So there's an international medical convention out in L.A. and four doctors are standing around.
The Israeli doctor says, "Medicine in my country is so advanced that we can take a kidney out of one man, put it in another, and have him looking for work in six weeks."
The German doctor laughs. "That is nothing," he says. "We can take a lung out of one person, put it in another, and have him looking for work in four weeks."
A doctor from Russia says, "In my country, medicine is so advanced that we can take half a heart out of one person, put it in another, and have them both looking for work in two weeks."
The American doctor, not to be outdone, says, "You guys are way behind, we just took a man with no brain out of Texas, put him in the White House, and now half the country is looking for work."
Such gallows humor -- familiar in the old Soviet Union during the reign of Stalin -- has become commonplace around the country since George W. Bush was elected president by the Supreme Court two years ago. Every single economic indicator is in the worst shape it's been in since his daddy was president, back in 1991.
But still, what we want to do is go to war.
I always thought I liked war. Back in 1975, just weeks before the final pullout in Vietnam, I enlisted in the United States Army, hoping, to paraphrase "Full Metal Jacket," to travel to exotic lands, meet interesting people and kill them. I specifically asked to be placed as a combat infantryman in the First Division, Regular Army -- Judge Angelo Morinello's old outfit -- in the knowledge that those guys saw more action than just about anybody.
I was a teen-ager, didn't keep up on current events and, when the conflict was declared over while I was still in training stateside, I was palpably upset. One afternoon, I found myself using a brush and silver paint to decorate landscaped rocks in the backyard of some colonel down in Fort Knox, Ky. Shortly after that, the Army and I parted company.
President Reagan's war was that silly little 1983 affair in Grenada, probably designed to take the bad taste out of our national mouth for the 200 U.S. Marines killed in Lebanon early in his first term by a suicide bomber. We got the hell out of Lebanon and quickly went to Grenada. There's a pretty good Clint Eastwood movie about that one called "Heartbreak Ridge," if you're interested.
The first President Bush apparently enjoyed war and got us into three. The first was his 1989 invasion of Panama, which saw more Navy SEALs killed in a single engagement than in any fight during that organization's illustrious history. The stated intention of the war was "regime change." We were going to remove Panamanian President Manuel Noriega from office. We did so, at great cost to the Panamanian people, who still suffer corrupt government.
Noriega was ousted and remains in prison.
The irony is that, when Bush the Elder was head of the CIA, he and Noriega were best friends, and were often photographed together yukking it up.
Then there was Desert Storm, the precursor to the war we're going to get into next. I had written a number of columns opposing the war but, waking up during the early morning hours of Jan. 17, 1991, I clicked on CNN and saw the greenish night-vision images of anti-aircraft artillery rising up from Baghdad at unseen American bombers.
My feelings instantly changed. You can be against the war but once there are American kids getting shot at -- and there were plenty from the small Pennsylvania town where I worked -- you owe it to them, and not to any president or anybody else, to support them.
That fight lasted three months and America lost 246 killed in action and another 19 missing. A great general, Norman Schwarzkopf, emerged, as did a great politician, Colin Powell. Behind the scenes, then-defense secretary Dick Cheney was upset we didn't take a lot more casualties and march into Baghdad to take the head of Saddam Hussein. In his mind, the whole thing was about oil, Saudi Arabia's, Kuwait's and, of course, Iraq's.
There's a George Clooney movie about that war called "Three Kings." It's terrible.
The thousands of GIs now suffering the effects of "Gulf War Syndrome," probably having to do with the unregulated destruction of nerve gas and other chemical agents during that conflict, has been covered better than I could by my colleague John Hanchette. That the government waited more than a decade before beginning to acknowledge what happened over there, when they knew about it all along, is a complete disgrace.
Just before he left office, Bush dispatched troops to Somalia. We got shot to pieces, but it was only after Bill Clinton took office, so he generally gets the blame. They made a movie about that one too, called "Black Hawk Down," detailing a firefight in which 18 American servicemen and hundreds of Somalis died. I haven't seen it.
Later, Clinton conducted an air war in the Balkans that worked out fairly well and ended the fighting between the Croats, Serbs and Kosovars. He was roundly denounced by the Bushes and Republicans everywhere for involving us in "foreign entanglements."
Following the attacks on New York and Washington in September, 2001, it was clear we had to go to war. We needed to destroy al-Qaeda, oust the Taliban government that supported it in Afghanistan and kill Osama bin Laden.
Over the past year, we've accomplished exactly one of those three objectives, which should tell us all something about Bush, Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's abilities as warriors.
The Nov. 5 attack in Yemen by the CIA that killed American citizen Kamal Derwish of Lackawanna and a bunch of his terrorist pals was a beautiful thing. Our guys apparently zeroed in on a cell phone transmission and launched an unmanned aircraft, which then fired a missile that vaporized the car in which the bad guys were presumably listening to the radio and plotting their next dastardly deed.
No U.S. serviceman was put in harm's way, and the operation went off without a hitch.
The invasion of Iraq is another thing. Plans call for 250,000 American combatants. British Petroleum, Shell and a number of other multinational oil companies are already in negotiations with the Iraqi Congress -- who will lead the government we install there -- for first dibs.
There is absolutely no indication that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11, and while the North Koreans have admitted to a vigorous program aimed toward the development of a nuclear arsenal, there is no credible evidence to indicate Iraq has similar intentions. Hussein is a deplorable individual, but there are plenty of those, and quite a few of them are our allies.
Probably, once American soldiers are committed, I will do everything in my power to support them. I'll put aside my feeling that this whole thing is a cynical dodge to take our minds off of the corporate scandals, a plummeting economy and the curtailing of individual freedom.
Maybe I won't cringe as much when, during the seventh inning stretch, watching the Indians or the Yankees, they play "God Bless America" instead of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game."
But until then, the whole thing stinks.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | November 19 2002 |