And Lukewarm Was His Name-O

Photo courtesy of Gage Skidmore

You don’t need a psychoanalyst to detect the latent theme running through the endorsements currently showering Mitt Romney like broken rain gutters pouring down on a concrete toadstool. And that premise is ennui. “Mitt? Really? Yeah. Okay. Whatever.” Makes tepid sound like a crazed bellow. With wild enthusiasm as MIA as World Series trophies in the Wrigley Field display case. Within the last 104 years, that is.

Someone should warn NASA because we are approaching stratospheric heights of apathy here. The only thing these highly solicited testimonials have accomplished is given a face to listless. The guy needs industrial-strength hip waders to slog through the thigh-high lethargy.

George W. Bush carved a precious three seconds out of his busy schedule to make a momentous announcement from the inside of an elevator telling an ABC news crew, “I’m for Mitt Romney” as the doors closed on him. Not that the candidate-in-waiting was particularly lusting after 44′s imprimatur, which some might call the Kiss of Campaign Death. But it effectively does nail down the eminently sought-after spoiled rich kid vote.

Rick Santorum got around to his ringing endorsement 13 paragraphs into a 16-paragraph email sent out to supporters after midnight. The only subterfuge he neglected to employ was to disguise it in semaphoric code. And these are Romney’s big-time Republican buddies. You’d think they were having their teeth pulled with families held at gunpoint on a listing catwalk yawning over an erupting caldera.

It’s been like that ever since the nominee became presumptive. Politicians oozing from the woodwork with the same kind of energetic frenzy fifth-grade school girls normally reserve for haggis-flavored ice cream studded with garlic pickle chips.

You got to know this is just the beginning of a series of sluggishly recalcitrant pledges of approbation. Here are some other passion-challenged tributes we can expect over the coming weeks.

“Mitt Romney. Had to go with somebody, right?”

“Not the brainwashed Romney. That was his dad.”

“Only two of Mitt Romney’s five sons think he’s a soulless Cyborg.”

“May be out of touch with the mainstream but looks pretty good tanning on the embankment.”

“Mitt Romney. Hey, it could be worse.”

“Not the kind of guy who would hold you down and cut your hair, unless you really were asking for it.”

“Pretty down to earth for someone building a 57-room mansion with a car elevator.”

“Will do for America what he did for Bain Capital.”

“Survived the mean streets of Bloomfield Hills.”

“Hardly ever sneaks out at night to kick homeless guys. Anymore.”

“A man who stands by his previous statements, no matter what they are.”

“Mormons are just like Christians, aren’t they?”

“Mitt Romney. Not that bad, when you consider the alternatives.”

“He’s no John McCain.”

“Going to make the world safe for rich people.”

“Mitt Romney. When good things happen to bland people.”

“He’s Oxymormonic!”

“Hasn’t strapped a dog to the roof of his car in over 28 years.”

“Mitt Romney. He’s got gas money.”

“Never ridden a bus in his entire life.”

“Looks more like Gordon Gekko than Michael Douglas ever did.”

“Mitt Romney. A man who feels strongly about both sides of many issues.”

The New York Times says Emmy-nominated comedian and writer Will Durst “is quite possibly the best political satirist working in the country today.” Check out the website: willdurst.com to buy his book or find out about upcoming stand-up performances.

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The Brief: Top Texas News for May 15, 2012

Photo courtesy of Shane Pope

New in The Texas Tribune:

Dewhurst’s ad:

Cruz’s radio ad:

  • Updated Interactive: Compare Texas Universities by Graduation Rate: Texas higher education officials released the state’s second annual higher education almanac on Tuesday — including records on part-time students — and we’ve added the latest year of data to our interactive graphic. We’ve also made it possible for you to share links associated with specific visualizations.
  • TWIA Board Approves Premium Rate Hike: “The Texas Windstorm Insurance Association’s board of directors approved a 5 percent premium rate increase Tuesday and is still considering a proposal with staggered premium rates.”

Culled:

  • George W. Bush: ‘I’m for Mitt Romney’ (ABC News): “Mitt Romney has the support of George W. Bush. ‘I’m for Mitt Romney,’ Bush told ABC News this morning as the doors of an elevator closed on him, after he gave a speech on human rights a block from his old home — the White House.”
  • Kay Bailey Hutchison officially endorses Romney (Houston Chronicle): “Retiring U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison announced Tuesday that she is officially and ‘enthusiastically’ endorsing presumed GOP nominee Mitt Romney for president. The Senator has hinted at backing the former Massachusetts governor since early this year, but had not officially endorsed the candidate. In an interview with CNN, Hutchison cited Romney’s business experience as a key to revamping the dragging economy.”
  • State Rep. Veronica Gonzales to become VP at UTPA (Rio Grande Guardian): “State Rep. Veronica Gonzales is to become vice president for university advancement at the University of Texas-Pan American. ‘I am very excited about this appointment. It will allow me to give back to my community,’ Gonzales told the Guardian. … Gov. Rick Perry could call a special election for the House District 41 seat Gonzales is vacating. If he does, the special election could be held in November, around the same time as the general election. Alternatively, Perry could leave the seat vacant until the general election is held.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at http://www.texastribune.org/texas-newspaper/texas-news/evening-brief-texas-headlines-may-15-2012/.

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Our View: Deport Criminals, Not Schoolgirls

Photo courtesy of Craig Cloutier

Oh, the outrage. President Barack Obama wants to deport criminals, before ousting schoolgirls with immigration problems. The audacity of this man.

The Colorado Springs Gazette laid out last Sunday the extraordinary similarities of Obama and former President George W. Bush, which speak poorly of each on most counts. These big-spending interventionists are the same on nearly all important issue, distinguished more by red-team/blue-team affiliation than anything of substance.

On one policy, however, we applaud the similarity. Each man has a rational approach to immigration.

Bush, a Texan fluent in Spanish, has an affinity for Mexico. As president, he wanted reasonable immigration reforms that would enable our country to benefit from productive, noncriminal aliens. He was pressured by extremists on the right — mostly talk radio hosts pandering for ratings — to show more hostility toward illegal immigrants. Deport them all and keep them out, the talking heads demanded. Don’t adjust quotas. View all immigrant babies as mere “anchors,” unworthy of their citizenship. Bush mostly held his ground, understanding that we have outgrown old immigration quotas and need immigrant productivity and procreation in order to thrive.

Obama’s immigration philosophy is nearly identical. He would like to see order at the border but refuses to demonize illegal immigrants and their kids. He understands that visas expire. He knows that crossing the border without permission is a misdemeanor, while subsequent residency is a noncriminal civil infraction. He views America’s immigration dilemma with a healthy perspective.

Talk radio hosts are riling up the masses this week because Obama said deportation efforts should focus on criminals. He was at a town hall meeting in a Washington school, when a student using Skype asked why students like her continue to receive deportation letters.

Obama said: “We have redesigned our enforcement practices under the law to make sure that we’re focusing primarily on criminals, and so our deportations of criminals are up about 70 percent. Our deportations of non-criminals are down, and that’s because we want to focus our resources on those folks who are destructive to the community. And for a young person like that young woman that we just spoke to, who’s going to school doing all the right things, we want them to succeed.”

The moderator asked if Obama could use an executive order to stop student deportations. Obama explained that it would “not conform with my appropriate role as president.”

“That does not mean, though, that we can’t make decisions, for example, to emphasize enforcement on those who’ve engaged in criminal activity,” Obama said.

That’s about as benign and commonsensical as a statement can be. Our country hasn’t the wherewithal to deport all illegal immigrants, but it can and should deport some. Our country, therefore, gets the most benefit by first deporting those who commit crimes. Lose the criminals, then worry about successful schoolgirls.

Leading radio jocks and bloggers went berserk. How dare Obama suggest any of them succeed? The normally sound-minded radio host Jason Lewis told us they’re all criminals.

No, they are not. A student is not a criminal for overstaying a visa, not by any stretch. It is illegal to double park, but not a crime. Likewise, it is illegal to reside in the United States without permission, but not a crime. To focus deportation efforts on criminal immigrants is like placing more emphasis on drunk drivers than on jaywalkers. We are a country of civil law and criminal law. Not all illegal activity is crime, and the vast majority of illegal immigrants have not been caught committing crimes. Let’s worry most about those who have. It’s common sense.

Bush and Obama are similar and weak. On immigration, they are wise and strong.

Republished from the Colorado Springs Gazette

 

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Bill O’Reilly: Leadership

This time next year, we could have the two presidential candidates in play. Only God knows who the Republicans will decide upon, but President Obama is a lock on the Democratic side. The big issues that will most likely decide the election of 2012 are the economy and leadership. And now there’s new data on the leadership front.

According to a Gallup poll released this week, Obama has fallen more than 20 points in the leadership category in less than two years. Right now, 52 percent of Americans believe he is a strong and decisive leader, while 47 percent say he is not. Bad news for the prez.

Truthfully, much of the leadership issue these days is driven by style. The last strong leader America had was President Reagan, who came across as tough but not belligerent. Reagan fired the air traffic controllers, thereby busting the union, demanded that the Soviets tear down the wall in East Germany, and generally governed with a good-natured confidence. His acting experience helped him project authority and benevolence at the same time — not an easy thing to do.

President Bush the Elder came across rather fatherly, even when waging war against Saddam Hussein. Bill Clinton had little authority because of his controversies. And Bush the Younger‘s battlefield setbacks eroded his leadership image.

Obama is a deliberative leader, a man who seeks consensus before acting. He took months before committing more troops to Afghanistan, did not alter the Bush strategy in Iraq even after criticizing it, and seemed to be indecisive about Libya. French President Nicolas Sarkozy was the guy who drove the military action, with Obama hitching a ride on the Frenchman’s passion.

In turbulent times, people naturally look for leaders who can bring them comfort and reassurance. At this point, Obama is having trouble doing that, and the Gallup poll reflects that reality. Obama’s style is cool and sometimes distant. When waging war or trying to prevent economic disaster, detachment can be detrimental. Rallying the troops usually wins the day.

President Lincoln was the nation’s strongest leader, with George Washington second and Franklin Roosevelt third. All three had huge problems to solve and did so with courage and bold decision making. Lincoln, in particular, was constantly under siege. If the Confederates had won the Battle of Gettysburg, the union might have been shattered forever. Lincoln knew that. Yet, he remained strong and in control and did what he had to do to hold the country together — even suspending habeas corpus.

Obama is a big admirer of Lincoln, as is George W. Bush. Both men understand that true leadership requires stone-cold courage and brilliant decision-making capability. Most human beings fall short in both categories, which is why true leadership is rarely on display.

But if it is in 2012, the person who shows it will be president.

Veteran TV news anchor Bill O’Reilly is host of the Fox News show “The O’Reilly Factor” and author of the book “Pinheads and Patriots: Where You Stand in the Age of Obama.” To find out more about Bill O’Reilly, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com. This column originates on the website www.billoreilly.com.

 

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Don’t Use The ‘Free Market’ As An Excuse

Illustration courtesy of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

This week, AT&T announced its plans to buy their competitor T-Mobile. Now it’s up to regulators to approve the merger.

Politicians pandering to the Tea Party love to talk about a free market. It sounds sexy. It sounds like wealth and freedom got married and had a perfect concept. If capitalism is a religion – free market is the savior. This free market will punish bad behavior and reward virtue. The free market knows all and endows accordingly. We don’t need to worry because the free market will figure it all out.

What is never mentioned when propping up the immaculate free market is the defining characteristic of the idea – honesty. It’s transparency and allowing shareholders and consumers access to real information, good or bad. A free market is essentially crowdsourcing or democratizing business. And you can’t make informed decisions without accurate information. That’s a tenet lawmakers and business tycoons tend to glaze over when touting their “principles.”

Deregulation is also a tenet of free market economics – it’s keeping the government out of business. Deregulation has proven to be much more popular than its “honesty” counterpart.

And if the word “deregulation” brings to mind Gulf seagulls suffocating in crude oil and rows of tract homes in foreclosure, then you have the gist of it. The housing bust crashing on bundles of what became toxic assets was not technically the “free market.” It was a horribly mutated half-breed hybrid of the venerated free market.

And the free market can fix it just like Sasquatch can fix it. Meaning: they can’t. Because no matter how much they’re talked about neither exist.

The housing crash was a semi-legal, giant and complex Ponzi scheme. Yes, the Ponzi scheme, named after 19th century-born fraudster Charles Ponzi who fittingly didn’t use the name Ponzi while doing his namesake scheme.

The truth is we don’t have a “free market.” Never have and probably never will. So when politicians like representatives Paul Ryan and Michele Bachmann talk about how this savior-in-theory can deliver us – it can’t. Using this super sexy sounding concept of “the free market” is exactly what got us demonstrably bad policy. Just like the inadequate regulation and insufficient honesty, which caused our current gigantic recession.

The debate over regulations is always “less vs. more.” Instead, how about better regulations and more of those?

So AT&T, a huge cell phone provider, wants to become even bigger. The first thing you need to know is, according to OpenSecrets.org, AT&T is the number two “heavy hitter” of the last 20 years. The company has given to both parties a total of $46,292,670. The top single recipient was Speaker of the House John Boehner – a politician who loves talking about the illusory free market, occasionally with a dry eye. Second, AT&T was already broken up after an anti-trust case in the 1980s. AT&T regrouped and started growing bigger in 2005.

In the next 12 months there will be debate over whether regulators should allow this giant merger. One of the arguments for the merger will be: “This is the free market at work.” How rewarding a giant company for being a giant is a good thing and the government (i.e., the people who’ve been receiving campaign donations from said giant company) should stay out of it. It’s akin to saying we should feed horses what we feed unicorns – because look how great unicorns are.

The bottom line is: Lack of competition hurts consumers. The cell phone companies are already unique in that if their service is awful (as an iPhone user I can testify that with AT&T there’s no “if”) – you have to PAY to leave them. It’s like if a restaurant gave you food poisoning, and you had to pay them $200 to let you stop eating there. Congress could have outlawed this practice – but they didn’t.

Already, all cell phone companies except T-Mobile were compliant in George W. Bush’s NSA warrantless wiretapping – so much for the government staying out of business.

Now if regulators approve of this purchase, a company which already doesn’t have to work that hard for our business will have to work even less. While this is great for AT&T – it’s not great for us. AT&T should not be allowed to buy T-Mobile.

And politicians shouldn’t be allowed to say this anti-competition, secret, virtual monopoly is somehow their mythical “free market.”

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A Look Back At President George H.W. Bush

 

Photo courtesy of Marion Doss

He’s 86 now, his eyebrows silver and his legs weakened by Parkinson’s-like symptoms. But as George Herbert Walker Bush approaches his twilight years, the untold tales of his life of public service are beginning to spill out.

 

Americans grown weary of political spin and attack-dog politics are coming to embrace the 41st president in ways they didn’t when he actually occupied the Oval Office, or before that, when he served as Ronald Reagan’s loyal right-hand man.

And Democrats who once mocked the Bush political dynasty are leading the charge. President Barack Obama has saluted the elder Bush several times, mostly recently bestowing on the Bush family patriarch America’s highest civilian honor last month at the White House.

And Bill Clinton, who ousted Bush from office in 1992 and later became his friend, is slated to lead a celebration Monday (March 21) at Washington’s Kennedy Center to honor Bush’s volunteer efforts through the Points of Light Foundation.

Former first lady Barbara Bush “likes to refer to me as her errant son, the black sheep of the family,” Clinton told the Center for Public Integrity in emailed answers to questions on Friday. “I have always liked and admired President Bush. In the last decade, I have come to love him and the time we share.

Clinton also sees in Bush a civility and pragmatism absent in today’s politics.

“I think people appreciate the leadership he provided in the critical years after the Berlin Wall fell, supporting democracy in Russia, the reunification of Germany, and the reaffirmation of the NATO alliance; his success in building a real coalition to win the first Gulf War.” But as much as any of that, Clinton said, people have come to value “the contrast between his kind of conservatism and that which dominates today – less extreme in substance, less harsh in rhetoric, more open to reasonable compromise.”

The questions that once dogged Bush’s political ascension — Iran-Contra, the “wimp” factor and “read my lips” to name a few — are long since faded to memory as Americans now are reminded of acts of heroism, bipartisanship, political selflessness and stubborn discipline revealed by close friends seeking to cement his place in history.

One such dramatic episode takes on new significance as Obama this weekend departs on his first trip to Latin America, eyeing new threats to democracy born during the strife and violence of the 1970s and 1980s.

In December 1983, then-Vice President Bush slipped away from a Latin America trip on a secret mission known only to a handful of U.S. leaders — his absence hardly noticed amidst the season’s normal holiday fare.

El Salvador’s military, embroiled in civil war, was losing American confidence as reports multiplied of human rights abuses and murders of civilians carried out by death squads of soldiers. And emotions were still raw over the unsolved killings of three Roman Catholic nuns and a laywoman.

Bush and a small contingent of White House aides and Secret Service agents whirled through the Salvadoran mountains aboard two Army Black hawk helicopters.

Their task was to deliver a stern warning to the Salvadoran military commanders from Reagan: end the murders and human rights abuses and allow fully free and democratic elections or the United States would instantly cut off aid in the fight against Cuban-backed communist guerillas.

Air Force II landed at San Salvador’s airport and Bush was then escorted onto a green Army Black Hawk chopper — absent the vice presidential seal. As the chopper wound its way through the mountains, the pilots maintained an unusually high altitude — about 5,000 feet — hoping to avoid anti-aircraft and small arms fire from rebels on the ground below.

For the White House advance staff, the setting seemed more than a bit incongruous for a man just one heartbeat away from the U.S. presidency: a sultry mountainside villa with faded pink concrete walls that was part of a compound purportedly used by San Salvador’s president as a residence.

When Bush’s advance team scouted the location a few days earlier, they thought they’d stumbled onto the set of a Grade B horror movie.

The carpets were stained with a brown, bloody color, and there were similar spatter stains on the walls. “It looked like a meeting had gone terribly wrong and no one survived,” recalled Antonio Benedi, one of Bush’s most trusted advance aides, who accompanied him on the mission.

Added Hector Irastorza, a White House aide who went with the security detail to inspect the presidential meeting place: “There was blood all over, and things were turned upside down. There were bullet holes in the wall. It was pretty fresh. It was clear they had had a skirmish there.”

“My first thought,” Irastorza recalled in an interview Friday, “was, ‘Is he (Bush) really going to meet with the people who did this?’”

Benedi and his team pondered calling off the get-together, but no one wanted to tell Bush, a former World War II bomber pilot who survived being shot down in the Pacific, that they were afraid for his safety.

Bush’s stated reason for the Latin American trip was the typical pro-democracy boosterism reserved for a vice president — attending the inaugural celebration of Raúl Alfonsín, Argentina’s democratically elected president.

Only a handful of top Reagan and Bush aides were privy to the Salvadoran side-trip and the planned confrontation with military commanders who supervised the death squads.

A Marine officer assigned to the National Security Council — who a few short years later would burst into the national limelight as the unrepentant central figure of the Iran-Contra affair — was among the chosen few. Then-Major Oliver North was at Bush’s side for much of the journey.

The night before the Salvadoran mission, Bush retreated from the Argentinian festivities to the U.S. embassy. Seemingly at ease, he challenged his traveling partners to a game of low-stakes poker.

“Bush pulled a Harry Truman, and asked if anyone wanted to play poker,” North recalled in an interview this week. “I told him my personal limit is $5, and before long I’m out of the game, real quick.”

The next morning Bush’s jet departed for El Salvador, and the crew made a re-fueling stop in Panama.

There, Bush asked Panamanian strong-arm man Manuel Noriega — who years later Bush, as president, would oust from power in a military invasion — to meet him at the airport for a lecturing on the need for more democracy in the Central American nation.

I watched George H.W. Bush confront the man directly about the drug trade, his support for bad people in Latin America and the need to bring real democracy to Panama,” North recalled.

Then it was off to El Salvador. The official report of the trip states that Bush visited with the Salvadoran president Álvaro Magaña and urged him to disband the so-called death squads, even giving a tough speech before he left the country.

But the full mission was the stuff of thrillers. The Black Hawks landed in a grassy field near the presidential villa. Surrounded by peaks, the location offered a reminder of the violent divisions inside the country at a moment when the military was locked in a stalemate with the communist rebels. The sound of fire from a Salvadoran gunship — perhaps ten to 15 kilometers away — was faintly audible as the vice president strutted inside.

The Salvadorans had spruced the villa’s walls with a fresh coat of paint and installed a new carpet.

After some brief pleasantries, Bush retreated to a room for a private discussion with the Salvadoran president.

Outside in the hallways, a couple of Secret Service agents grew alarmed as a large number of Salvadoran military commanders — each with pistols in holsters and some with semiautomatic rifles slung across their shoulders — entered the villa, preparing to meet the vice president.

A commotion broke out as the soldiers refused the Secret Service agents’ request to leave their arms outside. Bush poked his head out to ask for quiet.

We Americans were outgunned 5-to-1 and the prospect of having the VP deliver a message that they clearly didn’t want to hear was stark at best,” North recalled.

Aides suggested to Bush that perhaps the session be called off for security reasons. The vice president refused. “That is what we are here for. We’re here so they get the message,” North recalled Bush saying.

Soon, an entourage of military commanders filed into the room with their sun-faded camouflaged fatigues and weapons. Some stood, as there weren’t enough chairs to go around.

After brief pleasantries, an animated Bush slammed his fist on the table as he condemned the killings of the nuns and other human rights abuses. His message and tenor were unmistakable.

The vice president “told these commanders that their actions would have to stop immediately in order to restore the United States confidence in their ability to fight this war. Otherwise, the US would be forced to cut off aid,” Benedi recalled.

North said the scene was surreal. “They’re all senior guys, some of whom we had good reason to believe were involved with deaths squads. And everybody — to include the VP — knew that,” he said.

“He delivers this incredibly stark message, ‘If the killings don’t stop and you don’t hold elections, we are going to cut off our aid and it will stop you dead in your tracks and you know what that means.”

Bush dispatched the message and boarded his Black Hawk again, hoping the abrupt visit would make a lasting impression. North had handed the military leaders a list of death squad leaders the Americans wanted removed. And then they were off.

Within two weeks, the Salvadoran army reported it had begun disbanding its notorious death squads — and U.S. aid continued to flow as reports from private groups and the United Nations indicated that human rights abuses grew more infrequent. A democratic election was held the next year.

Cynthia Arnson, director of Latin American Programs at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said it had long been rumored that Bush met privately with Salvadoran military leaders and the detailed account emerging today fits Bush’s mission to deliver a blunt mission.

She said human rights and UN reports at the time clearly indicated human rights abuses went down after the Bush visit and Democratic elections occurred successfully. But recently declassified document shows the CIA was less convinced of the progress.

Still, Bush’s visit with the military commanders “was a dramatic demonstration that the most senior levels of the Reagan administration saw curbing death squad violence as the key to accomplishing U.S. goals in El Salvador,” Arnson told the Center.

The civil war, however, would rage on for years and reports of deaths squads returned during Bush’s presidency, when the 1989 slayings of Jesuit priests renewed human rights concerns.

Bush ultimately brought closure to the Salvadoran conflict, traveling in person to San Salvador in 1992 shortly after the government and rebels signed a peace accord that brought democracy to the central American country — a peace that holds even today amidst continued violence and strife inside the country.

Julia Sweig, a Latin America policy expert on the Council of Foreign Relations, said Friday that Bush as president ultimately “put the full force of his office behind the peace process and disarming both the Salvadoran right wing squads and the guerillas.”

On the helicopter ride back from the 1983 sojourn, Bush kept his matter of fact tone, refusing to acknowledge even for a second the risks he had just taken.

But his team was quickly reminded. Just two weeks later the veteran Army pilot who flew Bush’s chopper was shot dead as he sat in his cockpit in San Salvador, the victim of a communist rebel gunman, Benedi recalled.

Bush prefers to keep such stories to himself, seldom venturing into public save for an occasional sporting event or social dinner. He declined an interview request from the Center.

Mostly gone from public memory is Bush’s infamous portrayal of himself as a passive bystander in the Iran-Contra scandal or the Newsweek cover questioning whether the president-to-be was a “wimp.” Faded too are the memories of a painful 1992 re-election loss or the chronic attack ads playing back Bush’s broken “read my lips” promise on taxes.

Bush wasn’t afraid to mix it up politically — as Republican Party chairman he was a fierce defender of Richard Nixon during the early Watergate scandal and he later knocked Michael Dukakis out as a presidential candidate with the Willie Horton soft-on-crime line of attack.

But he also possessed a willingness to compromise with Democrats that often alienated his conservative base, as well as an aw-shucks, aloof but humble side that at times seemed awkward for a man at the pinnacle of powers.

A fumbled phrase, an awkward joke or lines like, “Not going to do it. Wouldn’t be prudent” gave comedian Dana Carvey plenty to parody on Saturday Night Live. But today those quirks have also given the 41st president a tangible, human quality.

“At the time, they didn’t seem to be leadership qualities to the public. They didn’t seem to have impact. Some even saw it as weaknesses,” said Roman Popadiuk, who worked alongside Bush in the White House as a national security spokesman and today heads his presidential library foundation.

“But now people are looking back at how he treated people and how Washington is now. And they’re appreciating how he harkened back to an era in which people were treated with respect and in which politics had some civility,” Popadiuk said. “The mutually cooperative way he tried to address things, the calm way he handled things in crisis, people see it today as a strength.”

Former President Clinton remembers back in 1983 when he visited the Bush family at its vacation compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, and his daughter Chelsea needed a bathroom.
“The then-Vice President took her by the hand and led her straight to the bathroom. I was so impressed,” Clinton recalled.

Two decades later while returning with the elder Bush on a trip back from visiting tsunami victims in Asia, the two former presidents faced a dilemma aboard their small plane.

“We took one long flight together to Indonesia to tour the tsunami zone and the plane had one small room with a bed,” Clinton recalled. “He offered the room to me to start and said that we’d switch. But I told him to go ahead and take the room, that I’d be fine sleeping on a mat on the floor. After forty years of sleep deprivation I can sleep anywhere. He deserved the bed.”

Popadiuk and Benedi also remember how Bush’s calm, muted response to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 led some conservatives to question why he hadn’t celebrated more overtly the American victory over communism. To this day, many conservatives give Reagan the credit, though it occurred on Bush’s watch.

What the public didn’t know then — and Bush refused to discuss publicly — was that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had sent an urgent cable to Bush on Nov. 9, 1989 as the wall crumbled asking the United States not to take provocative action that might instigate a Tiananmen Square-like military crackdown in East Germany.

The letters remain classified but sources described to the Center that Gorbachev’s letter pleaded that neither side take any action that would lead to confrontation or provoke protests that might spiral.
The president acquiesced, settling for a response so muted that reporters opined during an Oval Office news conference why he didn’t seem more enthused about the historic crumbling of communism’s most famous symbol.

Bush didn’t let on. Six days later, Bush penned a three-page letter to Gorbachev assuring him the United States appreciated the Soviet leader’s careful approach to the events in East Germany and was supportive of the peaceful transition of power.

Today, the continuing attacks on the 41st president’s son, George W. Bush and his performance as the 43rd president, don’t seem to phase the patriarch of America’s modern political dynasty.

He’s known to start a tale among friend with lines like, “Back when I gave a damn.”

Friends say Bush still likes to take a personal stroll to the local grocery store in Houston or take in a ballgame or two. But he has slowed with the loss of strength in his legs, which friends describe as Parkinsonism, a vascular condition that weakens his lower extremities and manifests some of the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease like unstable walking.

The symptoms started a few years back as Bush recovered from back surgery and the weakness has progressed such that he struggles to walk, even with a cane these days, though his upper body remains firm, friends say.

When the elder Bush came to Washington for the Medal of Freedom ceremony with Obama, he stopped first for lunch with some of his friends like Benedi. Bush arrived in a wheelchair before getting into a chair at the table.

But when the time came for him to appear in public, Bush left the wheelchair behind, insisting to walk on his own at the White House –with the help of a military aide. The ceremony gave much of America its first glimpse in years of the 41st president.

Separated by generation and ideology from the man he was honoring, Obama rattled off a litany of accomplishments, then quipped about one of Bush’s late-in-life exploits that endeared him to many younger generations. “Just to cap it off, well into his 80s, he decides to jump out of airplanes,” the current president said adoringly as he secured the blue-and-white ribbon around Bush’s neck.

To those who honor Bush – Democrat and Republican alike — what matters now is highlighting the resume and accomplishment of a man who traded his privileged upbringing for the cockpit of a Navy torpedo bomber. Shot down into the Pacific by Japanese fire, Bush only yearned for more public service after three years of education at Yale and a chapter as a Texas oilman who earned a small fortune.

Bush held nearly every power title one could crave: congressman, Republican Party chairman, CIA director, envoy to China, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, vice president and finally president.

But lofty titles, the perks of power or even the warm embrace of political popularity seemed to matter less to Bush than the simple satisfaction of getting a job done effectively.

It’s likely what made him comfortable in the shadows of the more famous and eloquent Reagan, or made him willing to swoop into a room full of armed military officers in a Latin American mountainside villa, friends say.

These are also the qualities that have led Americans — even Democrats — to cast aside whatever doubts they held from a political era gone by and to embrace Bush Sr. as elder statesman.

During the bitter debate last year over cap-and-trade regulations opposed by Republicans, Democrats hailed the elder Bush for creating an earlier cap-and-trade permitting system in the early 1990s that helped substantially reduce the pollution that causes acid rain. Anathema to his own party today, Bush’s stance two decades ago is cherished by environmentalists.

Last summer, Obama singled out the elder Bush on the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, another law fostered during the 41st presidency.

“Equal access. Equal opportunity. The freedom to make our lives what we will. These aren’t principles that belong to any one group or any one political party. They are common principles. They are American principles,” Obama declared that day.

Bush was absent from the ceremony. But friends say he basked in being recognized for the spirit of compromise and cooperation it took to get something like the ADA made into law two decades ago.

It was republished by permission from the Center for Public Integrity. It originally appeared at http://bit.ly/fuRAP3.

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A Week Is a Lifetime in Politics

Back when men still wore hats and ladies wore gloves, my precinct committeewoman made me memorize an iron rule of American politics: A week is a lifetime politically, and three months is an eternity.

That wise maxim has apparently been forgotten by the would-be 2012 Republican challengers to President Barack Obama, not a single one of whom — with quite possibly only 40 weeks remaining before the first, real main event of the 2012 presidential nominating fight, the crucial Iowa caucuses — has yet to declare her or his White House candidacy.

Because our presidential elections are held on November in years divisible by four and because organizing separate presidential organizations simultaneously in several dozen states requires people, money and, most of all, time, a candidate must generally decide to run no later than late winter of the year before the election. That would be now.

The problem is that the decision to challenge or not to challenge an incumbent president is almost always overly influenced by the challenger’s judgment of the incumbent president’s political strength a year and a half before the actual general election voting.

Consider the late winter of 1983, when President Ronald Reagan‘s re-election prospects for November 1984 were, to put it bluntly, bleak. When asked by the Gallup Poll, “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Ronald Reagan is handling his job as president,” only 35 percent of the Gipper’s constituents gave him a positive grade.

So what happened? Democrats rushed into the race — including Walter Mondale, John Glenn, Gary Hart, Alan Cranston, George McGovern and Jesse Jackson — sure that Reagan was beatable. But if a week is a lifetime politically, then a year and a half is a millennium. By November 1984, Reagan was getting favorable grades from 60 percent in the Gallup Poll and, more importantly, was carrying 49 of the 50 states while wining a landslide re-election.

In 1988, Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush won his own White House race, and as he prepared in 1991 to run for re-election, he looked unbeatable. After Saddam Hussein had invaded and occupied Kuwait, President Bush 41 and his secretary of state, Jim Baker organized a 32-country coalition to drive Saddam from Kuwait, won support for that action from both a Democratic Congress and from the United Nations and then, in a remarkable four-day military offensive, won the first clear-cut American military victory since 1945.

President Bush in the winter of 1991 — a year and a half before his re-election day — stood at an unprecedented 89 percent favorable in the Gallup Poll. One by one, leading Democrats — Dick Gephardt, Al Gore, Lloyd Bentsen, Bill Bradley, Mario Cuomo — who had openly or secretly lusted after the presidency saw Bush as unbeatable and came to the same decision: some variation of, “Rather than run, I choose to spend more time with my family.”

Only five Democrats rolled the dice that year —Tom Harkin, Bob Kerrey, Jerry Brown, the late Paul Tsongas and Bill Clinton. By Labor Day of 1992, President Bush’s favorable number in the Gallup had plummeted to 29 percent, and he would lose that November to Bill Clinton. A week is a lifetime.

As of today, President Obama looks formidable: a 50 percent favorable rating according to Gallup, no apparent primary challenge and, quite possibly, the nation’s first billion dollar campaign treasury. But Republicans should remember 1984 and 1992 before concluding that the race against Obama is impossible. If gasoline goes to six bucks a gallon — not impossible — no incumbent will be safe in 2012. Because a week truly can be a lifetime in politics.

 

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Happy Presidents Day

We’ve arrived at another Presidents Day that’s set aside to honor a few great presidents’ birthdays and its in the middle of another contentious running debate about whether or not we have a worthy president. Lately, a group known as birthers has even been working overtime to try and prove that our current president, Obama, wasn’t born in Hawaii but some far and distant foreign land and therefore was never eligible for the post.

Before Obama there was the previous officeholder, George W. Bush who was serving out two terms and back then there was a lot of mumbling and speculation about his general intelligence. Some wondered if he had the grey matter to pull off what needed to be done. Maybe he was just an eight-year-long front for a cabal that pulled the strings in his shadow.

It’s like they thought he was a human curtain for the real wizards.

Strangely, all of that behavior is considered patriotic in some circles. Note that the definition of patriotism changes for each crowd depending on who is in office and their particular party affiliation.

However, if any other country were to throw as many pointless stones at the character of the American President we’d all be up in arms just like when Congress changed the names of French fries to freedom fries in the congressional dining room after a snub from the French. These kinds of things matter to us.

Perhaps the reason we don’t care so much anymore about all the ballyhoo and falderal surrounding the fitness of our sitting presidents because it’s been going on so long most of us don’t really notice anymore and besides, we’re a little busy taking care of our own business.

Or maybe it’s that old rule that’s used as a variance for a lot of things we really want to get off our chest that says we can insult our own kind but everybody else better watch our or they’ll hear about it. However, that’s still an insult but now it’s about something that really ought to matter more.

There was a time when everyone took to heart the notion that once someone was elected President of the United States they represented the entire population of the US. Not just all of their party or even all of the voters but every citizen. We put down the rock of party affiliation for awhile at least for that office and at least till it got closer to election time and we supported their right to be there.

Sure, there were protests about policy, just ask anyone who was around during the Nixon era and a lot of what happened to Clinton was brought on by the man and his sexual escapades.

But right around that era politics was also starting to take on a darker tone as rumor and innuendo crept in and became another tool of entitlement. It was no longer enough to point out someone’s dismal voting record or how much pork they had gotten for their district.

Now, we wanted something personal and if it was vague and never had any proof that was still okay as long as it hinted at an inability to serve at all. The rancor and vilification didn’t stop with the election for even a brief honeymoon.

Bush was portrayed by an actor on Saturday Night Live as an overgrown child sitting in a children’s desk immediately after the election and the birthers have never stopped chattering. But once Bush or Obama was elected it was now the American President that everyone was saying was incompetent and they were shouting it to the rest of the world. Again, notice the difference between criticizing the policy decisions and ranting about our President’s fitness for duty.

This Presidents Day let’s all take a break from trying to find fault with our President and instead take a moment to feel a little gratitude for a system that lets us vote our conscience every four years and hand over the power in a peaceful, orderly system to whomever the majority has picked. That’s especially poignant given what’s happening in the streets of several Middle East countries right now.

Democracy may not be perfect and thanks to some hanging chads it may not always work as smoothly as we’d like but for the most part the idea works really well. There is not another country that is in existence now or has ever been that can point to such a long line of greatly admired leaders such as Washington, Lincoln or even Truman who were elected into office and never tried to stay longer than their official term.

There’s only one America that so many others try to reach while well over 300 million of us are blessed to call this home. Celebrate the day everyone and have a little cherry pie with friends and family.

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Ghost Soldiers

Army Reserve Sgt. 1st Class Lawrence Morrison was deployed to Iraq in 2005 as a Civil Affairs officer despite a bad knee, a bum shoulder, and high blood pressure. He was killed by an improvised explosive device. Credit: Morrison Family

Army Reserve Sgt. 1st Class Lawrence Morrison would have celebrated his 51st birthday next month if he hadn’t been sent to Iraq.

Instead the Postal Service dock worker was mobilized in 2005 despite a bad knee, a bum shoulder, and high blood pressure, and sent to be a Civil Affairs officer based at Taji, north of Baghdad. He died five months later during the Iraqi insurgency, a victim of an IED that tore apart his Humvee.

“This was not the way I wanted my life with him to end,” said his widow, Becky, of Yakima, Wash.

Morrison was among thousands of reservists called up on short notice for Civil Affairs work, a class of specialists that was supposed to be so plentiful and deeply trained that it would change the course of future warfare.

Instead, Civil Affairs has struggled as a stepchild in the vast military effort in Afghanistan and Iraq. Although a mere fraction of the troops are dedicated to Civil Affairs, they have been deployed without proper training and equipment to hostile territory to carry out heroic efforts against difficult odds and they are killed far out of proportion to their numbers, a Center for Public Integrity investigation found.

Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks prompted the Bush administration to declare a global campaign against terrorism, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld vowed to fight “a different kind of war” in which U.S. soldiers would help “make allies” of suppressed people.

The Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command should have been the vanguard of those efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, helping to restore electricity, building water systems and spreading good will.

But for most of Rumsfeld’s tenure, the command lacked the soldiers, training and equipment to do the job successfully, and disguised its weaknesses by keeping “ghosts” on its books, internal Army memos show.

“This won’t do!” Gen. Bryan D. Brown, the four-star general then in charge of Special Operations Command, wrote in a handwritten notation on a 2004 memo warning that Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations was short of critical supplies and had hundreds of “ghosts” on its books.

The hundreds of ghost soldiers on the Civil Affairs rosters were reservists who couldn’t perform their duties in a combat zone for a variety of reasons, such as they had physical ailments, had missed mandatory training or had lost contacts with their units. Their appearance on the books made the Civil Affairs command look like it had more human resources to deploy than it did, and that forced commanders to keep re-deploying the same reservists time and again to meet the demand. Heavy casualties thinned the ranks over time, leaving the force even more depleted, according to memos and interviews with former officers.

Generals in the field, unable to obtain sufficient Civil Affairs units, sent reservists into harm’s way without hardened armored vehicles, protective plates for their armored vests and machine guns.

Rumsfeld repeatedly sent “snowflake” memos to top officials in the Pentagon and the field demanding answers, and in 2006 he ordered a reorganization of Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations that split the forces and removed most of them from the military’s elite Special Operations Command.

Military commanders say the reorganization backfired and Civil Affairs troops remain in short supply well into Robert Gates’ tenure as defense secretary, although equipment problems have eased.

The statistics offer a grim picture. Though Civil Affairs soldiers only make up about 5 percent of the Army’s reserve forces, they account for 23 percent of the combat fatalities among reservists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The command’s lack of resources and legacy of dysfunction also complicates U.S. efforts to withdraw from Afghanistan starting this summer and calls into question the ability of the military to fight future insurgencies or respond to humanitarian disasters, current and former military officers say.

“It was too small of a force to begin with. We are scrambling right now to meet additional requirements for Afghanistan,” Maj. Gen. David Blackledge, the commander of the U.S. Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command, told the Center. “Our mission load is actually going up.”

Private 1st Class Lawrence Morrison II lays roses on the casket of his father, who was killed by an improvised explosive device while deployed to Iraq in 2005 as a Civil Affairs officer. Credit: Gordon King/The Yakima Herald

The Pentagon has sought to compensate for these gaps in recent years by reorganizing the command structure and increasing the number of Civil Affairs units. But the reorganization has been widely panned as awkward and counterproductive, and growth in Civil Affairs has been relatively anemic given the demand.

The Army currently has only about 8,000 Civil Affairs troops, or less than 1 percent of its active and reserve force. And the number of Civil Affairs battalions has increased by only about a third since the late 1990s, despite two massive, ongoing counterinsurgency operations.

Gates plans to grow Civil Affairs to 11,152 troops by 2013 and “is exploring ways to better integrate Civil Affairs functions with complementary stability operations” in Afghanistan, spokesman Geoff Morrell said.

As for Rumsfeld, he wrote in his memoir published this week that he didn’t believe soldiers should have been involved in nation-building.

“I did not think resolving other countries’ internal political disputes, paving roads, erecting power lines, policing streets, building stock markets, and organizing democratic governmental bodies were missions for our men and women in uniform,” Rumsfeld wrote.

“If some later contended that we never had a plan for full-fledged nation building or that we under-resourced such a plan, they were certainly correct. We did not go there to try to bring prosperity to every corner of Afghanistan. I believe—and continue to believe—that such a goal would have amounted to a fool’s errand.”

THE ‘GLUE’ BETWEEN THE MILITARY AND CIVILIANS

In contrast to conventional combat soldiers, Civil Affairs troops are mostly reservists with day jobs like judges or lawyers. They are experts at helping to build new governments, get the lights on, the water running, set up justice systems, and in the process, win the hearts and minds of local populations. They are supposed to be the link between the military and the civilian government and people living in a war zone.

Civil Affairs have figured in U.S. military campaigns in all U.S. wars since the American Revolution. They reached their zenith during World War II, when extensive preparations were made early on for stabilizing and reconstructing postwar Europe and Japan. Two months after entering the war, the Roosevelt administration ordered creation of a school of military government at the University of Virginia to train senior Civil Affairs officers. According to an official Army history, the first graduating class included a city manager, police chief, doctor, two city attorneys, several utility specialists, a public health officer, judges and the fiscal director of the Port of Oregon. Such forces have also been used extensively in Vietnam and in post-conflict situations and natural disasters in Central America, the Caribbean and the Balkans.

The Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command was deployed to “make allies” of the suppressed peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan, as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put it. Here, two members of the 416th Civil Affairs Battalion talk with the director of education for the Onkhai Valley in Wardak province, Afghanistan. Credit: Pfc Donald Watkins/U.S. Army

These forces are especially crucial today, said David Barno, a retired lieutenant general who commanded U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan from late 2003 through mid 2005.

“They can get a power grid up and operating and look at how societies interact. These are the skills that are typically outside the mainstream of the combat-centric military…but in the environments we’re in now, they’re absolutely essential,” Barno explained. “They are the glue that binds the military effort to the civilian population.”

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Rumsfeld seemed to acknowledge the importance of these personnel in waging what he called “a different kind of war”—one in which it would be crucial to portray Americans as liberators instead of infidel invaders.

“While we may engage militarily against foreign governments that sponsor terrorism, we may also seek to make allies of the people those governments suppress,” Rumsfeld said on Sept. 27, 2001.

On Oct. 8 of that year, he told Fox News that in conducting the war in Afghanistan, “we want to make sure that we can do everything we can to help the misery of the Afghan people which has been imposed on them by al Qaeda and by the Taliban leadership.”

But senior officials serving under Rumsfeld said he had little interest in the unglamorous work of stabilization and reconstruction and chafed at the fact that under a mid-1980s military reorganization, Civil Affairs units reported to U.S. Special Operations Command.

A paper trail left by the former defense secretary suggests Rumsfeld thought Civil Affairs units weren’t worthy of Special Operations, which also operates highly selective 12-man Special Forces “A-Teams” that conduct secret missions such as hunting down and killing alleged terrorists.

Rumsfeld wrote on March 7, 2005 in one of his notorious “snowflake” memoranda that Civil Affairs’ “skill sets are, at this stage, probably more of a distraction than a benefit to the increasing Special Operations roles and missions.” This was one of a half dozen memos Rumsfeld penned to various Pentagon officials suggesting that Civil Affairs be removed from Special Operations.

“Secretary Rumsfeld focused largely on the high value target set,” said Thomas O’Connell, assistant secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict from July 2003 until April 2007. “The Special Operations Forces components that operated at the lower end of the spectrum…were less appreciated by many civilian policymakers as to their potential for effectiveness in the fight.”

As recently as April 2009, the Pentagon in a report to Congress acknowledged the shortcomings of its reliance on reservists for Civil Affairs work. But its plan to remedy the situation called for reducing reservists from 89 percent of the Civil Affairs force to 74 percent by 2013, still an overwhelming burden on citizen soldiers.

A STARK WARNING FROM THE FIELD

The crisis was evident by 2004 at Fort Bragg, N.C., the mobilization center for Civil Affairs troops. A Jan. 14, 2004 trip report by Sergeant Major John W. Young Jr., the senior Army Reserve Enlisted Advisor monitoring reserves at Special Operations, describes multiple serious problems:

  • “1,000 or more ghosts” on the books. (A unit roster might look full on paper but the “ghosts” have not gotten the necessary training and cannot be deployed)
  • Lack of quarters for those who actually turned up, requiring some personnel to be billeted on cots in the gymnasium.
  • Widespread “cross-leveling” resulting in units comprised of soldiers from across Civil Affairs. This means cherry-picking soldiers from disparate units, a violation of the military rule that soldiers fight best alongside those they trained with.
  • Reservists who got only two weeks’ notice before mobilizing.
  • Soldiers forced to sign statements that they were “volunteering” for what was “an involuntary mobilization.”
  • Soldiers issued body armor without protective plates and bulky M-16s instead of smaller M-4 rifles more suitable for traveling in cramped vehicles. In training, due to “a shortage of weapons and ammo they got to fire [only] one round.”
  • The memo also describes a “critical shortage” of senior noncommissioned officers.

Local people waved American flags at Sgt. Lawrence Morrison’s funeral service in support of the Morrison family and those who serve in the United States military. Credit: Gordon King/The Yakima Herald

A copy of Young’s report obtained by the Center for Public Integrity shows that next to several of the concerns, Gen. Brown, the Special Operations commander, wrote “why” and “this won’t do.” A cover memo addressed to Lt. Gen. Philip R. Kensinger, Jr., one of Brown’s deputies, said, “Please take action not a very encouraging report.”

But instead of rectifying the situation, the military brass at Special Operations turned on Young, accusing him of going behind commanders’ backs and being “out of touch with reality” according to emails obtained by the Center for Public Integrity.

“They chewed my butt out and then ignored me until I retired,” said Young, who left the military in 2005 and now lives in Tulsa, Okla. “They were aware that the whole system was broke and there wasn’t much they were going to do to change things.”

Meanwhile, a number of top Army officials told Congress that Civil Affairs units were fully qualified. On March 11, 2004, two months after Young’s report, Brown told a House Armed Services subcommittee that Kensinger and the Army had been working to “ensure that all of our Civil Affairs forces are trained to…standards. They are fully qualified,” he said. Kensinger then told the subcommittee that, “Each one of those units are about 115 percent or more manned. People come into Civil Affairs because there’s a great balance in what they do in the civilian sector.”

The result of the shortages and mismatches was that soldiers died “needlessly,” said Timothy M. Haake, a retired major general and former deputy commander for mobilization and reserve affairs for Special Operations who elevated Young’s concerns to higher ups. “These generals didn’t do their job,” Haake said.

Neither Brown or Kensinger could be reached for comment.

THE ‘DIVORCE’

In 2006, after a blizzard of Rumsfeld snowflakes, most Civil Affairs units were split away from Special Operations and now report to the Army Reserve. In an awkward compromise, however, four battalions of active duty Civil Affairs soldiers are assigned to Special Operations. Many military experts consider this so-called “divorce” a mistake that has fractured Civil Affairs capabilities between two bosses. The split of Civil Affairs was “probably flawed in its conception, it certainly was flawed in its implementation,” a 2009 U.S. Army War College report by Col. Hugh Van Roosen found. “Given the recent rise in the importance of stability operations, relying significantly upon CA capabilities, this decision should be revisited by the current Secretary of Defense.”

Maj. Gen. David Morris, who commanded U.S. Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command during the reorganization, said he opposed the “divorce” at the time and that it caused multiple problems. Among them: getting money for replacement equipment when he suddenly lost access to regular Special Operations funds.

“We had to work our way through that with the Special Operations community, which we did,” he said. “But we were in the middle of a fight, and it was one of those bureaucratic things that was like an anchor slowing us down.”

Meanwhile, Special Operations Command has retained authority for long-term planning and doctrine for Civil Affairs—a situation akin to giving custody of a child to one parent after a divorce but allowing the other parent to make most of the decisions about how the child will be raised.

Blackledge, the major general who currently has Morris’ old job, said about the divorce, “I have not met anybody who thinks that was a good decision.”

AFGHANISTAN: UNDER-RESOURCED AND ‘SECOND DIBS’

U.S. officials from President Barack Obama to generals in the field have all stressed the importance of the Civil Affairs’ mission to stabilizing Afghanistan.

In a March 2009 speech on Afghanistan, Obama emphasized “agricultural specialists and educators, engineers and lawyers” rather than foot soldiers. Likewise, now-retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal highlighted the establishment of local judicial systems more than military action in hisconfidential assessment of the Afghan war in 2009.“Our strategy cannot be focused on seizing terrain or destroying insurgent forces; our objective must be the population,” he wrote in the report, which was leaked to The Washington Post. “This is a ‘deeds-based’ information environment where perceptions derive from actions, such as how we interact with the population and how quickly things improve.” He called for an “integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency campaign that earns the support of the Afghan people and provides them with a secure environment.”

Civil Affairs 1st Sgt. Christopher Coffin stands in front of the Hands of Victory in Baghdad. He was shipped to Iraq in 2003 after the Army blocked his retirement from the reserve force. He died in July 2003 after his Humvee was ambushed. Credit: Coffin Family

While the Obama administration reports fragile progress in the war, there is still a mismatch between Afghan needs and the skills of the Americans sent to help.

The demand for Civil Affairs soldiers in Afghanistan is so acute today that the Army routinely still resorts to “cross-leveling” to get enough warm bodies into a Civil Affairs unit before it deploys. This means cherry picking qualified Civil Affairs troops from disparate units to get one unit ready to go. The move, however, violates the military tenet that soldiers fight best alongside those with whom they have trained.

The Pentagon tries to provide reserve soldiers with four years of rest between year-long deployments. Blackledge, the current commander of Civil Affairs, said his units deploy every 20 months. But even that number is misleading and time at home—known as dwell time—was often reduced to less than two years, meaning reservists were treated like active-duty soldiers and deployed multiple times. An individual Civil Affairs soldier deploys much more frequently as he is cross-leveled from one unit to another. “The actual dwell time is much less for any individual soldier,” Blackledge said. “And that is the best it has been since the war started.”

“I seriously am amazed at what our soldiers go through with their personal lives.”

The shortage of Civil Affairs capability in Afghanistan is not a new story to some military leaders. One of the first things David Barno did when he arrived in Afghanistan in October 2003 was to resolve to increase the number of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in the Afghan countryside.

There were only four of these civil-military units at the time—only two manned by Americans—and Barno decided to raise the number to 12 by the spring of 2004.

While Barno praises the efforts of the PRTs, which sought to help meet the urgent needs of a population devastated by decades of war, he concedes that “we were clearly under-resourced in this commodity and the system had a lot of difficulty generating enough capacity in Civil Affairs just for the PRTs much less for units out there in the field.”

Also, the demands of the Iraq invasion meant “we were going to get second dibs on all the resources across the board, Civil Affairs certainly being part of that,” Barno said. He is a senior fellow and adviser with the Center for a New American Security.

“The initial deployment of Civil Affairs teams was just too small,” agreed Robert Perito, a senior program officer at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) who has written extensively about PRTs. These organizations were “an effort to compensate for the scarcity of Civil Affairs personnel,” Perito said.

The shortage of Army Civil Affairs personnel became so acute at one point that Navy and Air Force reservists were sent to head up PRTs in Afghanistan. The Marines have at times used artillery officers to fill the Civil Affairs role. Barno described the performance of these units overall as “a very mixed bag.”

During World War II, Perito said, the American in charge of creating a police force for postwar Germany had been chief of police for the state of Connecticut—and spent several years planning before being deployed. In contrast, Perito said, the Civil Affairs adviser to Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry—which is trying to build a police force of more than 100,000 men—was a police chief in an Atlanta suburb with only 24 people under his command.

While the State Department has attempted to fill the gap in expertise with its own “surge” of 1,000 civilians, many are contractors in country for less than a year and are not suited to working in hostile environments. “The vast majority are in Kabul, not out in the countryside,” said Paul Hughes, a senior program officer at USIP and 30-year Army veteran who advised the U.S. occupation government in Iraq in 2003. “It leaves the military units down range to deal with this.”

Observers with non-governmental organizations said the Army’s embrace of Civil Affairs and counterinsurgency in general has been sporadic. “One of the gaps that has not been addressed is I think there has been a recognition that they need these [Civil Affairs] officers, but I don’t think they have thought much about how they would be used,” said Erica Gaston with the Open Society Institute who has been in Afghanistan for three years. “I know there are officers in Kabul and they will say, ‘We are trying to reach out, but nobody will reach out to us.’”

MIXED PICTURE IN IRAQ

Although Iraq drew substantial resources away from Afghanistan, the Iraq war also suffered from strained Civil Affairs units.

Betsy Coffin, center, weeps at the funeral for her husband, Civil Affairs 1st Sgt. Christopher Coffin, in July 2003. Christopher Coffin was killed in Iraq when his Humvee was ambushed. Credit: Jacqueline Larma/Associated Press

Civil Affairs 1st Sgt. Christopher Coffin had served 23 years in uniform and had recently deployed to Kosovo when the Army blocked his retirement from the reserve force and shipped him to Iraq in 2003. He died in July 2003 after his Humvee was apparently ambushed. Fellow soldiers later told his wife, Betsy, that they did not have enough vehicles, protection and equipment needed that day. Her husband’s medical evacuation following the ambush was also delayed because the convoy’s only satellite phone had been destroyed.

Betsy Coffin recalls talking to her husband in Baghdad. “I know that he spoke at length about the lack of resources for the unit,” she recalled. “I know my husband was not happy about that convoy.”

Coffin was an experienced Civil Affairs reserve soldier whose civilian job was as a federal law enforcement officer.

Joseph Collins, who served as deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Stability Operations under Rumsfeld, called Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations personnel “some of the great unsung heroes” of the Afghan and Iraqi wars.

“Over time, the good units get used up and low readiness units get mobilized,” Collins said. “They start force feeding people into units who are not fit or well qualified.”

These forces are likely to be in high demand for the foreseeable future. “They are a transition element to get the military out of the lead role,” USIP’s Hughes said. “They are going to be extremely important over the next 20 years because I fully expect that the U.S. will be fighting more insurgency-type wars.” Civil Affairs units are also likely to be needed for humanitarian emergencies caused by natural disasters and to prop up fragile and failing states.

Such geostrategic thinking affords little comfort to Becky Morrison. Morrison said her husband, who had been working at the post office in Yakima, should never have been sent to Iraq in 2005 given his physical ailments.

Once he was reactivated, he attended a few classes in Oklahoma for two weeks and then was sent to Fort Bragg, she said.

“I don’t know what kind of training he got in North Carolina,” she said. She does recall that Morrison told her that just before they deployed to Iraq, the reservists were told to grab gear from a hodge-podge spread out on a large table that included women’s bras and flak jackets.

“They had to go through and pick out what fit them best,” she said.

Once in Iraq, Morrison spent most of his time handing out toys to Iraqi children even though he had been trained as a medic during his active duty in the 1980s. He died near a water mill that “wasn’t even his mission,” Morrison said. “They were on their way somewhere else when they were called to this place. He was tired, he was scared,” she said. “He had never been in combat before. I’m still upset over it.”

“My husband was killed and we’re walking away from Iraq now. I’m angry at the fact they’re bringing them all home because they didn’t accomplish what they set out to accomplish.”

Barbara Slavin was a co-author of this report.

This article was republished by permission from the Center for Public Integrity. It originally appeared at http://bit.ly/eSPI0G.

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The Road to Re-election Does Not Go Through Cairo

Anastasio Somoza was the corrupt and brutal dictator of Nicaragua from the U.S. presidency of Franklin Roosevelt well into Dwight Eisenhower‘s White house tenure. When an opponent with real evidence directly accused him of having stolen an election, Somoza retorted, “Indeed, you won the election, but I won the count.”

Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian “strongman” (you call a despot a dictator when he mostly opposes your national self-interest and a strongman when he has mostly served your national self-interest) is just one of many anti-democratic oppressors the United States has been close to over the years.

Yes, the stakes in Egypt are enormously high — primarily for the people of Egypt but also for the future of the Middle East, with consequences for much of the world beyond, including the United States. If the eventual outcome is a happy one, with a free, stable and prospering Egypt constructively engaged with its neighbors, it’s possible that the U.S. and President Obama will receive at least some credit for having positively contributed to that result.

But if the Obama team is planning to emphasize the incumbent president’s foreign policy strengths in the 2012 campaign, they can save money, time and effort by forgetting about it.

When the economy is bad, the economy is only the issue in American presidential politics. Foreign policy successes do not by themselves re-elect presidents faced with immediate problems on the domestic front.

Look at Harry Truman, whose Truman Doctrine providing military aid to Turkey and Greece and saved both of those countries from falling under Soviet control, who rebuilt a war-devastated Western Europe through the plan named for his Secretary of State, Gen. George C. Marshall, who crafted NATO and the European defense system and, through a bold airlift, saved Berlin. With sagging poll numbers, economic strife and a revolt in his own Democratic Party, Truman did not even run for re-election in 1952.

Or what about George H.W. Bush? After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, President Bush, with his Secretary of State Jim Baker, assembled a genuine international coalition of 32 nations, and won endorsement for actions from the United Nations and from a Democratic-controlled Congress. In an impressive four-day military blitz in late February 1991, the U.S. and coalition forces drove the Iraqi troops out of Kuwait and crippled Iraq’s military capacity.

During this President Bush’s first and only term, the Berlin wall came down, after 45 years Germany was reunited, democracy peacefully bloomed in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union broke up. This is truly the stuff of history. And this remarkable record of foreign policy triumphs meant nothing to U.S. voters, plagued by a faltering economy and unemployment. They elected Democratic Gov. Bill Clinton, whose foreign policy credentials, earned from his mastery of the historic boundary dispute between Arkansas and Oklahoma over who owned Fort Smith, must have impressed voters in Philadelphia and Fresno.

Finally, take the case of Jimmy Carter, whose skill, mastery of details, endless capacity for hard work and singular stubbornness were all indispensable through 13 days of secret negotiations to broker the 1978 Camp David agreements, which led the following year to the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty. One year later, when the “misery index” (the sum of the nation’s inflation and unemployment rates) pushed 22 percent and the Ayatollah Khomeini held power and American hostages in Iran, the Camp David miracle was forgotten.

The lesson: A perceived foreign policy failure can defeat a president, but even a celebrated foreign policy success will not re-elect him if Americans aren’t working.

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