Sunday, November 07, 2004
today's papersVicious TriangleBy David SarnoPosted Sunday, Nov. 7, 2004, at 3:38 AM PT
The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times lead—and the New York Times weirdly stuffs—the coordinated series of bloody attacks in the Sunni Triangle that left 52 dead and more than 60 injured. The violence occurred as the U.S. prepared for a major invasion of Fallujah (heavy air strikes have now begun). Samarra was thrown into "turmoil," and security forces closed bridges and enforced a noon curfew in the city of 250,000, which has been under tenuous U.S. control since early last month. The NYT leads instead with a look at Iraq's fractured and worrisome political landscape, in which a large number of mutually antagonistic Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish, and secular parties are jockeying for position in advance of the January elections.
In Ramadi, a suicide bomber rammed his car into a convoy of Marines, injuring 16, while elsewhere in the Triangle insurgents detonated car bombs and stormed police stations with deadly results. The attacks are thought to be the beginning of a widespread campaign of retaliation against the upcoming offensive in Fallujah, outside of which the U.S. has massed 10,000 troops to do battle with between 1,000 and 6,000 insurgents of various allegiances. The forecast is grim: The WP predicts that both sides will suffer "heavy casualties" in the battle, while the LAT quotes an unnamed senior U.S. diplomat who says, "There will be horrific events outside Fallujah ... I would never tell you that violence in Sunni areas won't get worse when you open up a battle."
Iraq's two established Shiite parties—Dawa and Sciri—have formed an uneasy coalition in hopes that the revered Ayatollah Ali Sistani will anoint it the chosen Shiite party. Their major competition is the new (and definitely anti-American) alliance between fallen U.S. favorite Ahmad Chalabi and radical insurgency leader Moqtada Sadr. Meanwhile the minority Sunnis have threatened to boycott the elections if Fallujah is invaded. Without Sunni support, the elections could not be considered legitimate, and absent elections, experts think Iraq could spiral into chaos and civil war (see Lee Smith's recent Slate piece).
The LAT guesses at the aftermath of Yasser Arafat's death, especially about whether the Bush administration will renew its efforts to execute the "road map" now that the Palestinian leadership is expected to be more moderate and open-minded. One gauge of the administration's attitude will be whether they send a representative to Arafat's funeral. After that, there probably won't be much action until Spring—after the Cabinet shakeups determine whether Sec. State Colin Powell will be present for Round 2.
The NYT also fronts an analysis of how Bush took Florida with a GOTV effort that was much stronger than the Democrats', successfully employing 109,000 volunteers to make three million voter contacts in the days before the election (at 400,000 the 2004 margin of victory was up a ways from 537). The Dems also appear to have been badly humbugged—Florida Republicans are now claiming that their well-publicized threats to challenge questionable registrants was a "big head fake," meant to get the Kerry folks to worry about fielding thousands of lawyers instead of getting their base out to vote.
Democratic Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada will replace the ousted Tom Daschle as minority leader, a post he secured only a few hours after Daschle's concession speech. The LAT front calls Reid a "master of parliamentary infighting," smart, quick, and attentive to detail. He's also conservative, having voted for Bush's tax cuts and the Iraq War and against several environmental measures. At his side will be new Democratic whip Richard Durbin* of Illinois, a more liberal lawmaker who Reid favors for his "ability to communicate" (Reid, being a kind of Senate shut-in, is "less accustomed to being a spokesman").
A WP article asserts that Bush will not significantly alter his foreign policy during the second term. The article is not clear about what a "major shift" would entail, although presumably it would include healing relations with Europe. One former high-ranking official predicts that there will be no second Iraq, saying the first one had been "very sobering ... for the administration." Soaring budget deficits and a weary military might also limit options for further Middle East forays.
The LAT offers a look at the flawed military tribunals in Guantanamo Bay, where three months ago prisoners were first given the right to a hearing (by then, some of the 550 enemy combatants there had been imprisoned for nearly three years). The picture painted is outrageous: Of the 104 verdicts handed down by the tribunal, only one resulted in a prisoner's release. Prisoners are in almost every case accused of having close ties to al-Qaida, but the charges are so old, and exculpatory evidence so hard for the accused to access, that prisoners have no real chance to build a successful defense. In addition, the panels appear to give "little or no credence" to detainees' claims of abuse.
Too Rich: Santa Barbara police arrested a man for rape on Thursday after his alleged victim saw him on TV: He was a contestant on the popular reality show Blind Date. Investigators acquired the tape and tracked the man down immediately. (LAT)
Correction, Nov. 8, 2004: This article originally spelled Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin's name incorrectly. (Return to corrected sentence.)David Sarno is a writer in Iowa City.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2109341/
The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times lead—and the New York Times weirdly stuffs—the coordinated series of bloody attacks in the Sunni Triangle that left 52 dead and more than 60 injured. The violence occurred as the U.S. prepared for a major invasion of Fallujah (heavy air strikes have now begun). Samarra was thrown into "turmoil," and security forces closed bridges and enforced a noon curfew in the city of 250,000, which has been under tenuous U.S. control since early last month. The NYT leads instead with a look at Iraq's fractured and worrisome political landscape, in which a large number of mutually antagonistic Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish, and secular parties are jockeying for position in advance of the January elections.
In Ramadi, a suicide bomber rammed his car into a convoy of Marines, injuring 16, while elsewhere in the Triangle insurgents detonated car bombs and stormed police stations with deadly results. The attacks are thought to be the beginning of a widespread campaign of retaliation against the upcoming offensive in Fallujah, outside of which the U.S. has massed 10,000 troops to do battle with between 1,000 and 6,000 insurgents of various allegiances. The forecast is grim: The WP predicts that both sides will suffer "heavy casualties" in the battle, while the LAT quotes an unnamed senior U.S. diplomat who says, "There will be horrific events outside Fallujah ... I would never tell you that violence in Sunni areas won't get worse when you open up a battle."
Iraq's two established Shiite parties—Dawa and Sciri—have formed an uneasy coalition in hopes that the revered Ayatollah Ali Sistani will anoint it the chosen Shiite party. Their major competition is the new (and definitely anti-American) alliance between fallen U.S. favorite Ahmad Chalabi and radical insurgency leader Moqtada Sadr. Meanwhile the minority Sunnis have threatened to boycott the elections if Fallujah is invaded. Without Sunni support, the elections could not be considered legitimate, and absent elections, experts think Iraq could spiral into chaos and civil war (see Lee Smith's recent Slate piece).
The LAT guesses at the aftermath of Yasser Arafat's death, especially about whether the Bush administration will renew its efforts to execute the "road map" now that the Palestinian leadership is expected to be more moderate and open-minded. One gauge of the administration's attitude will be whether they send a representative to Arafat's funeral. After that, there probably won't be much action until Spring—after the Cabinet shakeups determine whether Sec. State Colin Powell will be present for Round 2.
The NYT also fronts an analysis of how Bush took Florida with a GOTV effort that was much stronger than the Democrats', successfully employing 109,000 volunteers to make three million voter contacts in the days before the election (at 400,000 the 2004 margin of victory was up a ways from 537). The Dems also appear to have been badly humbugged—Florida Republicans are now claiming that their well-publicized threats to challenge questionable registrants was a "big head fake," meant to get the Kerry folks to worry about fielding thousands of lawyers instead of getting their base out to vote.
Democratic Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada will replace the ousted Tom Daschle as minority leader, a post he secured only a few hours after Daschle's concession speech. The LAT front calls Reid a "master of parliamentary infighting," smart, quick, and attentive to detail. He's also conservative, having voted for Bush's tax cuts and the Iraq War and against several environmental measures. At his side will be new Democratic whip Richard Durbin* of Illinois, a more liberal lawmaker who Reid favors for his "ability to communicate" (Reid, being a kind of Senate shut-in, is "less accustomed to being a spokesman").
A WP article asserts that Bush will not significantly alter his foreign policy during the second term. The article is not clear about what a "major shift" would entail, although presumably it would include healing relations with Europe. One former high-ranking official predicts that there will be no second Iraq, saying the first one had been "very sobering ... for the administration." Soaring budget deficits and a weary military might also limit options for further Middle East forays.
The LAT offers a look at the flawed military tribunals in Guantanamo Bay, where three months ago prisoners were first given the right to a hearing (by then, some of the 550 enemy combatants there had been imprisoned for nearly three years). The picture painted is outrageous: Of the 104 verdicts handed down by the tribunal, only one resulted in a prisoner's release. Prisoners are in almost every case accused of having close ties to al-Qaida, but the charges are so old, and exculpatory evidence so hard for the accused to access, that prisoners have no real chance to build a successful defense. In addition, the panels appear to give "little or no credence" to detainees' claims of abuse.
Too Rich: Santa Barbara police arrested a man for rape on Thursday after his alleged victim saw him on TV: He was a contestant on the popular reality show Blind Date. Investigators acquired the tape and tracked the man down immediately. (LAT)
Correction, Nov. 8, 2004: This article originally spelled Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin's name incorrectly. (Return to corrected sentence.)David Sarno is a writer in Iowa City.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2109341/
Darkness falls in FloridaFrom the author of the grimly hilarious campaign memoir "Looking Forward to It," a final, post-election chapter you won't find in his book.
- - - - - - - - - - - -By Stephen Elliott
Nov. 6, 2004 I was in the voting equipment center in Broward County, Fla., on the night of the election. The streets were blocked off and they were counting votes in the back room of the building. Brenda Snipes and the other election officials were sitting behind a large oak table and occasionally arguing over a challenged ballot. There were 30 to 40 journalists and politicos watching a black-and-white screen as the numbers from the county slowly trickled in. The Democrats took 65 percent of the county, which is about what everybody expected. But only 60 percent of the county turned out to vote. People had been hoping for 70 or 75 percent.
Larry Davis, one of the head lawyers for the Democrats, left early to have a beer and I decided to leave with him. But I got lost on the way, turning into the airport, and driving around the streets surrounding it for an hour. By the time I had my beer things were pretty much done.
The repercussions are obvious. There will be no unifying our divided country. Unification is for Democrats and the Republicans control everything. Mandate is what Clinton had when he beat Bob Dole by 10 percent. That was our chance to declare evangelical churches political organizations, take away their tax status, jail their leaders, and send the rest of them off to reeducation camps.
I'm just kidding about that, kind of. If we have to act like Republicans to beat Republicans, then I'm not sure what we win. The good news for the Republicans is that thanks to underfunding education people are getting dumber. Ignorance is bliss and there's a lot of minimum-wage earning, uninsured, poor white people wearing big smiles today.
Not long ago, on the last night of the Republican convention, I was sitting with Harold Meyerson and E.J. Dionne in a French restaurant on the Upper West Side. We had gone there subconsciously to avoid Republicans. French food is like Republican Kryptonite.
The Republican convention was a hate fest, a downer from start to finish. Rudolph Giuliani had stated that Saddam Hussein was himself a weapon of mass destruction, intimating that we had gone to war over a metaphor. Zell Miller had proclaimed that American troops are always liberators, never occupiers. Freedom was on the march but Freedom didn't mean what it used to, nor did Optimism, Liberalism and a host of other words pulled and twisted from the latest dictionaries.
By midnight the restaurant was full with the staff of National Public Radio, Harper's and Air America. It was quite funny at the time, how we had all gravitated to that spot. And I remember saying to Harold, "I hope when this is over I can go back to writing fiction." He got what I was saying right away. I was longing for a situation where I cast my vote and went back to work. Where the stakes weren't so high that nothing else seemed worth doing. Where the election of one candidate over another didn't mean that hundreds of thousands of people would die for no good reason. But that's not going to happen anytime soon.
On Thursday, my final morning in Florida, I sat with Larry Davis, the chief Democratic lawyer for Broward County. He had 600 lawyers working under him during this election. It was a still morning in southern Florida, with a clear sky. We were both still a little depressed, though I had to admit Thursday felt better than Wednesday. I had lost $120 on the election and I was trying to focus on that. I could handle losing $120. Larry told me some stories of the previous day at the office. A friend of his who had come out as a homosexual six years ago had called to ask what he should do.
"Go back in the closet," Larry quipped.
"There's no silver lining to this," Larry told me, and I had to agree. We started talking about the Swift Boats but neither of us felt like playing the blame game. Larry asked if after a year on the campaign trail all of this was over for me and I told him I guessed it wasn't. He nodded his head.
"You know, after people were done contemplating suicide or moving to Canada, by the end of yesterday we were saying, 'I wonder who's going to run in 2008? Hillary/Obama?'"
"That's if there's a presidency to run for in 2008," I reminded him.
Larry laughed. He has children older than me. "Oh. There will be," he said, getting up, preparing to head to court. That was the end of our conversation and the end of my time in Florida. I'd like to stay in Florida but I have things to do back home. I always try to end things on a happy note. Nobody likes a sad story.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writerStephen Elliott is the author of "Looking Forward to It: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the American Electoral Process." Sound OffSend us a Letter to the Editor
Related storiesPolitics as crack cocaineNovelist Stephen Elliott talks about John Kerry the guitar strummer and avid reader, George W. Bush the magnetic caveman, and his own loopy new book about the 2004 campaign.By Alex Mar10/27/04
"I love you, man"An excerpt from Stephen Elliott's hilarious new book, "Looking Forward to It: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the American Electoral Process."By Stephen Elliott10/27/04
"Happy Baby" by Stephen ElliottA young man miraculously survives the loss of his parents, a brutal group home and an abusive girlfriend with his soul intact.By Andrew O'Hehir04/15/04
Salon.com >> Books
Salon Search About Salon Table Talk Advertise in Salon Investor Relations
News & Politics Opinion Tech & Business Arts & EntertainmentIndie film Books Life Comics Audio DialogueLetters Columnists Salon Gear
Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibitedCopyright 2004 Salon.com Salon, 22 4th Street, 11th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94103Telephone 415 645-9200 Fax 415 645-9204E-mail Salon.com Privacy Policy Terms of Service
- - - - - - - - - - - -By Stephen Elliott
Nov. 6, 2004 I was in the voting equipment center in Broward County, Fla., on the night of the election. The streets were blocked off and they were counting votes in the back room of the building. Brenda Snipes and the other election officials were sitting behind a large oak table and occasionally arguing over a challenged ballot. There were 30 to 40 journalists and politicos watching a black-and-white screen as the numbers from the county slowly trickled in. The Democrats took 65 percent of the county, which is about what everybody expected. But only 60 percent of the county turned out to vote. People had been hoping for 70 or 75 percent.
Larry Davis, one of the head lawyers for the Democrats, left early to have a beer and I decided to leave with him. But I got lost on the way, turning into the airport, and driving around the streets surrounding it for an hour. By the time I had my beer things were pretty much done.
The repercussions are obvious. There will be no unifying our divided country. Unification is for Democrats and the Republicans control everything. Mandate is what Clinton had when he beat Bob Dole by 10 percent. That was our chance to declare evangelical churches political organizations, take away their tax status, jail their leaders, and send the rest of them off to reeducation camps.
I'm just kidding about that, kind of. If we have to act like Republicans to beat Republicans, then I'm not sure what we win. The good news for the Republicans is that thanks to underfunding education people are getting dumber. Ignorance is bliss and there's a lot of minimum-wage earning, uninsured, poor white people wearing big smiles today.
Not long ago, on the last night of the Republican convention, I was sitting with Harold Meyerson and E.J. Dionne in a French restaurant on the Upper West Side. We had gone there subconsciously to avoid Republicans. French food is like Republican Kryptonite.
The Republican convention was a hate fest, a downer from start to finish. Rudolph Giuliani had stated that Saddam Hussein was himself a weapon of mass destruction, intimating that we had gone to war over a metaphor. Zell Miller had proclaimed that American troops are always liberators, never occupiers. Freedom was on the march but Freedom didn't mean what it used to, nor did Optimism, Liberalism and a host of other words pulled and twisted from the latest dictionaries.
By midnight the restaurant was full with the staff of National Public Radio, Harper's and Air America. It was quite funny at the time, how we had all gravitated to that spot. And I remember saying to Harold, "I hope when this is over I can go back to writing fiction." He got what I was saying right away. I was longing for a situation where I cast my vote and went back to work. Where the stakes weren't so high that nothing else seemed worth doing. Where the election of one candidate over another didn't mean that hundreds of thousands of people would die for no good reason. But that's not going to happen anytime soon.
On Thursday, my final morning in Florida, I sat with Larry Davis, the chief Democratic lawyer for Broward County. He had 600 lawyers working under him during this election. It was a still morning in southern Florida, with a clear sky. We were both still a little depressed, though I had to admit Thursday felt better than Wednesday. I had lost $120 on the election and I was trying to focus on that. I could handle losing $120. Larry told me some stories of the previous day at the office. A friend of his who had come out as a homosexual six years ago had called to ask what he should do.
"Go back in the closet," Larry quipped.
"There's no silver lining to this," Larry told me, and I had to agree. We started talking about the Swift Boats but neither of us felt like playing the blame game. Larry asked if after a year on the campaign trail all of this was over for me and I told him I guessed it wasn't. He nodded his head.
"You know, after people were done contemplating suicide or moving to Canada, by the end of yesterday we were saying, 'I wonder who's going to run in 2008? Hillary/Obama?'"
"That's if there's a presidency to run for in 2008," I reminded him.
Larry laughed. He has children older than me. "Oh. There will be," he said, getting up, preparing to head to court. That was the end of our conversation and the end of my time in Florida. I'd like to stay in Florida but I have things to do back home. I always try to end things on a happy note. Nobody likes a sad story.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writerStephen Elliott is the author of "Looking Forward to It: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the American Electoral Process." Sound OffSend us a Letter to the Editor
Related storiesPolitics as crack cocaineNovelist Stephen Elliott talks about John Kerry the guitar strummer and avid reader, George W. Bush the magnetic caveman, and his own loopy new book about the 2004 campaign.By Alex Mar10/27/04
"I love you, man"An excerpt from Stephen Elliott's hilarious new book, "Looking Forward to It: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the American Electoral Process."By Stephen Elliott10/27/04
"Happy Baby" by Stephen ElliottA young man miraculously survives the loss of his parents, a brutal group home and an abusive girlfriend with his soul intact.By Andrew O'Hehir04/15/04
Salon.com >> Books
Salon Search About Salon Table Talk Advertise in Salon Investor Relations
News & Politics Opinion Tech & Business Arts & EntertainmentIndie film Books Life Comics Audio DialogueLetters Columnists Salon Gear
Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibitedCopyright 2004 Salon.com Salon, 22 4th Street, 11th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94103Telephone 415 645-9200 Fax 415 645-9204E-mail Salon.com Privacy Policy Terms of Service
November 7, 2004OP-ED COLUMNIST
Rove's RevengeBy MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON — Just how much did Karl Rove hate not being one of the cool guys in high school in the 60's? Enough to hatch schemes to marshal the forces of darkness to take over the country?
Oh, yeah.
A supporter of Nixon against Kennedy at 9, the teenage Karl was, in his description, "a big nerd," a small guy with a pocket protector, briefcase, and glasses almost as big as his head.
Even as a high school debater in Salt Lake City, "Rove didn't just want to win; he wanted the opponents destroyed," write James Moore and Wayne Slater in "Bush's Brain." "He would defeat them, slaughter them and humiliate them."
The Boy Genius, as W. calls him, the "architect" who helped him get the second term he dearly wanted to surpass his father, is happy to crush the liberal elites inspired by Kennedy's New Frontier under the steamroller of 19th-century family values.
Like the president, vice president and defense secretary, General Karl wanted to wipe out the gray, if-it-feels-good-do-it, blame-America-first, doused-in-Vietnam-guilt 60's and turn the clock back to the black-and-white Manichaean values of the 50's.
W. and Karl played up western movie stereotypes. After 9/11, the rugged frontier myth, the hunter/Indian-fighter hero in a war of civilization against savagery worked better than ever. But this White House's frontier is not a place of infinite progress and expansion, stretching society's boundaries. It doesn't battle primitivism; it courts primitivism.
Instead of the New Frontier, Karl and W. offer the New Backtier.
Even as a child, I could feel the rush of J.F.K.'s presidency racing forward, opening up a thrilling world of possibilities and modernity. We were going to the moon. We were confronting racial intolerance. We were paying any price and bearing any burden for freedom. We were respecting faith but keeping it out of politics. Our president was inspiring much of the world. Our first lady was setting the pace in style and culture.
W.'s presidency rushes backward, stifling possibilities, stirring intolerance, confusing church with state, blowing off the world, replacing science with religion, and facts with faith. We're entering another dark age, more creationist than cutting edge, more premodern than postmodern. Instead of leading America to an exciting new reality, the Bushies cocoon in a scary, paranoid, regressive reality. Their new health care plan will probably be a return to leeches.
America has always had strains of isolationism, nativism, chauvinism, puritanism and religious fanaticism. But most of our leaders, even our devout presidents, have tried to keep these impulses under control. Not this crew. They don't call to our better angels; they summon our nasty devils.
Jimmy Carter won the evangelical vote in 1976, and he won it in Ohio. He combined his evangelical appeal with a call for social justice, integrating his church and laboring for world peace. But W. appealed to that vote's most crabbed insecurities - the disparaging of the other, the fear of those godless hedonists in the blue states out to get them and their families. And the fear of scientific progress, as with stem cell research.
When William Jennings Bryan took up combating the theory of evolution, he did it because he despised the social Darwinists who used the theory to justify the "survival of the fittest" in capitalism. Bryan hated anything that justified an economic system that crushed poor workers and farmers, and he hated that the elites would claim there was scientific basis for keeping society divided and unequal.
The new evangelicals challenge science because they've been stirred up to object to social engineering on behalf of society's most vulnerable: the poor, the sick, the sexually different.
Yet the Bush conservatives do their own social engineering. They thought they could toughen up the American character with the invasion of Iraq. Now they want to reshape the country on "moral" issues - though their morality seems to allow them to run a campaign full of blatant distortions and character assassination, and to mislead the public about the war.
Back in 1994, Newt Gingrich said he wanted the government to mold the moral character of Americans and wipe out remnants of the "counterculture McGoverniks." He got derailed, but now he and his pious friends are back in full cry, messing with our psyches and excluding themselves from the rules they demand others follow. They'll eventually do themselves in, but will they do us in first?
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS Help Back to Top
Rove's RevengeBy MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON — Just how much did Karl Rove hate not being one of the cool guys in high school in the 60's? Enough to hatch schemes to marshal the forces of darkness to take over the country?
Oh, yeah.
A supporter of Nixon against Kennedy at 9, the teenage Karl was, in his description, "a big nerd," a small guy with a pocket protector, briefcase, and glasses almost as big as his head.
Even as a high school debater in Salt Lake City, "Rove didn't just want to win; he wanted the opponents destroyed," write James Moore and Wayne Slater in "Bush's Brain." "He would defeat them, slaughter them and humiliate them."
The Boy Genius, as W. calls him, the "architect" who helped him get the second term he dearly wanted to surpass his father, is happy to crush the liberal elites inspired by Kennedy's New Frontier under the steamroller of 19th-century family values.
Like the president, vice president and defense secretary, General Karl wanted to wipe out the gray, if-it-feels-good-do-it, blame-America-first, doused-in-Vietnam-guilt 60's and turn the clock back to the black-and-white Manichaean values of the 50's.
W. and Karl played up western movie stereotypes. After 9/11, the rugged frontier myth, the hunter/Indian-fighter hero in a war of civilization against savagery worked better than ever. But this White House's frontier is not a place of infinite progress and expansion, stretching society's boundaries. It doesn't battle primitivism; it courts primitivism.
Instead of the New Frontier, Karl and W. offer the New Backtier.
Even as a child, I could feel the rush of J.F.K.'s presidency racing forward, opening up a thrilling world of possibilities and modernity. We were going to the moon. We were confronting racial intolerance. We were paying any price and bearing any burden for freedom. We were respecting faith but keeping it out of politics. Our president was inspiring much of the world. Our first lady was setting the pace in style and culture.
W.'s presidency rushes backward, stifling possibilities, stirring intolerance, confusing church with state, blowing off the world, replacing science with religion, and facts with faith. We're entering another dark age, more creationist than cutting edge, more premodern than postmodern. Instead of leading America to an exciting new reality, the Bushies cocoon in a scary, paranoid, regressive reality. Their new health care plan will probably be a return to leeches.
America has always had strains of isolationism, nativism, chauvinism, puritanism and religious fanaticism. But most of our leaders, even our devout presidents, have tried to keep these impulses under control. Not this crew. They don't call to our better angels; they summon our nasty devils.
Jimmy Carter won the evangelical vote in 1976, and he won it in Ohio. He combined his evangelical appeal with a call for social justice, integrating his church and laboring for world peace. But W. appealed to that vote's most crabbed insecurities - the disparaging of the other, the fear of those godless hedonists in the blue states out to get them and their families. And the fear of scientific progress, as with stem cell research.
When William Jennings Bryan took up combating the theory of evolution, he did it because he despised the social Darwinists who used the theory to justify the "survival of the fittest" in capitalism. Bryan hated anything that justified an economic system that crushed poor workers and farmers, and he hated that the elites would claim there was scientific basis for keeping society divided and unequal.
The new evangelicals challenge science because they've been stirred up to object to social engineering on behalf of society's most vulnerable: the poor, the sick, the sexually different.
Yet the Bush conservatives do their own social engineering. They thought they could toughen up the American character with the invasion of Iraq. Now they want to reshape the country on "moral" issues - though their morality seems to allow them to run a campaign full of blatant distortions and character assassination, and to mislead the public about the war.
Back in 1994, Newt Gingrich said he wanted the government to mold the moral character of Americans and wipe out remnants of the "counterculture McGoverniks." He got derailed, but now he and his pious friends are back in full cry, messing with our psyches and excluding themselves from the rules they demand others follow. They'll eventually do themselves in, but will they do us in first?
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS Help Back to Top
News Home - Help
RELIGION AND POLITICS: THE DANGEROUS MIX
Thu Nov 4, 8:00 PM ET
By Richard Reeves
NEW YORK -- Like generals fighting the last war, political reporters almost always cover the last campaign. And so we did this time. Pre-election stories focused above all on voting itself -- registration, turnout, ballot challenges, touch screens -- until we had chads coming out our ears. In 2008, we might be covering the campaign from church pews.
Latest Headlines:
·
Kerry's Votes Key to Bush Win, Rove Says AP - 1 hour, 49 minutes ago
·
AP Poll: Stable Iraq Tops Voter Priorities AP - 1 hour, 55 minutes ago
·
Bush strategist Karl Rove takes victory lap after election win AFP - 1 hour, 56 minutes ago
All Election Coverage
Richard Reeves
Little did we know at CBS News, where I worked this time, that exit polls would show that the 2004 election would not be about war and terrorism, the economy or the demonstrated incompetence of the commander in chief. It would be, for at least half the nation, about "moral values."
We blew it, really, because the important part of President Bush (news - web sites)'s brilliant re-election campaign was not about deeds or even words. It was a campaign of the heart --- as in Bush's 2000 debate declaration that Jesus was his favorite philosopher. "He changed my heart," said the man who would be president. Interesting that, but President Bush did not overdo the religion thing in speeches and appearances. He mentioned his faith on occasion, but why shouldn't he? Faith is obviously important to him.
The real work, we discovered too late, was going on away from the cameras. For a long time, I have hated the stealthy politics of direct mail and telephone banks. I learned that lesson years ago in California when my wife was running for state office. There was no way she could counter truly vicious messages she never saw or heard herself, stuff timed to arrive on the Friday before Election Day.
Bush's mail and phone messages were not vicious, at least not the ones that I heard about or saw. They were in a code. A typical mailing was in Ohio, where this election was decided. A professor at the University of Akron, John C. Green, described one mailer as a beautiful photograph of a church, with the words: "George W. Bush Shares Your Values. Marriage. Life. Faith."
I think that's great, unless you translate the message into political language, directed at church mailing lists, which translates as: "I'm against gay marriage. I'm against abortion. I'm like you." Repeated often enough, those messages are divisive -- if they are broadcast to everyone in the country. But they work magic with a targeted audience. In other words, religion works in politics.
But it is dangerous and divisive. I come from a line that dependably produced ministers for two Protestant faiths, Dutch Reformed and the Church of the Nazarene. My generation, though, opted out. So did the founding fathers of this great country. They had their reasons.
The founders, at least the most important of them, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, loved the idea of God but were afraid of Christianity. "During almost 15 centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial," wrote James Madison, the father of the Constitution. "What have been its fruits? More or less in most places, pride and indolence in the clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution."
John Adams had this to say: "The United States of America governments have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses."
Those guys chose "E Pluribus Unum" -- "Out of many, one" -- to put on the new country's currency. It was only in 1957 that the words on all our bills were changed to "In God We Trust."
Many of the founders, including those named here, called themselves "Deists," which meant that they believed in God only on evidence from nature or reason -- and they thought of Jesus Christ as a man, a smart and admirable man. Some of them, particularly Jefferson, thought of religion as a useful tool in governing, a way to moderate and discipline the instincts of men. But most of all they worried that fervid Christianity, with all its moral values, could also be used to turn one man or woman against another, a divisive force to be feared. That is why the First Amendment of their Constitution, which is ours, guaranteed freedom of religion -- and freedom from religion.
(EDITORS: If you have editorial questions, please contact Alan McDermott at amcdermott@amuniversal.com.)-->
Story Tools
Email Story
Post/Read Msgs (226)
Formatted Story
Ratings: Would you recommend this story?
Not at all 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 Highly
Copyright © 2004 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.Questions or CommentsPrivacy Policy -Terms of Service - Copyright Policy - Ad Feedback
Iraq Declares Martial Law Amid Surge of Violence U.S. Command Seals Off Fallujah in 'Final Preparations' for Assault
By Karl VickWashington Post Foreign ServiceSunday, November 7, 2004; 3:03 PM
BAGHDAD, Nov. 7 -- Iraq's interim government announced a state of emergency on Sunday, imposing martial law on a country braced for a massive U.S. military assault on the city of Fallujah.
The order, read before cameras by a spokesman for interim prime minister Ayad Allawi heightened a sense of crisis in Iraq and fueled fears that an offensive on Fallujah would unleash counterattacks that insurgents appeared to have already begun elsewhere in the country.
The U.S. command announced it had sealed off Fallujah and was "finishing final preparations for an assault" on the city, the Associated Press reported.
Later in the day, Allawi, in a brief meeting with reporters, said the emergency law will be implemented "whenever and wherever is necessary."
He called the measure "a very powerful message that we are serious" about curbing violence before January's scheduled elections. "We want the elections to take place. We want to secure the country so elections can be done in a peaceful way and the Iraqi people can participate ... freely, without the intimidation by terrorists and by forces who are trying to wreck the political process in Iraq. "....I hope the terrorists get [the message] because we are not going to be easy on them."
Sunday brought news of a massed insurgent attack on police stations and the killing of 21 police officers in Haditha and Haqlaniya, two towns west of Fallujah. The twin attacks, carried out by fighters who included Arab foreigners, followed a flurry of car bomb and mortar attacks Saturday that left more than 30 people dead in Samarra about 60 miles north of Baghdad. U.S. and Iraqi forces had reclaimed Samarra from rebels last month in an operation that was cast as a model for the attack on Fallujah.
In some of the latest violence south of Baghdad, 21 young Iraqi men were killed Saturday and Sunday while returning to their homes in Najaf after having traveled to the capital to join the Iraqi National Guard, said Najaf police chief Ghalib Hashem Jazaari. Gunmen killed 13 of the recruits Saturday and eight others Sunday as they were passing through the town of Latifiya, a hotbed for insurgents, Jazaari said. He said the killers apparently had been tipped to the recruits' travel by informants in the guard recruiting office.
In other attacks Sunday, a car bomb exploded outside the Baghdad home of the interim finance minister, killing a guard, and another car bomb targeted a U.S. military convoy near the capital's airport, leaving one U.S. soldier dead and another wounded. In addition, two provincial officials were assassinated south of the capital while traveling to the funeral of a third.
"We have decided to declare a state of emergency in all areas of Iraq, with the exception of the region of Kurdistan for a period of 60 days," Allawi spokesman Thaer Naqeeb announced in early afternoon Baghdad time, citing the transitional law put in place during the U.S. occupation that expired in June.
Kasim Daoud, Iraq's minister of state and national security adviser, said the government has "the power to extend the state of emergency for three months until the elections if there is no improvement," according to the Associated Press.
Naqeeb said Allawi would provide details at a Monday news conference. Technically, the state of emergency would give the government broad powers to impose curfews, restrict movement and make arrests. But Allawi's interim government has struggled to secure basic control over large sections of Iraq, and U.S. forces routinely operate on their own, making arrests and engaging in firefights independent of civil authorities.
"This will increase the violence," said Mohammed Bashar Faidhi, spokesman for the Association of Muslim Clerics, which represents some 3,000 Sunni Muslim clergy in Iraq and has been a leading voice for the resistance. "The government is like a man walking in the dark who wants to avoid a small hole and falls into a big hole," he said.
"At this point the government can't even protect itself," Faidhi said. "How can it impose a state of emergency? Allawi, when he travels, half of the American army accompanies him!"
Meanwhile, some 10,000 U.S. Marines and Army troops and newly trained Iraqi infantrymen massed for a threatened assault on Fallujah, a city of 300,000 controlled by insurgents and foreign fighters since April. Senior Marine officers gathered troops for pep talks, invoking the memory of previous Marine urban assaults.
Allawi declined to say whether he had yet authorized an attack on Fallujah. "The window is closing, absolutely," he said. "We can't wait indefinitely. We have made our case very clear, that we have nothing with the people of Fallujah. On the contrary, the people of Fallujah have been asking us to really intervene as fast as we can and to salvage the people. They have been taken hostage by a bunch of terrorists and bandits and insurgents who were part of the old regime. They had been involved in atrocities when Saddam [Hussein, the ousted Iraqi leader] was around. Our government is determined to safeguard the Iraqi people."
Naqeeb's statement announcing the state of emergency blamed, in part, "the continuation of a pattern of violence and terrorism and the daily operations of mass murder" committed by "terrorist intruder groups." The violence, he said, was part of "their persistent attempt to paralyze the state's activities" and destroy Iraq's infrastructure. The government, Naqeeb said, "has exhausted all possible means" to solve the problem peacefully.
In some of the latest violence, a car bomb exploded Sunday near the home of Iraq's finance minister, Adil Abdel-Mahdi, killing one of his guards. The minister himself escaped injury, officials said.
One U.S. soldier was killed and another wounded in two attacks on military convoys in and around Baghdad, the military reported. No other details were immediately provided.
In Haditha, some 30 insurgents mounted a coordinated assault on the city's police headquarters that started at 9 p.m. Saturday and lasted three hours.
"First of all, we were attacked by mortars," said Lt. Muneef Abdullah. "Then the armed men came and started shooting and throwing hand grenades. When we tried to defend ourselves, they started launching RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] at us."
He added, "We called the Americans to come and help us, but unfortunately they took three hours, as if they were coming to a wedding."
Other accounts of the attacks on the police stations in western Anbar province, which includes Fallujah, said that some of the Iraqi police were killed execution-style after being captured. The AP said at least seven policemen were lined up and shot after a gun battle in Haditha about 135 miles northwest of Baghdad.
According to Reuters news agency, the attackers in Haditha took 21 captured Iraqi policemen to an oil-pumping station and shot them to death in cold blood.
Last month, insurgents massacred 49 unarmed Iraqi army recruits after capturing them on a road northeast of Baghdad. A group led by Jordanian insurgent Abu Musab Zarqawi claimed responsibility for the killings.
The group also claimed in a message posted on the Internet that it was behind attacks Saturday in Samarra in which more than 30 people, most of them Iraqi policemen, were killed. Attackers stormed an Iraqi police station and set off at least two suicide car bombs in those attacks.
Special correspondent Saad Sarhan in Najaf, Iraq, and staff writer William Branigin in Washington contributed to this report.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
By Karl VickWashington Post Foreign ServiceSunday, November 7, 2004; 3:03 PM
BAGHDAD, Nov. 7 -- Iraq's interim government announced a state of emergency on Sunday, imposing martial law on a country braced for a massive U.S. military assault on the city of Fallujah.
The order, read before cameras by a spokesman for interim prime minister Ayad Allawi heightened a sense of crisis in Iraq and fueled fears that an offensive on Fallujah would unleash counterattacks that insurgents appeared to have already begun elsewhere in the country.
The U.S. command announced it had sealed off Fallujah and was "finishing final preparations for an assault" on the city, the Associated Press reported.
Later in the day, Allawi, in a brief meeting with reporters, said the emergency law will be implemented "whenever and wherever is necessary."
He called the measure "a very powerful message that we are serious" about curbing violence before January's scheduled elections. "We want the elections to take place. We want to secure the country so elections can be done in a peaceful way and the Iraqi people can participate ... freely, without the intimidation by terrorists and by forces who are trying to wreck the political process in Iraq. "....I hope the terrorists get [the message] because we are not going to be easy on them."
Sunday brought news of a massed insurgent attack on police stations and the killing of 21 police officers in Haditha and Haqlaniya, two towns west of Fallujah. The twin attacks, carried out by fighters who included Arab foreigners, followed a flurry of car bomb and mortar attacks Saturday that left more than 30 people dead in Samarra about 60 miles north of Baghdad. U.S. and Iraqi forces had reclaimed Samarra from rebels last month in an operation that was cast as a model for the attack on Fallujah.
In some of the latest violence south of Baghdad, 21 young Iraqi men were killed Saturday and Sunday while returning to their homes in Najaf after having traveled to the capital to join the Iraqi National Guard, said Najaf police chief Ghalib Hashem Jazaari. Gunmen killed 13 of the recruits Saturday and eight others Sunday as they were passing through the town of Latifiya, a hotbed for insurgents, Jazaari said. He said the killers apparently had been tipped to the recruits' travel by informants in the guard recruiting office.
In other attacks Sunday, a car bomb exploded outside the Baghdad home of the interim finance minister, killing a guard, and another car bomb targeted a U.S. military convoy near the capital's airport, leaving one U.S. soldier dead and another wounded. In addition, two provincial officials were assassinated south of the capital while traveling to the funeral of a third.
"We have decided to declare a state of emergency in all areas of Iraq, with the exception of the region of Kurdistan for a period of 60 days," Allawi spokesman Thaer Naqeeb announced in early afternoon Baghdad time, citing the transitional law put in place during the U.S. occupation that expired in June.
Kasim Daoud, Iraq's minister of state and national security adviser, said the government has "the power to extend the state of emergency for three months until the elections if there is no improvement," according to the Associated Press.
Naqeeb said Allawi would provide details at a Monday news conference. Technically, the state of emergency would give the government broad powers to impose curfews, restrict movement and make arrests. But Allawi's interim government has struggled to secure basic control over large sections of Iraq, and U.S. forces routinely operate on their own, making arrests and engaging in firefights independent of civil authorities.
"This will increase the violence," said Mohammed Bashar Faidhi, spokesman for the Association of Muslim Clerics, which represents some 3,000 Sunni Muslim clergy in Iraq and has been a leading voice for the resistance. "The government is like a man walking in the dark who wants to avoid a small hole and falls into a big hole," he said.
"At this point the government can't even protect itself," Faidhi said. "How can it impose a state of emergency? Allawi, when he travels, half of the American army accompanies him!"
Meanwhile, some 10,000 U.S. Marines and Army troops and newly trained Iraqi infantrymen massed for a threatened assault on Fallujah, a city of 300,000 controlled by insurgents and foreign fighters since April. Senior Marine officers gathered troops for pep talks, invoking the memory of previous Marine urban assaults.
Allawi declined to say whether he had yet authorized an attack on Fallujah. "The window is closing, absolutely," he said. "We can't wait indefinitely. We have made our case very clear, that we have nothing with the people of Fallujah. On the contrary, the people of Fallujah have been asking us to really intervene as fast as we can and to salvage the people. They have been taken hostage by a bunch of terrorists and bandits and insurgents who were part of the old regime. They had been involved in atrocities when Saddam [Hussein, the ousted Iraqi leader] was around. Our government is determined to safeguard the Iraqi people."
Naqeeb's statement announcing the state of emergency blamed, in part, "the continuation of a pattern of violence and terrorism and the daily operations of mass murder" committed by "terrorist intruder groups." The violence, he said, was part of "their persistent attempt to paralyze the state's activities" and destroy Iraq's infrastructure. The government, Naqeeb said, "has exhausted all possible means" to solve the problem peacefully.
In some of the latest violence, a car bomb exploded Sunday near the home of Iraq's finance minister, Adil Abdel-Mahdi, killing one of his guards. The minister himself escaped injury, officials said.
One U.S. soldier was killed and another wounded in two attacks on military convoys in and around Baghdad, the military reported. No other details were immediately provided.
In Haditha, some 30 insurgents mounted a coordinated assault on the city's police headquarters that started at 9 p.m. Saturday and lasted three hours.
"First of all, we were attacked by mortars," said Lt. Muneef Abdullah. "Then the armed men came and started shooting and throwing hand grenades. When we tried to defend ourselves, they started launching RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] at us."
He added, "We called the Americans to come and help us, but unfortunately they took three hours, as if they were coming to a wedding."
Other accounts of the attacks on the police stations in western Anbar province, which includes Fallujah, said that some of the Iraqi police were killed execution-style after being captured. The AP said at least seven policemen were lined up and shot after a gun battle in Haditha about 135 miles northwest of Baghdad.
According to Reuters news agency, the attackers in Haditha took 21 captured Iraqi policemen to an oil-pumping station and shot them to death in cold blood.
Last month, insurgents massacred 49 unarmed Iraqi army recruits after capturing them on a road northeast of Baghdad. A group led by Jordanian insurgent Abu Musab Zarqawi claimed responsibility for the killings.
The group also claimed in a message posted on the Internet that it was behind attacks Saturday in Samarra in which more than 30 people, most of them Iraqi policemen, were killed. Attackers stormed an Iraqi police station and set off at least two suicide car bombs in those attacks.
Special correspondent Saad Sarhan in Najaf, Iraq, and staff writer William Branigin in Washington contributed to this report.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
November 6, 2004CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Music at a Wheel's Click, but Do We Really Hear?By BERNARD HOLLAND
y friend Brant Rumble showed me his iPod the other day. Brant, who edits books on popular culture for a Midtown publisher, has just introduced 11,000 songs - two-thirds of his CD collection - into iPodian jaws.
The iPod, for the less than hip, looks like a cigarette case with earphones hanging out of it. It's meant mainly, I suppose, for listening while walking around or sitting in the subway or pounding a treadmill in the gym. Brant tells me there have been complaints about the iPod's battery power to go along with the good reports. He also says competitors are hot on its heels with what they think is something better. I could no more recommend the iPod than I could one kind of jet engine over another.
As I write and you read, Brant is probably walking through Rockefeller Plaza with "Waterloo Sunset" in his ears, but I can't help fantasizing about Brant the Wagnerian, with 180 complete versions of "Parsifal" held warmly in his hand. Or Brant the Mozartean, with maybe 1,600 symphonies and room left over for an overture or two. Haydn wrote a lot of music, and though I haven't done the arithmetic, I bet that Brant's iPod could swallow the Haydn corpus whole with never a belch.
The best way to deal with abstract ideas of such enormousness is to visualize them in a concrete way. Imagine, for instance, the conductor Herbert von Karajan reduced to the size of an ionized particle.
With effort, I resist ingratitude and acknowledge the convenience of having 45 recordings of Wagner's "Ring" cycle at my fingertips: a luxury comparable to having one's dry cleaning picked up and delivered. No one in Wagner's lifetime ever made him come to them.
To the beard-strokers and hand-wringers busy divining the future of opera houses and concert halls, the iPod brings news: some good, some not. Who could complain about this avalanche of music? But who can cope with it? Brant admits to the pressures of such superrichness. He feels obliged to listen for all he's worth. He doesn't deny that he may not be listening as well as he once did.
If you can listen to everything, you may end up hearing nothing. I sometimes wish half of Brant's iPod were filled with blank spaces. Music cannot begin or end without silence in front and behind. Unending music is not music.
And is it all too easy? Any music critic will tell you that the eager anticipation of new recordings fades with their unsolicited, almost daily flow into the office. Would knowing a little less actually make us smarter, or at least hungrier?
I do wonder if spiritual muscle tone is being softened. Maybe we who walked 10 miles in driving snow to our one-room schoolhouses learned more. On the other hand, maybe all that walking made us too tired to learn much. Medieval poets and accountants had phenomenal memories because, not being educated to write, they had no choice.
In Brant's aesthetic, music makes walking around more pleasant, like a good pair of shoes. Music as something useful is an idea that Paul Hindemith and other 20th-century composers disillusioned by the overblown Romantic mystique of music pursued, but with limited impact. The elevator-music industry paid heed and made a fortune.
When Brant isn't allowing his iPod to roam at will, he is arranging sets of songs according to where he is and what he is doing. Going to Las Vegas means upbeat and excited; coming back, he wants something soothing, maybe to heal the wounds of loss.
German musicologists told us in the last two centuries that music was sacred; you stopped doing anything else and listened. Another friend suggests that the iPod and devices like it demonstrate the end of communal music. Brant's iPod acts more like a wall than an altar: he on one side, the honking and blaring of Sixth Avenue on the other. That he hasn't been hit by a car while listening to the Kinks speaks for the existence of angels.
The iPod culture is not a sudden event. Record buyers have been taking the opera house into their living rooms for a century.
Composers, once part of a more or less monolithic tradition, have divided and subdivided into separate cells and political wings. Some make music that still sings like Brahms; others, like Karlheinz Stockhausen, hear music in the rotors of a helicopter hovering overhead.
It may not matter how many are listening to either camp the way they used to. Tchaikovsky would have disappeared long ago were his audiences small and record sales minimal. Today, only a few people actually listen to Anton Webern, but his music will survive and thrive one iPod listener at a time.
Maybe an irreversible progression is under way: more kinds of music, fewer listeners for each kind. Bigger and smaller at the same time. Concert and opera life began with people gathering together to share the pleasure (or annoyance) of one another's company. It may end with one concert hall per listener.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS Help Back to Top
November 7, 2004
The Confessions of John Patrick ShanleyBy ALEX WITCHEL
ow can you pass up a chance to attend a family reunion with an Oscar winner who got up and thanked ''everybody who ever punched or kissed me in my life and everybody who I ever punched or kissed?'' Think of the drama, the intrigue, the ice packs. But in a park in Rockland County, N.Y., on a September Saturday, there was nary an Irish temper in sight. The men in John Patrick Shanley's family toted bags of charcoal, raw meat and tongs. The women, like the Italian characters in Shanley's original screenplay for ''Moonstruck,'' unwrapped enormous bowls of pasta salad and oversize platters of deli sandwiches, more than enough for 40. Everyone shared, hugged, talked, showed pictures and yelled at their kids to stay out of the brook.
Shanley, the youngest of five, father of two, drove up from Manhattan with his sons. He traveled light, taking only a badminton set, two sandwiches from Gourmet Garage and a reporter for The New York Times. Within minutes, the rest of the family had swarmed to the far side of the table, a spontaneous quarantine.
They knew that come November, Shanley, 54, would have three plays opening in New York. They also knew that the curse of having a writer in the family is that everything -- sooner or later -- becomes material. Witness the new lineup: ''Doubt,'' inspired by a relative's experience with a priest who was convicted of child molestation, opens Nov. 22 at Manhattan Theater Club. ''Sailor's Song,'' a lyrical meditation on choosing to love in the face of death, written after Shanley's mother, father and eldest sister all died within an 18-month period, opens Sunday in a LAByrinth Theater Company production at the Public Theater. And a revival of ''Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,'' Shanley's 1984 two-character play about desperate loners afraid of love (think the very dark side of Nicolas Cage and Cher in ''Moonstruck''), opens on Wednesday at Second Stage Theater.
They also knew that it was Shanley's tormented relationship with his mother that became the template for many of his physically and emotionally damaged or maimed male characters (remember Cage's wooden hand?) who must face down a profusion of often indifferent, always ambivalent females. No, certainly no need to go there during a family reunion. Though of their mother, Shanley's older brother, Tom, said gallantly: ''Up to and including me, my mom's batting arm was still good. By the time John came along she was worn out. But I always, always felt loved. She probably didn't hit me enough.''
Shanley only smiled. Those requiring further instruction can refer to ''Where's My Money?'' (2001), his scathing play about divorce, in which a male lawyer says, ''Women consume, and they must be directed what to consume, or they may identify you as lunch.'' From the same play comes one of Shanley's most quoted lines: ''Monogamy is like a 40-watt bulb. It works, but it's not enough.''
Although it was the angst of finding love in and beyond the kind of volatile Irish-American family Eugene O'Neill would recognize that dominated Shanley's earlier plays, it was his biting humor that aligned his work with the surreal domestic comedies of John Guare and Christopher Durang. Shanley has since found increasingly larger canvases for his rage: in last year's political allegory, ''Dirty Story,'' he portrayed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a sadomasochistic relationship between a man and a woman. In The New York Times, Ben Brantley called it ''appallingly entertaining,'' going on to say that Shanley's ''broadening of perspective has led him to create one of the liveliest, boldest and -- against the odds -- funniest studies ever of a subject that even hard-core satirists tend to approach on tiptoe.''
It surprises no one that Shanley's triple crown -- two new plays and a revival -- skirts Broadway, a bottom-line marketplace where ''tiptoe'' rules, and where his plays have never been produced. As Robyn Goodman, a producer of ''Avenue Q,'' last season's Tony Award winner for Best Musical, said: ''When John wants to make a lot of money, he writes 'Moonstruck.' When he writes from his heart as an artist, he's not thinking of mass appeal.''
For Shanley, writing was how he learned to make sense of a childhood in which he was always an outsider. Growing up as a son of an immigrant meat packer in the east Bronx in the 50's and 60's put him in ''a very violent neighborhood,'' he said. ''It was extremely anti-intellectual and extremely racist and none of this fit me. I was in constant fistfights from the time I was 6. I did not particularly want to be. People would look at me and become enraged at the sight of me. I believe that the reason was they could see that I saw them. And they didn't like that.''
His hyperdeveloped skills of observation have afforded him a lifetime of highs and lows. The hard-knocks childhood gave way to a stateside stint in the Marines during Vietnam; a meteoric rise in Hollywood with the success of ''Moonstruck'' led to a meteoric crash after writing and directing the catastrophe that was ''Joe Versus the Volcano.'' An impassioned rededication to the theater followed. Shanley's 23 plays, many of which he has also directed, have been translated into 15 languages, performed in 17 countries and receive about 80 productions a year in the United States and Canada. Both his marriages failed, replaced by, as one theater producer put it, ''a different blonde on his arm every night,'' Kim Cattrall among them. Recently, in a cruel twist, he weathered a siege of glaucoma that has cost him 50 percent of his sight yet, incredibly, has slowed his work pace not at all.
With a history this tumultuous, perhaps it is best to trace its particulars away from the convivial crowd by the brook. Though the quarantine held, Shanley's Aunt Peggy, his mother's only surviving sister, did make room on a picnic bench to offer her own assessment of her nephew's work. ''It's all in his head,'' she confided. ''I think every kid thinks he had a hard time.''
She went on to recall that Shanley's father, who came here at 24 from County Westmeath, used to admonish his youngest son to ''get a real job.'' And he did. Before he won his Oscar, Shanley worked as an elevator operator, a house painter, furniture mover, locksmith, bartender and sandwich maker. But looking and listening and telling a story was the only job that stuck.
Shanley lives on a sunny block in Brooklyn Heights, in a modest apartment building without a doorman. There is color everywhere; bright blue walls in the living room, bright green in the kitchen. There are two small bedrooms, one for Nick and Frank, Shanley's sons (named for his parents, Nicholas and Frances), who come on the weekends. In the otherwise meticulously clean bathroom, a white strand of dental floss lay on the white tiled floor. Like the white birdie at the reunion that flew at him across the badminton net against the white light of the sky, Shanley could not see it.
He sat at a large dining-room table across from his desk, which was jammed with scripts. Above his computer, a framed handmade sign read ''Make Me.'' A multicolored glass chandelier from Provence hung in the center of the room; another was in the entrance hall.
''That was what they called me in the Bronx,'' he said. ''They said: Your name's Shanley? We'll call you Chandelier. Then it became just 'Lier.' '' He pronounced it ''Leah.'' Along with his huge, bursting laugh, the Bronx comes and goes when Shanley speaks, though it doesn't stray far. The kid from the hot-lunch program who never saw a play until he worked on a high-school production of ''Cyrano de Bergerac'' broke through barriers of class and education to become one of the theater's most successful playwrights. He wears that victory lightly, although the courtly, cagey manners of an outsider -- always gauging a response, planning a parry -- tend to peek through. He rarely disagrees; he simply restates someone else's opinion until it resembles his own. He seems open and often is, displaying the flamboyance, warmth and humor that have shaped many of his characters. Just as frequently, he will catch himself and draw back. His lips purse, a heady, distancing speech begins and he is gone.
These days, Shanley is dancer thin, and against his graying hair, his blue eyes are vivid. But after five operations they tend to flash unexpectedly, disconcertingly, revealing what look like shards of mirror, a writer's fun-house distortion that seems to dare the person before him: Do you see what I see?
From the beginning, Shanley went to Catholic schools. The Sisters of Charity, who ran St. Anthony's Grammar School, which he attended in the Bronx and has written about in ''Doubt,'' were the sympathetic antithesis to the Irish Christian Brothers who ran Cardinal Spellman High School. ''They beat children with their fists,'' Shanley said. ''I saw a 220-pound brother put a boy, a little gangly boy, against a wall and hit him in the stomach as hard as he could.''
Shanley's response to that environment was to become a professional problem child. In religion class, he insisted he did not believe in God. In the cafeteria, he flung mashed potatoes over his shoulder often enough to get banned from the hot-lunch program. He read science fiction books during all his classes and spent five days a week, every week for most of the two years he was there in detention before the brothers finally kicked him out.
He went instead to the Thomas Moore Preparatory School, a private school with a Catholic orientation, in Harrisville, N.H., which afforded him a few humane teachers. It was their kindness, actually, that was among the reasons he wrote ''Doubt,'' in which a nun suspects a priest of being a bit too interested in a young boy. The strength of the play is how skillfully Shanley exposes the two sides to every suspicion.
''It was homosexual teachers for the most part who saved me,'' Shanley said. ''The head of discipline at Thomas Moore was gay, and he was my friend and protector. Did he have his reasons for being interested in me? Everybody has their reasons. Passion fuels many things, and it's used in many ways. Many of these people never cross the line.''
Shanley's relative, unfortunately, was not as lucky. ''A child in my family was molested by a priest,'' he said. ''The parents went first to the local level, then up the chain of command to a highly placed church official, who took them by the hands and said: 'I'm so sorry this happened to you. I will take care of it.' And then he promoted him. They were so shocked that they left the church for 10 years. But they missed it, so they returned to a parish where the monsignor gave a sermon saying that with these church scandals it was the parents, not the clergy, who were responsible. They had to leave the church again.
''And still another reason I wrote this play is that I'm very aware that debate has become the form of communication, like on 'Crossfire.' There is no room or value placed on doubt, which is one of the hallmarks of the wise man. It's getting harder and harder in this society to find a place for spacious, true intellectual exchange. It's all becoming about who won the argument, which is just moronic.''
''Sailor's Song'' -- an emotionally raw piece about a man whose wife is dying, the nephew who keeps him company during her coma and the two women he meets in a bar, one of whom channels the dead -- mines his grief over his parents' and sister's deaths. When he began to speak about his father, Nicholas, his ''good parent,'' who died in 2001 at 95, he turned away and wept.
''He was this guy from the land with the ability to forcefully say the thing that needed to be said or to make the observation that cut away everything and revealed the essence of the situation,'' Shanley said. ''He was very affectionate, but from about 20 feet away. He would scream as if there was a chasm, 'I love you, boy!' He was not violent to me, but my oldest brother, Jim, said a curse word when he was, I think, 5 years old, and my father punched him with a closed fist. By the time I showed up he had deeply mellowed out. He slapped me once at my mother's repeated exhortation -- 'Hit him, Nick! Hit him' -- and I could see it broke his heart to do it. He didn't have it in him anymore.''
Shanley's mother died in 2002. So what was the problem, exactly?
''She was a pill,'' he said. ''It took me many years of thinking, reading psychological tomes of various kinds, talking endlessly, writing plays, to finally say: 'You know, she was a pill. That was the problem.' And in my climactic interchange with my mother, she called me up and said: 'What was it? What was so terrible?' And I said very easily, very kindly really, 'Well, you just weren't very affectionate.' And she said, 'No, that's not how I am.' And that was the conversation. To get to that was a byzantine, tortuous road. But that was the crux of it. These things always end up being pretty simple.''
Not really. In Shanley's ''Beggars in the House of Plenty'' (1991), Pop, a butcher, terrorizes his eldest son with a cleaver and says: ''You'll look for love to stop the starving thing in you that I put there, but nothing will stop the starving thing. I'll never approve of you.'' In the same play, Ma bemoans her recurrent headaches.
''My mother wasn't comfortable with me no matter what I did,'' Shanley said. ''When I was a kid, she had these terrible headaches, and was always screaming, 'Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I've got a splitting headache!' And many years later I said, 'Do you still get headaches?' And she said: 'What are you talking about? I don't get headaches.' I said, 'Wait a minute, when I was growing up you had headaches all the time.' And she thought about it and went: 'Oh, yeah. That's true.' I said, 'When did they stop?' She said, 'When you left.'''
He went on: ''I remember I'd asked if she had seen 'Five Corners,' my first movie. And she said: 'No, I haven't. I understand the mother is thrown out the window in that movie.' And I said, 'Yeah.' That was the end of that subject.''
Not that his father was terribly different. After Shanley's freshman year at New York University, he was placed on academic probation and dropped out to enlist. He returned to school two years later, putting himself through on a combination of the G.I. Bill, loans and odd jobs. In 1977 he graduated as valedictorian.
''My father said, 'It's not too late to join the Sanitation Department,' '' Shanley recalled. ''But he was kind of joking. I would say that my parents were intermittently proud of me. They couldn't hang onto it, you know? It would come and go, like the flu.''
Well, beside his ex-wives, there must be a long line of women who would have loved to get their hands around his mother's neck. He laughed. ''Absolutely,'' he said, adding dryly, ''although you do tend to wrestle with the same problem, so you often choose somebody who is going to give you something to work with.''
It was his second wife, the actress Jayne Haynes, with whom he adopted his sons, who are now 12, in 1992. Through open adoption, he agreed to pay the room and board of two pregnant women, assuming one might change her mind. Neither did.
''We got two children, four and a half months apart,'' Shanley said. ''It was very intense and very hard but ultimately great. Nicky is Mexican-American, from just this side of the Rio Grande. Frankie is a blond, blue-eyed Celt from Texarkana. They're joined at the hip.''
After Shanley's glaucoma was diagnosed, however, it wasn't easy to stop two roughhousing boys from climbing all over Dad. ''The really bad three-year period ended about three years ago,'' he said. When medication failed, surgery became necessary. ''They basically had to puncture the eyes to lower the pressure,'' he continued. ''My eyes deflated, and I went blind in one eye, then in the other, fortunately never at the same time. When you have eye surgery, you have to be awake. They use a topical anesthetic, and by the last surgery I'd become immune to it. I was just in agony. But for some reason it always would time out around productions so that I would go blind and then they would be able to bring back the vision just in time for me to go to work. And then I would be blind in the other eye after I finished that job, and then they'd fix that.
''After the last surgery, the surgeon said, 'You'll take these drops, and if the pressure remains constant, then you're out of the woods.' And he thought for a minute and said, 'Actually, you're never going to be out of the woods.' And I said, 'So I live in the woods now.''' He sighed. ''Look, I can read, I can drive, I can direct plays. But I just, you know, live in a delicate eyeball world.''
And there's no family history of this? He shook his head. ''None,'' he said. ''Except my mother. Late in life.''
n a rainy morning, Shanley went to the Public Theater to hear the first read-through of ''Sailor's Song.'' With three plays opening almost at once, he made the judicious decision to direct none of them.
Sitting at a large table, two actresses threw some moony looks Shanley's way; hope springs eternal on the first day of rehearsal. The playwright responded not at all, until the reading began and one of those actresses spoke some lines. ''Phony Baloney,'' he wrote in the margin of his script. An actor stumbled on a speech and, like everyone else who made a mistake, looked guiltily at Shanley, whose benign expression never changed. Though at a certain point, when one character said, ''It can be a curse to love,'' it became clear that the soft panting noise in the room was Shanley, bent in his chair, crying.
When the reading ended, he went into the lobby of the Public and sat at a cafe table. Even within the theater, Shanley is considered something of an outsider, a tough guy; some of its gay denizens refer to him as Manly John Shanley. But while everyone bows to his talent -- and covets his Oscar -- most people don't know him well. Because he has so often insisted on directing his own work (which has earned him some critical slaps for self-indulgence, when the text might have benefited from an outside eye), some charge that he is, at heart, an arrogant control freak.
''I find that people who say I'm a control freak are control freaks themselves,'' Shanley said calmly. ''For them it's about power; for me, it's about ideas. Nothing would be better than to learn in wiser hands than mine. In the past I have tried that and found that the news was not good. I waited to see my work expanded, and instead, I saw it become less than.
''I have to fight for what I believe. I came from a background that I wasn't going to be able to capitalize on. If I had, somebody could have gotten me into the telephone company or maybe the Fire Department. I was going to be a writer, and I had never met a writer, and I had never gone to the theater. I was completely having to invent this from scratch. It was going to have to be about my craft and my desire to be heard, and you push your way to the front and say, 'Damn it, you're going to do my play.' That kind of braggadocio and aggressiveness, which was in my case based on real conviction -- was very important.''
Because ''Moonstruck,'' which grossed about $80 million and won three Oscars, was only his second movie, he didn't have to fight as long or as hard in Hollywood. The time for that would have been in 1990, after ''Joe Versus the Volcano'' bombed. But he chose not to.
''When I was in Los Angeles, I was in the above-the-line community pretty much all the time,'' he said. ''And it's a very small group of people who basically reassure each other that they must be doing O.K. because they're in the room with these other people. I found it, after a while, just antithetical to my nature. I like to make a good living, but there are limits to how much cash is good for a person to have coming over the transom every day. It's also addictive. Money is like heroin, and I grew up in a neighborhood that was destroyed by heroin. I've watched addiction all my life. Celebrity is like heroin. And constant praise is like heroin. And, you know, no one can resist constant praise. I had to get out.''
Shanley has written numerous screenplays since then; four have been produced, including ''Alive'' and ''Congo.'' A script he co-wrote for HBO, ''Live From Baghdad,'' about journalists who covered the 1991 Persian Gulf war, was nominated for an Emmy Award. ''I still make an awful lot of money out of Hollywood,'' he said. ''And once in a while they make something I write. But that's not my raison d'etre.''
That would be the theater. Tony Kushner, who had a big-time show-biz success of his own with HBO's adaptation of ''Angels in America,'' said of Shanley: ''What I admire most are that his plays are beautifully well made, economical, sharp and coherent. I like the toughness of his writing a lot. He's not a misanthrope, but he's in pursuit of why people behave as badly as they do along with having a great compassion for them. That's an unusual and interesting combination.''
For Shanley, there is no calling greater: ''Playwriting is the last great bastion of the individual writer. It's exciting precisely because it's where the money isn't. Money goes to safety, to consensus. It's not individualism. That's why sometimes I get very frustrated watching plays. I'm like: 'Man, you have the shot here to say anything and this is what you're saying? This boring retread of a play I've seen 500 times, this denatured Arthur Miller? I mean you could do or say anything that's within the bounds of the law if you don't harm anybody physically, and this is what you're doing?'' He shook his head. ''Theater is just too exciting a prospect to be left to dullards.''
That less-than-collegial attitude may account for the fact that in the 25 years Shanley has been writing and directing in New York, he has never won an award for either. ''Maybe they think I have enough,'' he said easily, getting up to return to rehearsal. ''And if that's it, that's O.K.''
As it is, that Oscar of his is still causing problems.
While even more family arrived at the reunion, Aunt Peggy was recalling that she and her sister Bessie had gone to see each of Shanley's plays, from the very beginning. ''When he won, we were so disappointed,'' she said. ''He never mentioned our names.''
But her granddaughter, Mary Murphy, chimed in, ''It's very cool, having a star in the family.''
The star sat alone, watching Nick and Frank play badminton with cousins, uncles and aunts. When they took a break, conversation centered on starting the sixth grade. At Frank's school, students call teachers by their first names. ''We could have done that, too,'' Shanley said amiably, ''but then we'd be put to death.''
Both boys are protective of Shanley, almost tender in their vigilance of him. They continually surround him, seeming to stand sentry. Maybe it's the glaucoma. Maybe it's because he's just not like other dads. When Frank came off the makeshift court -- a patch of grass dotted with rocks -- and Shanley saw his skinned knee, he said, ''You know, in Ireland, kings were kings until they had a physical imperfection, and then they were put to death.''
His brother Tom quickly interjected, ''Well, Frank, it's a good thing you're not a king.'' But Frank didn't need reassurance. He seems to hear stuff like that all the time. He sat near his father a while longer, then returned to the game.
Shanley watched his sons. ''They're going to fall in love and have their hearts broken,'' he said quietly. ''I don't think I can take it.''
The next time it was Nick who left the court. He wore a silver medallion around his neck, a leadership medal he won at camp. As the apparent conscience of the group, he had determined that there were too many questionable calls on whether the birdie was in or out.
''Dad, we need more string,'' he said.
Shanley seemed puzzled and looked toward the net. ''Why? Is it falling down?''
Nick shook his head. ''No, no, I want outlines,'' he said, gesturing to the court.
''Oh, you want boundaries,'' Shanley said and burst out laughing. ''No, I don't have any of those.''
Nick smiled before turning to go. Actually, he knew that.
Alex Witchel is a staff writer for the magazine.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS Help Back to Top
News Home - Help
U.S. Seizes Part of Fallujah Rebel Area
26 minutes ago
By JIM KRANE, Associated Press Writer
NEAR FALLUJAH, Iraq - The Iraqi government declared 60 days of emergency rule throughout most of the country Sunday, and U.S. troops seized a small section of territory in Fallujah ahead of an expected all-out assault on the guerrilla sanctuary. Militants dramatically escalated attacks, killing at least 30 people, including two Americans.
AP Photo
AFP
Slideshow: Iraq
Violence Continues Throughout Baghdad(AP Video)
Latest headlines:
·
AP Poll: Stable Iraq Tops Voter Priorities AP - 17 minutes ago
·
Portugal to keep military force in Iraq an extra three months AFP - 24 minutes ago
·
U.S. Seizes Part of Fallujah Rebel Area AP - 26 minutes ago
Special Coverage
U.S. troops that have sealed off Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, captured part of rebel-held territory on the west bank of the Euphrates River, which includes the city's main hospital, where several people were taken prisoner.
An AC-130 gunship, meanwhile, launched airstrikes after sundown as residents reported fierce exchanges of fire on the outskirts of the city. Dozens of explosions resonated from the city and the minaret-studded skyline was lit up with huge flashes of light.
Flares were dropped to illuminate targets, and defenders fought back with heavy machine gunfire. Flaming red tracer rounds streaked through the night sky from guerrilla positions inside the city.
As American troops began final preparations for battle in Fallujah, commanders warned them to expect the most brutal urban fighting since the Vietnam War. The U.S. command announced it had sealed off Fallujah and was "finishing final preparations for an assault" on the city.
Iraqi and U.S. officials would not say whether the emergency law decree or the move to capture territory in Fallujah marked the start of an all-out attack.
Underscoring the country's instability, several heavy explosions thundered through the capital even as government spokesman Thair Hassan al-Naqeeb was announcing the state of emergency, which applies throughout the country except for Kurdish-ruled areas in the north.
Iraqi interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, who must give the green light for the assault, said the state of emergency is a "very powerful message that we are serious" about reining in insurgents before elections set for late January.
"We want to secure the country so elections can be done in a peaceful way and the Iraqi people can participate in the elections freely, without the intimidation by terrorists and by forces who are trying to wreck the political process in Iraq (news - web sites)," he told reporters.
Insurgents waged a second day of multiple attacks across the restive Sunni Triangle north and west of Baghdad, storming police stations, assassinating government officials and setting off deadly car bombs. About 60 people have been killed and 75 injured in the two days of attacks.
At dawn, armed rebels stormed three police stations in the towns of Haditha and Haqlaniyah, 140 miles northwest of Baghdad, killing 22 policemen. Some were lined up and shot execution-style, according to police and hospital officials.
Three attacks on U.S. convoys in and around Baghdad killed two American soldiers and wounded five others, the military said. Residents reported grenades setting police cars aflame on Haifa Street in the heart of the capital.
A car bomb also exploded near the Baghdad home of Iraq's finance minister, Adil Abdel-Mahdi, a leading Shiite politician. Abdel-Mahdi and his family were not home at the time, but the U.S. military said the bomb killed one Iraqi bystander and wounded another. A U.S. patrol came under small-arms fire as it responded, wounding one soldier, a statement said.
In a Web posting, the al-Qaida affiliate group of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, believed headquartered in Fallujah, claimed responsibility for the attacks on Haditha and Haqlaniyah.
"In the dawn of this blessed day, the lions of al-Qaida in Iraq faced up to a group of apostates in the proud city of Haditha," said the statement, which could not be authenticated. "The lions stormed the city's police directorate and killed everyone there...With this operation, the city has been completely liberated. The lions have been wandering in the city until late today."
The widespread insurgent attacks seemed aimed at relieving the pressure on Fallujah, where about 10,000 American troops — including two Marine battalions and an Army battalion — are massing for a major assault if Allawi gives the green light. Two Iraqi brigades also were expected to participate in the assault.
The emergency decree lays the groundwork for a severe crackdown in areas where guerrillas operate.
Under the law, all traffic and men between the ages of 15 and 55 were banned from the streets of Fallujah and surrounding areas 24 hours a day.
All members of the Fallujah police and security services were suspended indefinitely. Under the emergency power, all roads into Fallujah and neighboring Ramadi are closed indefinitely.
Residents reported hearing U.S. warplanes roar overhead as heavy artillery pounded targets throughout the city. Insurgents fired back, and gunfire crackled through the night.
Government negotiators reported the failure of last-minute talks for peace as Allawi continued to maintain that dialogue with Fallujah leaders was still possible, even if a large-scale military action began.
Allawi, a secular-minded Shiite Muslim, called a meeting Sunday with his defense minister, interior minister and provincial police commanders.
The prime minister faces strong pressure from within the minority Sunni community to avoid an all-out assault.
"I urge the brother prime minister to reconsider the issue of storming Fallujah and to give another chance for dialogue," Hatim Jassim, a member of the Iraqi National Council, told Al-Jazeera television.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan (news - web sites) and others have warned that a military offensive could trigger a wave of violence that would sabotage the January elections by alienating the Sunni minority, which forms the core of the insurgency. About 60 percent of Iraq's 25 million people are Shiite.
The influential Sunni clerical Association of Muslim Scholars has threatened to call a boycott of elections if Fallujah is attacked. A public outcry over civilian casualties prompted the Bush administration to call off a siege in April, after which Fallujah fell under control of radical clerics.
U.S. jets have been pounding the rebel bastion for days, launching its heaviest airstrikes in six months on Saturday — including five 500-pound bombs dropped on insurgent targets — to soften up militants.
U.S. intelligence estimates about 3,000 insurgents have dug in behind defenses and booby traps in Fallujah, a city of about 300,000 which has become a symbol throughout the Islamic world of Iraqi resistance to the U.S.-led coalition.
Sgt. Maj. Carlton W. Kent, the top enlisted Marine in Iraq, told troops the coming battle of Fallujah would be "no different" than the historic fights at Inchon in Korea, the flag-raising victory at Iwo Jima, or the bloody assault to dislodge North Vietnamese from the ancient citadel of Hue they seized in the 1968 Tet Offensive.
"You're all in the process of making history," Kent told a crowd of some 2,500 Marines. "This is another Hue city in the making. I have no doubt, if we do get the word, that each and every one of you is going to do what you have always done — kick some butt."
___
Associated Press correspondents Tini Tran, Mariam Fam, Katarina Kratovac and Maggie Michael in Baghdad contributed to this report.
Story Tools
Email Story
Post/Read Msgs
Formatted Story
Ratings: Would you recommend this story?
Not at all 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 Highly
Copyright © 2004 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.Questions or CommentsPrivacy Policy -Terms of Service - Copyright Policy - Ad Feedback
News Home - Help
Commanders Give Marines Pep Talk in Iraq
Sun Nov 7, 1:18 PM ET
By JIM KRANE, Associated Press Writer
NEAR FALLUJAH, Iraq - As U.S. forces prepared for what is expected to be the biggest Marine-led urban assault since Vietnam, U.S. commanders pumped up troop spirits Sunday, saying they were no different from the storied heroes of Iwo Jima and Korea.
AP Photo
Commanders Give Marines Pep Talk in Iraq(AP Video)
Latest headlines:
·
AP Poll: Stable Iraq Tops Voter Priorities AP - 14 minutes ago
·
Portugal to keep military force in Iraq an extra three months AFP - 22 minutes ago
·
U.S. Seizes Part of Fallujah Rebel Area AP - 23 minutes ago
Special Coverage
Standing before some 2,500 Marines who stood or kneeled at his feet, Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, the commanding general of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, told them that they would be at the front of the charge.
"This is America's fight," Sattler said. "What we've added to it is our Iraqi partners. They want to go in and liberate Fallujah. They feel this town's being held hostage by mugs, thugs, murderers and terrorists."
Two Marine battalions, along with a battalion from the Army's 1st Infantry Division, will be the lead units sent into a Fallujah attack. They will be joined by two brigades of Iraqi troops.
"God bless you, each and every one. You know what your mission is. Go out there and get it done," Sattler said.
More than 10,000 U.S. troops massed around the Sunni Muslim city are expected to take a role in the assault on Fallujah, whose green-lit minarets are visible from the U.S. base near the city.
That's well over twice the number of Americans who were involved in an April siege on Fallujah. That assault lasted for three weeks, until Marines were forced to pull back amid Iraqi outcry over the hundreds of casualties. Sunni insurgents then tightened their hold.
Sgt. Maj. Carlton W. Kent, the top enlisted Marine in Iraq (news - web sites), told troops Sunday the coming battle of Fallujah would be "no different" than the historic fights at Inchon in Korea, the flag-raising victory at Iwo Jima, or the bloody assault to remove North Vietnamese troops who occupied the ancient citadel of Hue in the 1968 Tet Offensive.
"You're all in the process of making history," Kent boomed in a clarion voice. "This is another Hue city in the making. I have no doubt, if we do get the word, that each and every one of you is going to do what you have always done — kick some butt."
Marine battalion commander Lt. Col. Mike Ramos said many of the young fighters would be dashing into battle for the first time. In the barracks, Marines could be seen packing up gear, strapping anti-tank missile tubes to their packs. They would also be carrying gas masks in case of chemical weapons, a threat Ramos deemed unlikely.
"They're sharpening their K-Bar fighting knives; they're cleaning their weapons for the last time; they've fueled their vehicles and they've rehearsed the plan," said Ramos, 41, of Dallas.
Ramos predicted that "freedom and democracy" would prevail in Fallujah within days.
"Make no mistake about it, we'll hand this city back to the Iraqi people," he said. "I think it will be rapid."
During the fight, rules of engagement allow U.S. troops to shoot and kill anyone carrying a weapon or driving in Fallujah, a move aimed at allowing U.S. troops to fire on car bombers, Ramos said. Military age males trying to leave the city will be captured or turned back.
"If I see someone who looks like a martyr, driving at high speed toward my unit, I'll send him to Allah before he gets close," Ramos said.
Sattler reminded the troops that the assault would be a joint U.S.-Iraqi effort. The fledgling Iraqi military, which has been under intense U.S. training, needs to be led by example into the fight against Fallujah, he said.
"This is a whole can of whoop-butt all combined here," Kent said, surveying the Marines surrounding him.
A pumped-up crowd shouted a deafening "Hoo-rah" in response.
Story Tools
Email Story
Post/Read Msgs
Formatted Story
Ratings: Would you recommend this story?
Not at all 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 Highly
Copyright © 2004 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.Questions or CommentsPrivacy Policy -Terms of Service - Copyright Policy - Ad Feedback
