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Between Iraq and several hard places
By Mark Shields (Creators Syndicate, Inc.)
WASHINGTON (Creators Syndicate, Inc.) -- This week, we find ourselves with more questions than we have answers. For example: When the government of Germany endorses and champions diplomacy rather than war to resolve international tensions, shouldn't the government of the people of the United States be happy and grateful instead of furious and snide? Is there somewhere a pharmacist with a sense of humor who, when returning a filled prescription for Viagra, does so in a container with a child-proof cap? On September 11, 2001, 343 New York firefighters marched heroically through the Gates of Death into the Fires of Hell -- because that is what they had vowed to do to save the lives of strangers whose names they did not know, whose faces they had never seen. The firefighters were public employees and dues-paying union members. Yet, not one of them insisted first on first talking to his shop steward about his seniority rights before putting his life in mortal peril. Might President Bush's unyielding demand that federal Homeland Security employees surrender their collective bargaining rights make just a little more sense if, on September 11, at the moment of maximum peril, at least one union boss had staged a work stoppage? The British prime minister, it will be recalled, made a better and more persuasive public case for U.S.-British action in Kosovo than then-President Bill Clinton did. Now, Tony Blair makes a more persuasive case for U.S.-British action against Saddam Hussein than does current President George W. Bush. Is Tony Blair "a great American" or what? Between 1940 and 1973, the United States had a military draft and three out of four male college graduates and three out of four male high-school graduates served in some branch of the U.S. military. Why is it, then, that so few of our major elected officials, including the last Democratic president and the entire current Republican House leaders, along with the GOP Senate leader and the vice president, were in the small minority of American males who did not serve? Do you know the definition of "silence"? It's Trent Lott, Tom Delay, Dick Cheney and Bill Clinton swapping war stories. Be truthful now. Didn't you like choosing Miss America in Atlantic City a lot more when it was a "beauty contest," which was long before it became "a scholarship competition"? If we have really "changed" that profoundly since that fateful September Day, then how do we explain the inordinate attention and buzz given to prime-time TV shows of the addled Ozzy Osbourne along with his bananas family and the multi-challenged Anna Nicole Smith? Does the cultural emergence of these two real-life offerings mean that "we have kept the terrorists from winning"? Military leaders I trust have told me that a military occupation-pacification-democratization of a conquered Iraq could take up to 15 years and require the continued presence there of up to 50,000 U.S. troops. If you think the British troops had a tough and thankless job keeping the peace in Northern Ireland, how many would volunteer to be part of the first Western, Christian, pro-Israel conquering and occupying army of an Arab country? As a Notre Dame alum and fan, I cannot understand why it took the Notre Dame brass so long to hire their new and successful football coach Tyrone Willingham from Stanford, where in four meetings his teams had beaten Notre Dame three times. It's one thing to lose to the University of Miami -- where they hope eventually to have a school their football team can be proud of -- but no college eleven should ever lose consistently to a university that has higher SAT scores. Should it? If invading Iraq were really such a terrific idea, would South Dakota Democrat Tim Johnson be the only United States senator to have a child (his son Sgt. Brooks Johnson of the Army Airborne) among the 1,055,316 enlisted personnel of the U.S. military? Next time, more answers.
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