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Typical Dems: 'Not interested in security of American people'
By Mark Shields (Creators Syndicate)
WASHINGTON (Creators Syndicate) -- Thanks to his federal government, Mike Thompson of St. Helena, in the Napa Valley of California, traveled overseas as a young man. The year was 1970, and 18-year-old Mike Thompson was in Southeast Asia, a paratrooper with the 173rd Army Airborne. It was there in combat where he earned the Purple Heart for the permanent wounds he suffered. He left the Army as a staff sergeant in 1973, went home, worked in the wine business, earned bachelor's and master's degrees and in 1990 became the first Vietnam vet elected to the California legislature. In 1998, he was elected to the Congress. I failed to mention that Mike Thomson is, according to the 2 million messages sent by the Republican National Committee quoting President George W Bush, one of those miscreants "not interested in the security of the American people" -- a Democrat! In 1970, David Bonior of East Detroit, Michigan, the grandson of Polish and Ukrainian immigrants, the son of an auto worker, who had left the Catholic seminary to accept a football scholarship to the University of Iowa, was halfway through his own four-year hitch in the U.S. Air Force. In 1976, after four years in the Michigan legislature, Bonior was elected to the Congress, where in 1991, he won a leadership race to become Democratic whip. Obviously, as the discerning reader can see, he, too, is someone "not interested in the security of the American people." Thompson and Bonior, men who had answered their nation's call for the U.S. war against Vietnam, last week traveled along with their House colleague Dr. Jim McDermott, D-Washington, (who, coincidentally, in 1970 was an active duty U.S. Navy officer and psychiatrist treating Vietnam casualties) to Baghdad to try to avoid an all-but-inevitable U.S. war against Iraq. The Sermon on the Mount may have proclaimed "Blessed are the peacemakers," but in our cheap-shot political culture and talk-radio trash, to seek peace is to be at best a dupe and at worst a traitor. What a travesty. Among the three lawmakers, during the nation's longest and most divisive foreign war, was 10 years of honorable military service—and their efforts at peace-making are attacked and condemned by little men whose own counterfeit patriotism led them to exploit college and graduate-school deferments until their own exposure to the draft ended at age 26. Was Jim McDermott's questioning in Iraq of President Bush's candor imprudent? Probably. Is Jim McDermott unpatriotic? Absolutely not. It was Churchill who said, "Jaw, jaw, jaw is better than war, war, war." What does our government urge to avoid armed conflict between the Catholics and the Protestants of Northern Ireland, between India and Pakistan, between the Palestinians and the Israelis? Open communication, dialogue and conversation, that's the answer. David Bonior, while an early and passionate critic of the widespread civilian suffering inflicted by the U.N.-U.S. sanctions, at every meeting impressed upon Iraqi officials the need for complete, unfettered inspections for Saddam Hussein's weapons. "I think they know we mean business," he soberly adds. "I have not in 30 years seen the international situation as brittle as it is today. ... It (U.S. invasion of Iraq) has the potential of inflaming another generation of terrorists." Mike Thompson is no romantic on the subject of war: "You see a lot of horrific stuff. You see people shooting at one another. You see people get shot. You see people die. ... No matter how noble or just the cause, good people are killed in every war." Thompson objects to the "idea that somehow a pre-emptive, unilateral strike is OK," especially when he (and every other Member of Congress I have interviewed) has seen "no evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda" and "no evidence that Iraq constitutes an imminent threat to the United States." Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni served two tours in Vietnam as a company commander. He was shot three times, and won the Bronze star and the Purple Heart. Zinni has warned that an attack on Iraq by U.S. forces, "already stretched too tight all over the world," would derail the war against terrorism, jeopardize the U.S. position in Afghanistan and effectively end any prospect for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. Zinni could have been speaking for Thompson and Bonior when he said: "There is a hell of a good reason why generals are cautious. Politicians make mistakes. Soldiers pay for those mistakes with their blood."
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