Riverside area crime stats— and other updates

BY DAVID RUBENSTEIN

Nothing seems to be able to pry George Bush out of his delusion. Our Senator Norm Coleman is right in there with him, but in his own way, ready to move in any direction.

About a month ago the President was speaking at a press event while on a trade-related visit to Vietnam. Things there looked “hopeful,” he said. A reporter then asked if he saw any lessons for the debate over Iraq.
“The task in Iraq is going to take a while,” he replied. “We’ll succeed unless we quit.”

Many have wondered what the President could have meant. To the extent we succeeded in Vietnam, it’s because we did quit. Now at least they don’t hate us. Vietnam is poised to become another source of cheap goods for U.S. consumers and possibly cheap labor for U.S. companies. It didn’t become an insular little country with nuclear weapons, run by a man with a funny haircut and a taste for Hollywood movies.

You may call some or all of these things a success, but they surely did not come about because we didn’t “quit.” The United States was driven out of Vietnam, but only after some 48,000 Americans and probably more than two million Vietnamese were killed, and several million gallons of herbicide were sprayed over the countryside, poisoning the land so thoroughly that kids are still being born with birth defects.

Now we have Norm Coleman weighing in on the current delusion. A couple of weeks ago he found himself trying to distinguish his position from that of Rep.-elect Tim Walz, who, anticipating a recommendation of the Iraq Study Group, was already advocating talking to Syria and Iran as a possible way out of the Iraq quagmire.

Coleman said we should be wary of negotiating with Syria because it is playing a “destabilizing” role in the region. This continues to be his line.

Destabilization is an interesting concept. Not a month before Coleman made his statement, a group called Refugees International issued a report that touched on it directly. The subtitle was: “Iraq is bleeding all over the Middle East.”
The report, quoting U.N. figures, notes that 2.3 million Iraqis “have fled violence in their country; 1.8 million have fled to surrounding countries, mainly Jordan and Syria, while some 500,000 have vacated their homes for safer areas within Iraq. An estimated 40,000 people are leaving Iraq every month for Syria alone.”
If your political career wasn’t riding on a delusion, you would have to say it was the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq that has destabilized the region—including Syria—and not the other way around. The war has created a huge refugee crisis in the most volatile and dangerous region in the world. The most advanced health care system in the Arab world has been torn to shreds. A civil war—or two, or three, depending on whose definition you adhere to—has been triggered, with no end in sight. We can only hope the dynamic doesn’t take hold in Pakistan.

To recall, once Iraq was “liberated,” it was supposed to be the great blank canvas on which the neo-conservative heirs to the Reagan vision could paint their own vision of a proper economy: weak or no regulation, “free markets” and privatization. Even the flat tax was broached in those heady days when the neocons were still drooling over “mission accomplished.” And of course there also would be billions of dollars in contracts for U.S. companies, with additional millions for the law firms that specialize in setting such things up.

This is the war that Norm Coleman went to the mat to promote. He even tried to endear himself to the Bush administration by taking on its most potent critic and adversary, the United Nations, in a headline-grabbing investigation. Norm bet it all on the neocon delusion, and now the cards he is holding don’t look that great.
Now there is no more Iraq and may never be one. There are millions of people who remain in what’s left of it only because they can’t afford to leave. They confront a situation that most people, even in the poorest and most ravaged countries in the world, know only through their worst nightmares. Children blown up, parents tortured, hospitals turned into death traps.

Meanwhile the neocon delusion has, as many predicted it would, strengthened Islamist militants in the entire region, including Palestine and Lebanon, and beyond into Europe, Africa and Asia.

George Bush was a shallow man who was “found” by powerful interests who realized he could be packaged and sold to an electorate. In the end he didn’t prove to be as felicitous a choice as another right-wing politician who was elevated by a similar process, Ronald Reagan. George listened to the wrong people and had too much to prove. They gave him real guns, and look what he done.

Norm Coleman rose by ambition and natural political skills that were already being honed when he was student body president and anti-Vietnam war protest leader at Hofstra University. Norm has always been his own man, a kind of political idiot savant who could intuit the spectrum of “beliefs” that would buoy his career at the moment, and then embrace them. The problem for Norm is that as you gain prominence and responsibility, your past eventually hobbles your ability to zig when history zags.