what sort of interests may incite the US and UK administrations to keep on backing the ambitious Iraqis for better society. The answer came from Washington last week. President Bush and Prime Minister Blair held a press conference on November 12th.
Mr. Blair said
“ … we have to complete our mission in Iraq, make sure that Iraq is a stable and a democratic country. And I have no doubt at all that whatever the difficulties the terrorists and insurgents, supporters of Saddam Hussein may pose for us, that we will overcome those difficulties -- ourselves, the multinational force, together with the Iraqi government -- and ensure that Iraq can be that democratic, stable state that the vast majority of Iraqis, I know, will want to see…”
Nice words which raise hopes of a brighter future.
A question resided in my mind for long time till the early days of the invasion last year which says ( What makes the US and UK knock Saddam down?).
Saddam served their interests since the early days of his time in power. For example, he fought Iran for them. It is not a secret, Saddam said it clearly “We are fighting Iran on behalf of the civilized world”.
He made it justifiable for them to bring their forces to the region, which floats on oil, after he invaded Kuwait. Even in his last days, he offered them free Iraqi oil for keeping him in power.
Isn’t it better to put someone in power who can maintain their interests regardless the way he rules?
A pressman, in the conference, asked a question coincides with my query. He said
“ What if the Iraqis come up with somebody who's not friendly to the United States, is not a democrat, but it's peaceful, is this something you can live with?”
Mr. Bush answered
“…the Iraqis will have come up with somebody who is duly-elected. In other words, democracy will have spoken. And that person is going to have to listen to the people, not to the whims of a dictator, not to their own desires -- personal desires…”
I don’t know whether Mr. Bush knows the conception of Iraqis, and Arabs, of possessing power or not. It is the concept of the Sheikh who gains power and to grasp firmly, never let go till death.
Anyhow, one should have faith in change. This can be observed in Bush’s words
“…. I readily concede there are skeptics, people who say democracy is not possible in certain societies. But, remember, that was said right after World War II with Japan…”
US & UK represent, together, an influential factor in Mideast and in the world, so no one can plan for a country without taking this factor in his calculations. I’m saying so to put aside comments say (Iraqis have to decide their future), which I admire highly. One should be pragmatic and tries to understand the strategy of the influential factor.
Now let’s see what the new strategy in the region is. It is, according to Mr. Blair
“…there was a view in foreign policy that you dealt with countries on the basis of whatever attitude they had towards you, but really whatever they did within their own countries, that was up to them, and didn't really make a difference to your long-term relationship…” and “…it does mean that there's been a shift, and I think a shift quite dramatically, since 9/11 in the thinking that is informing our view of how we make progress…”
It seems that the events of 9/11 are paradoxical, (Should we thank Bin Laden for his crime?haha..)
A clear point is to be said by Mr. Blair
“…That's why in Iraq we decided when Saddam was removed, we didn't want another hard man coming in, another dictator…” .
It is a firm rule to be followed from now on, but is it a matter of morality. In politics there is no morality but there is interests. Interests is the pivot of politics. So, what kind of interests that makes Mr. Blair set this rule.
He added
“…The people want the freedom (referring to the Iraqis). What we recognized, I think, today, is that we're not going to have our security unless they get that freedom…”
He made it clear (our security=their freedom). Thank you Mr. Bush. Thank you Mr. Blair.
Monday, November 22, 2004
Security & Freedom
It is known in politics that there is no permanent friendship but mutual interests. I’ve been thinking what sort of interests may incite the US and UK administrations to keep on backing the ambitious Iraqis for better society. The answer came from Washington last week. President Bush and Prime Minister Blair held a press conference on November 12th.
Mr. Blair said
“ … we have to complete our mission in Iraq, make sure that Iraq is a stable and a democratic country. And I have no doubt at all that whatever the difficulties the terrorists and insurgents, supporters of Saddam Hussein may pose for us, that we will overcome those difficulties -- ourselves, the multinational force, together with the Iraqi government -- and ensure that Iraq can be that democratic, stable state that the vast majority of Iraqis, I know, will want to see…”
Nice words which raise hopes of a brighter future.
A question resided in my mind for long time till the early days of the invasion last year which says ( What makes the US and UK knock Saddam down?).
Saddam served their interests since the early days of his time in power. For example, he fought Iran for them. It is not a secret, Saddam said it clearly “We are fighting Iran on behalf of the civilized world”.
He made it justifiable for them to bring their forces to the region, which floats on oil, after he invaded Kuwait. Even in his last days, he offered them free Iraqi oil for keeping him in power.
Isn’t it better to put someone in power who can maintain their interests regardless the way he rules?
A pressman, in the conference, asked a question coincides with my query. He said
“ What if the Iraqis come up with somebody who's not friendly to the United States, is not a democrat, but it's peaceful, is this something you can live with?”
Mr. Bush answered
“…the Iraqis will have come up with somebody who is duly-elected. In other words, democracy will have spoken. And that person is going to have to listen to the people, not to the whims of a dictator, not to their own desires -- personal desires…”
I don’t know whether Mr. Bush knows the conception of Iraqis, and Arabs, of possessing power or not. It is the concept of the Sheikh who gains power and to grasp firmly, never let go till death.
Anyhow, one should have faith in change. This can be observed in Bush’s words
“…. I readily concede there are skeptics, people who say democracy is not possible in certain societies. But, remember, that was said right after World War II with Japan…”
US & UK represent, together, an influential factor in Mideast and in the world, so no one can plan for a country without taking this factor in his calculations. I’m saying so to put aside comments say (Iraqis have to decide their future), which I admire highly. One should be pragmatic and tries to understand the strategy of the influential factor.
Now let’s see what the new strategy in the region is. It is, according to Mr. Blair
“…there was a view in foreign policy that you dealt with countries on the basis of whatever attitude they had towards you, but really whatever they did within their own countries, that was up to them, and didn't really make a difference to your long-term relationship…” and “…it does mean that there's been a shift, and I think a shift quite dramatically, since 9/11 in the thinking that is informing our view of how we make progress…”
It seems that the events of 9/11 are paradoxical, (Should we thank Bin Laden for his crime?haha..)
A clear point is to be said by Mr. Blair
“…That's why in Iraq we decided when Saddam was removed, we didn't want another hard man coming in, another dictator…” .
It is a firm rule to be followed from now on, but is it a matter of morality. In politics there is no morality but there is interests. Interests is the pivot of politics. So, what kind of interests that makes Mr. Blair set this rule.
He added
“…The people want the freedom (referring to the Iraqis). What we recognized, I think, today, is that we're not going to have our security unless they get that freedom…”
He made it clear (our security=their freedom). Thank you Mr. Bush. Thank you Mr. Blair.
Monday, November 22, 2004
Sunday, November 21, 2004
Jack Kelly: Victory in Fallujah
Jack Kelly: Victory in Fallujah: "Jack Kelly: Victory in Fallujah
Iraq's Iwo Jima gets scant media respect
Sunday, November 21, 2004
The rule of thumb for the last century or so has been that for a guerrilla force to remain viable, it must inflict seven casualties on the forces of the government it is fighting for each casualty it sustains, says former Canadian army officer John Thompson, managing director of the Mackenzie Institute, a think tank that studies global conflicts.
Jack Kelly is national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio (jkelly@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1476).
By that measure, the resistance in Iraq has had a bad week. American and Iraqi government troops have killed at least 1,200 fighters in Fallujah, and captured 1,100 more. Those numbers will grow as mop-up operations continue.
These casualties were inflicted at a cost (so far) of 56 Coalition dead (51 Americans), and just over 300 wounded, of whom about a quarter have returned to duty.
'That kill ratio would be phenomenal in any [kind of] battle, but in an urban environment, it's revolutionary,' said retired Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, perhaps America's most respected writer on military strategy. 'The rule has been that [in urban combat] the attacking force would suffer between a quarter and a third of its strength in casualties.'
The victory in Fallujah was also remarkable for its speed, Peters said. Speed was necessary, he said, 'because you are fighting not just the terrorists, but a hostile global media.'
Fallujah ranks up there with Iwo Jima, Inchon and Hue as one of the greatest triumphs of American arms, though you'd have a hard time discerning that from what you read in the newspapers.
The swift capture of Fallujah is taxing the imagination of Arab journalists and -- sadly -- our own. How does one portray a remarkable American victory as if it were of little consequence, or even a defeat? For CNN's Walter Rodgers, camped out in front the main U.S. military hospital in Germany, you do this by emphasizing American casualties.
For The New York Times and The Washington Post, you do this by emphasizing conflict elsewhere in Iraq.
But the news organs that liken temporary terrorist success in Mosul (the police stations they overran were recaptured the next day) with what happened to the terrorists in Fallujah is false equivalence of the worst kind. If I find a quarter in the street, it doesn't make up for having lost $1,000 in a poker game the night before.
The resistance has suffered a loss of more than 2,000 combatants, out of a total force estimated by U.S. Central Command at about 5,000 (other estimates are higher) as well as its only secure base in the country. But both the Arab media and ours emphasize that the attack on Fallujah has made a lot of Arabs mad. By this logic, once we've killed all the terrorists, they'll be invincible.
'The experience of human history has been the more people you kill, the weaker they get,' Thompson noted.
For the Arab and European media, the old standby is to allege American atrocities. In this they have had invaluable assistance from Kevin Sites, a free lancer working for NBC, who filmed a Marine shooting a wounded Iraqi feigning death in a mosque his squad was clearing. Al Jazeera has been showing the footage around the clock.
The mutilated body of Margaret Hassan, the aid worker kidnapped in Baghdad last month, has been discovered in Fallujah, as have torture chambers. Residents of Fallujah have been describing a reign of terror by the insurgents. But it is the Marine's alleged 'war crime' that is garnering the most attention.
The Marine did the right thing. The terrorist he shot was not a prisoner, was not attempting to surrender and was not a lawful combatant under the Geneva Convention. The squad had other rooms to clear, and couldn't afford to leave an enemy in their rear. The San Jose Mercury News described how Lance Cpl. Jeramy Ailes was shot to death by an Iraqi who was 'playing possum.'
'It's a safety issue pure and simple,' explained former Navy SEAL Matthew Heidt. 'After assaulting through a target, put a security round in everybody's head.'
Journalists quick to judge the Marine are more forgiving when it comes to the terrorists. 'They're not bad guys, especially, just people who disagree with us,' said MSNBC's Chris Matthews.
And journalists wonder why we are less popular than used car salesmen."
Iraq's Iwo Jima gets scant media respect
Sunday, November 21, 2004
The rule of thumb for the last century or so has been that for a guerrilla force to remain viable, it must inflict seven casualties on the forces of the government it is fighting for each casualty it sustains, says former Canadian army officer John Thompson, managing director of the Mackenzie Institute, a think tank that studies global conflicts.
Jack Kelly is national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio (jkelly@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1476).
By that measure, the resistance in Iraq has had a bad week. American and Iraqi government troops have killed at least 1,200 fighters in Fallujah, and captured 1,100 more. Those numbers will grow as mop-up operations continue.
These casualties were inflicted at a cost (so far) of 56 Coalition dead (51 Americans), and just over 300 wounded, of whom about a quarter have returned to duty.
'That kill ratio would be phenomenal in any [kind of] battle, but in an urban environment, it's revolutionary,' said retired Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, perhaps America's most respected writer on military strategy. 'The rule has been that [in urban combat] the attacking force would suffer between a quarter and a third of its strength in casualties.'
The victory in Fallujah was also remarkable for its speed, Peters said. Speed was necessary, he said, 'because you are fighting not just the terrorists, but a hostile global media.'
Fallujah ranks up there with Iwo Jima, Inchon and Hue as one of the greatest triumphs of American arms, though you'd have a hard time discerning that from what you read in the newspapers.
The swift capture of Fallujah is taxing the imagination of Arab journalists and -- sadly -- our own. How does one portray a remarkable American victory as if it were of little consequence, or even a defeat? For CNN's Walter Rodgers, camped out in front the main U.S. military hospital in Germany, you do this by emphasizing American casualties.
For The New York Times and The Washington Post, you do this by emphasizing conflict elsewhere in Iraq.
But the news organs that liken temporary terrorist success in Mosul (the police stations they overran were recaptured the next day) with what happened to the terrorists in Fallujah is false equivalence of the worst kind. If I find a quarter in the street, it doesn't make up for having lost $1,000 in a poker game the night before.
The resistance has suffered a loss of more than 2,000 combatants, out of a total force estimated by U.S. Central Command at about 5,000 (other estimates are higher) as well as its only secure base in the country. But both the Arab media and ours emphasize that the attack on Fallujah has made a lot of Arabs mad. By this logic, once we've killed all the terrorists, they'll be invincible.
'The experience of human history has been the more people you kill, the weaker they get,' Thompson noted.
For the Arab and European media, the old standby is to allege American atrocities. In this they have had invaluable assistance from Kevin Sites, a free lancer working for NBC, who filmed a Marine shooting a wounded Iraqi feigning death in a mosque his squad was clearing. Al Jazeera has been showing the footage around the clock.
The mutilated body of Margaret Hassan, the aid worker kidnapped in Baghdad last month, has been discovered in Fallujah, as have torture chambers. Residents of Fallujah have been describing a reign of terror by the insurgents. But it is the Marine's alleged 'war crime' that is garnering the most attention.
The Marine did the right thing. The terrorist he shot was not a prisoner, was not attempting to surrender and was not a lawful combatant under the Geneva Convention. The squad had other rooms to clear, and couldn't afford to leave an enemy in their rear. The San Jose Mercury News described how Lance Cpl. Jeramy Ailes was shot to death by an Iraqi who was 'playing possum.'
'It's a safety issue pure and simple,' explained former Navy SEAL Matthew Heidt. 'After assaulting through a target, put a security round in everybody's head.'
Journalists quick to judge the Marine are more forgiving when it comes to the terrorists. 'They're not bad guys, especially, just people who disagree with us,' said MSNBC's Chris Matthews.
And journalists wonder why we are less popular than used car salesmen."
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