Tom Watson

A Blogging Soldier's Farewell

Blogger Andy Olmsted, an American Army Major who blogged from Iraq, was killed in action yesterday and posts his own eulogy at Obsidian Wings, where he blogged regularly under the name G'kar. Everybody with a soul should read the entire post and the comments, but here's an excerpt:

What I don't want this to be is a chance for me, or anyone else, to be maudlin. I'm dead. That sucks, at least for me and my family and friends. But all the tears in the world aren't going to bring me back, so I would prefer that people remember the good things about me rather than mourning my loss. (If it turns out a specific number of tears will, in fact, bring me back to life, then by all means, break out the onions.) I had a pretty good life, as I noted above. Sure, all things being equal I would have preferred to have more time, but I have no business complaining with all the good fortune I've enjoyed in my life. So if you're up for that, put on a little 80s music (preferably vintage 1980-1984), grab a Coke and have a drink with me. If you have it, throw 'Freedom Isn't Free' from the Team America soundtrack in; if you can't laugh at that song, I think you need to lighten up a little. I'm dead, but if you're reading this, you're not, so take a moment to enjoy that happy fact.

Andy requested no political statements, no use of his death to damn the war or the President. And so silence at this keyboard in his memory.

UPDATE: You can read about the circumstances of his death from his family, the family members of a captain who also died, and current and former comrades in arms in the comments secton of Andy's final post.

War Is Hell (Until It Gets Boring)

Pity the neocons. Their war against Islamofacism just drags on and on, the Bush Administration resembles the New York Jets running out the clock in the fourth quarter of yet another blow-out at the dreary Meadowlands, and the reports out of Iraq just don't hold the same manly drama they once did. So many have moved on.

Neocon godfather Norman Podhoretz brings his must...bomb...Iran...now mantra to the campaign of Rudy Giuliani, who proclaims that "civilization itself" is in danger from Islamic fascists. Paul Wolfowitz grew bored with warfare early, ran the World Bank into the wall, and is hiding out at the American Enterprise Institute. Richard Perle apologized and disappeared into the think tanks. And talk about move on - Karl Rove is advising Democrats.

But one famed neocon - the best writer of the bunch - has really let his snarling, gung-ho, kill 'em before they kill us war vision slip away, in favor of...cosmetic waxing?!

Yes, Christopher Hitchens, the reformed liberal who became knee-shakingly fearful for western civilization after 9/11, has spent two full issues of Vanity Fair engrossed (le mot juste) in extreme personal grooming. While the fighting men he urged on (and mourned, I must say) continued to go door to door in the worst neighborhoods in the world, Hitch had an appointment at the studio of "the renowned 'J Sisters,' the seven girls from Brazil who have pioneered the waxing technique that bears their country’s name." What followed?

The male version of the wax is officially called a sunga, which is the name for the Brazilian boys’ bikini. I regret to inform you that the colloquial term for the business is “sack, back, and crack.”

I wonder. With the neocons otherwise occupied as the war drags on, what next for Rumsfeld?

UPDATE: It's always so wonderful when they turn on themselves, isn't it? And this guy is touting the leading Democrat!

My Hometown

I was eight years old and running with a dime in my hand
Into the bus stop to pick up a paper for my old man
I'd sit on his lap in that big old Buick and steer as we drove through town
He'd tousle my hair and say son take a good look around this is your hometown

I grew up in Yonkers, New York and by the 1960s, the city had seen better days. My father worked for The Herald Statesman, the daily paper and commuted every day on the bus to the paper down near the river. When we visited the office or ventured downtown, I was always struck with the steep rise of the hills of the city, rising high over the Hudson. You'd come over the rise and find yourself staring from the backseat of the wagon at these long, strange vistas of mostly empty industrial buildings, run-down three-story houses and the Palisades across the river. In college, I got a a job as a sportswriter working for the same paper as my dad, who toiled in the layout department of what was by this time a chain of newspapers under the Gannett corporate seal. They combined it all into one countywide paper a few years ago, The Journal News, and it was there I read about the death of Army Staff Sgt. Courtney Hollinsworth from my hometown.

Hollinsworth joined the Army at 17 with a required signature from his mother, and was assigned to the 4th Cavalry Regiment of the 1st Infantry Division, based in Fort Riley, Kansas. He died this week in an attack in Baghdad by insurgents using grenades and an improvised explosive device, according to the Defense Department. A career NCO, he was an experienced 26 years old, nine years of service contributed to his nation for low pay and long days and nights.

Last night, Hollinsworth's commander in chief proved yet again just how unworthy he is of that title - how much less of a man he is than Courtney Hollinsworth of Yonkers, New York was.

He sat before the cameras and claimed that a principle he dubbed the “return on success” mandated that U.S. soldiers remain in the hopeless Iraqi meat-grinder - to be released only if and when they "succeed" in pacifying a massive civil insurrection, the sectarian tribal struggle that he alone ignited four long, long years ago. And then the President pledged something that is not in his diminishing power to deliver - an enduring American military presence in Iraq. “The more successful we are, the more American troops can return home,” he promised. Win or die.

Bush's strategy is to run out the clock and dump Iraq on his Democratic successor, to make permanent the greatest American mistake of our generation, our grand national failing of the 9/11 challenge. It's the only card he has left to play, but I think he'll be called on it nonetheless. This will always be Bush's war, Bush's horror, Bush's terror and residents of Crawford and Greenwich and Kennebunkport will feel the local disgrace of having raised such a man and sent him to lead for some time.

The President's supporters are limited now to the few, the proud, the foolish. Consider House Republican Minority Leader, John Boehner who said this week that the war was an "investment" and - as Lance Mannion put it - "that all the dead soldiers and Marines, all the wounded, crippled, maimed, and broken men and women coming back home from Iraq are a 'small price' to pay to achieve whatever goal the war supporters decide this week has been the goal of the war all along."

Of course, the President's supporters also include the entire Republican Presidential field, not one of whom has repudiated the failed and immoral Iraq policy. They're all for the war and the Bush vision of endless occupation, from Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani (who infamously blamed the troops and not the President for the Iraq mess) to John McCain and Mitt "Double Gitmo" Romney. None of them, in my view, can be an American commander in chief. None are worthy of Sgt. Hollinsworth.

Courtney Hollinsworth joined the Army right out of Saunders Trades and Technical High School, a big sprawling box of a school on Palmer Avenue just across the muni golf course a few blocks from where I grew up. He'd done two tours, one in Afghanistan and one in Iraq,  but "some of the people from his platoon were called back up and he felt obligated to be with them so he reenlisted for a second tour," his aunt told the Daily News.

In Yonkers, his family heard from Sgt. Hollinsworth about three weeks ago.  "He was down. He said a couple of guys in his unit were killed," his mother said. "And he said that the insurgents had gotten stronger - that they had gotten a lot stronger than before - and there was more violence than the first time around."

His grandmother opposes the war, but naturally supported her grandson. "I'm always on the computer e-mailing senators about it - Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid," she said. And his mother believes the country got lost following President Bush.

"So many lives have been lost - not just U.S. lives but the lives of children over there. You get to the point where you don't want these guys to have died in vain. No, I don't support the war, but I definitely support the soldiers. My prayers are with them."

According to the paper my Dad I both worked for, the Yonkers cops are expected to form up on the eastern end of the George Washington Bridge when the hearse bearing Sgt. Hollinsworth's body crosses the Hudson this weekend. They'll ride as an honor guard north up the Henry Hudson Parkway through Van Cortlandt Park and take the local streets up and over the big hills and down to North Broadway and the funeral home. Then they'll bury a son of Yonkers, New York who wanted nothing more than to be a soldier and serve his country.

Now Main Street's whitewashed windows and vacant stores
Seems like there ain't nobody wants to come down here no more
They're closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks
Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain't coming back to your hometown

Comma Day

"...I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma ..."

-- President George Bush, 24 September 2006

Scene and Heard

A special "wheels coming off" edition of this little occasional link-fest today, apropos of the vehicle of state screeching along down Pennsylvania Avenue on sparking rims.

• Bob Geiger (he of the in-depth Senate coverage) reports on something I must've missed in the newspapers: Senator Jim Webb's proposal for a new GI Bill of sorts for returning war veterans. Says Geiger: "Webb did more for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan on his first day in the Senate than the man he ousted, George Felix Allen, did in the entire previous Congress." And be sure to read Bob's personal postscript about his own post-service education.
• Lance Mannion is en fuego with his takedown of warmonger and faux liberale Joe "Anonymous" Klein today: "I know he's just another Cliff Clavin of the Washington Punditocracy, fancying himself an expert on any and every subject that comes up, endlessly spouting off, happy to substitute opinion and conjecture for actual knowledge and asserting unreliable and even nonexistent experts to back him up, and retreating into bluster, paranoia, and hysteria when anyone challenges him on the facts, and I ought to ignore him." Smack.
• Says Chervokas: "Before the November elections Dick Cheney told ABC News that no matter what the outcome of the vote it would be full speed ahead in Iraq.Turns out he wasn't kidding." And he believes Congress will shut him down. Hope so.
• Steve Gilliard continues to believe - as he has for more than a year now - that Bush cannot survive in office; that his presidency must fall. He hasn't said it in a while - perhaps he's as weary as I became - but he's back on it today: "...in the end, I think America has had enough. Sending the Guard back is an insane political mistake. Two tours for part-time solders? ... I think Bush will lose the country, and eventually leave in disgrace because his plan will fail. It will fail badly and bloodily and he will be exposed as the weak little man he is and we will not have long to wait."
• Jim Wolcott quotes Steve and compares Bush with Richard Nixon, the last (and only) man drummed out of office by his own party. But he finds a key difference: "Bush will not enjoy a lion-in-winter third act. For better or worse, Nixon was his own man, a stark lesson in the possibilities and limits of self-reliance. Bush, who has always relied upon others to bail him out of jams, is not his own man. If he were, he wouldn't let Cheney secretly run the show."
• And while Cheney and Rice plot war on Iran and Syria, the Republicans peal off. The voluble Chris Bowers has the language from 12 - count 'em, 12 - members of the minority in the Senate who have had enough.

Yellow Surge Suit

Flew into Washington early this morning on the first real cold day of the year. At dawn, the pink light over the Whitestone Bridge looking eastward on Long Island was stunningly beautiful; and sipping my steaming coffee in the shuttle terminal, the pink grew into a warmer read and then lifted and disappeared into the blue of day, as the jetliners rolled in. Picked up the cab at National (note: you can usually tell the political party of the shuttle pilots by whether they say "National" or "Reagan") and we immediately hit traffic.

"Funeral," said the driver as he tapped the steering wheel in an impatient rhythm. "Arlington." Indeed, a long line of car with lights on. so we actually looped around toward the cemetery, around the Pentagon, and slipped below the Lee Mansion onto Memorial Bridge.

And there was the funeral cortege coming over the bridge - military, flags flying from the hearse and the limousines and the SUVs all in line. No way of knowing if it was for some old general or some young sergeant, body flown home recently from Iraq.

I watched them pass as we drove toward the Lincoln Memorial. Big day in Washington: the President to announce his famed "surge." Twenty-thousand fresh troops - well, not so fresh really; back for more tours. All for a troop level that is actually less than the number of American soldiers in Iraq last year. All for a shameful political cover story - a hail mary pass with young American lives.

It was so cold, and fresh and clear in Washington today. The city looked like shiny gem in limestone and gold leaf, as it sometimes does. Maybe, as it always does when a constitutional crisis beckons - because that's what is clearly happening - the legislative branch is on a collision course with an imperial presidency run off the rails.

And complete fools like Michael Ladeen write things like this in ole Billy Buckley's rag:

We’ve got lots of soldiers sitting on megabases all over Iraq. They should be out and about, some of them embedded, others just moving around, tracking the terrorists, hunting them down. I don’t know how many guys and gals are sitting in air-conditioned quarters and drinking designer coffee, but it’s a substantial number. Enough of that.

What a lying, shameful shank of cowardly column gristle.

When Johnny Comes Marching Home

I never suffer from writer's block. This may be because it doesn't exist. Writer's block is simply the refusal to write poorly, the inability to give in and just spew the trash. A crutch, no more. So it never gets in my way. A far more insidious condition has, however, paralyzed this humble journal over the past week or so - the malady (rare in these parts) known as "nothin' t'say."

By rights, I should be cranking out more top music lists, jotting a few more post-hanging thoughts, ripping into the failed Administration anew. At the very least, I should be cheering the historic rise of Nancy Pelosi to the Speaker's chair and the iconic transfer of power from the wheels that slip to the wheels that grip.

But I can't.

Somewhere between the mistletoe and the ball-drop, the movement mojo fled these pages. It was great to win the election, incredible to be a tiny part of the netroots, and wonderful to see the electorate finally repudiate an illegitimate movement. But the grins on the faces of the newly-sworn, and the high-fives in grand chambers of the republic left me cold, I must admit. (Though I did get a kick out of the classic in-your-face that Rep. Keith Ellison delivered with ol' Tom Jefferson's prized Koran. Sweet.)

Blame the New York Times for the mirthless mildew herein; the editors on 43rd Street had to go and run one of their big "faces of the dead" packages to mark the New Year. The 3,000th death coinciding with Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve and all the lost souls in Times Square, keyed by the pages of young, hopeful faces just shook the blogging life right out of me.

Then I went to the NYT's Website and really got lost, body and soul. Some interactive genius has created the saddest, most effective digital monument to this war's cost that I've yet beheld: an ever-changing photo map of tiny squares, each one linking to the life of a dead soldier and the whole forming the bitmapped face of life sacrificed too early and in vain. Behind that are personal stories, some recording into audio files by comrades still living. I've been clicking and reading and and listening and getting sadder by the day.

And there's nothing, really, to say.

What's the point of writing yet again about the uselessness of this adventure, its cost in lives and limbs and burned skin and terrorized, battered psyches? Of picking out another failed Bush Administration policy, another anti-American invasion of civil liberties, another poor decision? For what? This keyboard can't bring them back. Their families must go on living without them forever, knowing that their lives were cast away in adventurous frivolity by a bunch of think-tankers and oilmen. Who can say our young men and women are "defending democracy" now, as the shouts of "Moktada! Moktada!" still echo in the American-built death chamber?

We can oppose this phony "surge" on our blogs all we want, but we're still throwing away our own young for a lost and immoral cause - day in and day out, more die needlessly. They die now to protect the ego of the President; they die now because a few old men with names like Cheney and Lieberman and McCain believe that America can't sustain another defeat like Vietnam. Not on their brave, Churchillian watch. No-sir.

Well, we can sustain a defeat. We cannot sustain the bleeding. We will not. This is clear.

Right now, I can't find the will to write about it, however. I need a break from the blogging ramparts. Maybe we all do. Hurling bytes back and forth while soldiers are dying on their third or fourth or fifth tour of duty in Iraq seems amoral, vacant, pointless. Possibly just for today, I'll admit. Or a week. Or a month.

Or maybe it's time to foresake the blogs. In favor of the streets.

Vengeance Is Mine (Sayeth the Decider)

So George W. Bush got his man. The American government handed over Bush's vengeance totem to a street gang of taunting thugs, who wrapped his neck in a thick hang-knot, taunted him over arcane differences in ancient Muslim politics, chanted the name of killer cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, and dropped him to a brutish death from a cheap sheet-metal gallows. Black ski masks made the macabre scene look like something out of Spielberg's Munich; the cheap camera phone video gave the execution an air of casual brutality. And the sleeping President awakens in luxurious sheets and pronounces himself satisfied that justice has been served.

This is justice, American-style? A cheap, showy lynching in a concrete-block shack with guards in second-hand leather jackets and loose, open collars, chosen for their own particular stake in vengeance? This is what our President demands of our soldiers? That they hold a prisoner in secret American custody through a circus trial and virtually no appeal, acting on the orders of a weak and small-minded prime minister and deliver Saddam to his killers just 20 minutes before his death?

Listen. Don't shy away from the video, from the still photographs, from the corpse, from the accounts of the "witnesses." You owe that to the families of the nine American servicemen whose deaths were announced the very day of Saddam's long drop. Look at the tawdry, vengeful murder and mourn. Not for Saddam Hussein, a murderous tyrant who faced a tyrant's back-alley execution at the hands of a mob, as many have since the days of Robespierre. Mourn for your country, for your system of justice. Mourn for the bit of our own honor that swung from the rope in Iraq.

UPDATE: There are some wonderful, thoughtful posts out there on the Saddam hanging. Christy Hardin Smith's point of view as a former prosecutor and defense attorney is a must-read. Here's a taste (read it all):

As I read through the news articles on the Saddam hanging this morning, it was that lack of human compassion, even on any level, that struck me as somehow unseemly, as undignified and as uncivilized, barbaric even. That feeling of someone being thrown to the lions, no matter how deserving of punishment, while the masses look on and cheer at the tearing from limb to limb — the disgusting spectacle of bread and circuses, set to a theme song and a hasty graphics design on the 24-hour news networks.

And Josh Marshall's piece at TPM has been widely making the rounds, but here's the key  quote (hat tip to Jim Wolcott):

"This whole endeavor, from the very start, has been about taking tawdry, cheap acts and dressing them up in a papier-mache grandeur--phony victory celebrations, ersatz democratization, reconstruction headed up by toadies, con artists and grifters. And this is no different. Hanging Saddam is easy. It's a job, for once, that these folks can actually see through to completion. So this execution, ironically and pathetically, becomes a stand-in for the failures, incompetence and general betrayal of country on every other front that President Bush has brought us."

And Fareed Zakaria has it right in Newsweek:

The saga of Saddam's end—his capture, trial and execution—is a sad metaphor for America's occupation of Iraq. What might have gone right went so wrong.

The Real Day of Mourning

America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned. As I see it, the time has come to look forward to an agenda for the future, to unify, to bind up the Nation's wounds, and to restore its health and its optimistic self-confidence.
-- Gerald R. Ford, April 23, 1975

And so the old man's body will be brought along the wide boulevards and monuments, and the shadows of the caisson will flicker off the cold marble. A lone horse will be led riderless, boots turned backwards in the stirrups and the guns will fire their salute. This is how we mourn our dead commanders in chief.

The last time we did this, the war was young and the casualty count was low. And we were burying a President who according to common legend, lifted the nation's collective spirit in the post-Vietnam era,  the venerated creator of a national political movement that governed absolutely on that Washington DC day two years ago.

Just two years later, that movement is in ruins and disgrace; the Reagan revolution has been forever discredited; its formula of trading winked-at intolerance for tax-cutting power and wealth led to corruption and to the current White House disgrace. Two years ago, we buried the movement conservative, the great man who lifted the nation out of the malaise of a failed war. Two months ago, voters buried his movement. Now, we bury the moderate deal-maker who brought the troops home the last time America failed on a grand scale overseas.

Yet, the war drones on. The number rises always. The injured and maim return. And our disgraced President faces two more long years in office with no plan, no support, no movement, and no strength in his political parties. George W. Bush refuses the reality that Gerald Ford embraced, even after his neo-con wizards recanted their dishonorable spell in Vanity Fair and hung the sign of cowardice around their own, wrinkled necks.

And we do not mourn.

As a nation, we refuse to join together to mourn the nearly 3,000 American men and women who have died for the neo-cons' grand adventure, for George Bush's divinely-inspired dream.

The plastic flags no longer flutter from car windshields and the magnetic Support the Troops bumper ribbons are all mangled and soiled by exhaust fumes and road grime. There is no national sacrifice; in spirit, we are all the free-spending Bush twins, tossing back Cosmos and enjoying our freedom heedless of what a roadside bomb can do to a body.

Mission Accomplished has morphed into Stay the Course, which has become the New Way Forward. The Maoist Republican phrase-makers demand lockstep mind-marching by the legions even now, even as silly as it now seems, even with their party in splintered ruins, the "movement" now synonymous with humiliation.

So they'll wheel the old man through Washington one more time and our current President will stand at attention in a smart gray suit, purse his lips and scowl. The nation will mourn, he will decree.

Let us step forward instead to honor the sacrifice instead of the ritual. As we bury the man who ended the Vietnam War, let's make his funeral the National Day of Mourning our soldiers have not received.

Nearly, 3,000 dead and no national prayer service, no national day of remembrance, no national honors. Yet all the flags will be ordered to half mast and the bands will play their mournful tunes for a moderate, mediocre national leader. Where is our sense of scale, our sense of justice, our sense of duty?

George Bush is taking his time, being a deliberate Decider; he's closeted at Camp David sketching out the alternative course. Then he will return to  bury a Republican forebear who slashed his policies in a death-embargoed interview with the Power Jackal of the Washington Post.

Why not watch that long march, the line of Senators, the President with the hand over his heart and say a silent thanks for the young men and women who have died in this adventure?

Better yet, write about it. Blog about it. Use Ford's funeral dirge to play a nationwide recessional for the cost of this war. Don't mourn a 93-year-old who became President and enjoyed a quarter century of long drives and birdie putt. Mourn the young soldiers dying in Baghdad, in Anbar, in Diyala. Remember the 2990 as of today.

What better way to honor the politician who finally ordered the last generation of cannon fodder out of Southeast Asia - the one who admitted the lost cause?

UPDATE: Jim Wolcott gets off the best line on this: "A flag-draped coffin is acceptable viewing only if a dead president is inside." Indeed.

Ford's Theater

The political deal that brought Gerald Ford to the Oval Office was a good one, and cynically sure-handed: a pardon in exchange for the Presidency. That Ford only served two years before a Watergate-weary nation elected a born again reformer and sent the unelected chief executive into a golf-laden retirement was beside the point: the man from Michigan was a political deal-maker, hardly the bumbler Chevy Chase made him into on Saturday Night Live to great comedic advantage.

Indeed, the deal to get Nixon to San Clemente was the capstone on a legislative career built on something that many pundits believe is impossible these days - bipartisan compromise, which is, you must understand, the exact opposite of nonpartisan surrender.

Ford represented Grand Rapids in the House from 1949 till he became Vice President after Spiro Agnew's disgrace. Little remembered is that he gave up significant political power to serve Richard Nixon in his last year of power: Ford was the minority leader for a decade, and he opposed LBJ's Great Society programs in public, while cutting deals to approve them in private. He described himself as "a moderate in domestic affairs, an internationalist in foreign affairs, and a conservative in fiscal policy" - the kind of description that would fit any number of ambitious Democrats these days.

Ford's Presidency began with one of the seminal political speeches of the last 50 years, clearly the moment he will best be remembered for; I remember listening to it by my Dad's old portable radio in our rental on Cape Cod that August. But in the end, his White House tenure was one of necessary and painful defeat - the pull-out in Vietnam, the comic Whip Inflation Now campaign, the Swine Flu epidemic, "Ford to City: Drop Dead," the Mayaguez incident, and the two weird assassination attempts.

He was at the center of what was popularly viewed as a failed institution in the 1970s just as we view it here in the 2000s. Gerald Ford made the deal, took the hits, and lit out for the links. Somebody had to. May as well have been a deal-maker from Michigan.