Veterans for Common Sense

As Washington goes, it was a religious moment.

A slender man with sharp features and a thatch of graying hair in an invisible gray suit flitted down the big marble hallway seeming to want to disappear before he turned into a small room. Wrong room. This was some kind of teach-in crowded with antiwar soldiers. Priests with attitude, maimed Vietnam vets, seventies ghosts with silver goatees, the beaded fringe of the Congressional Black Caucus, and all led by a beatific congresswoman from Sonoma County with great legs and a habit of chanting, “Thank you, thank you, thank you for being here.”

Suddenly, the room was silent. Walter Jones, Republican of North Carolina, took a seat at the end of the table. “Walter Jones is here,” the congresswoman with the legs announced. He will go next.

“Thank you, Madame Chairman.” Jones looked out at the room through narrow eyes. “As you know, being a conservative Republican, I have taken some criticism for doing what I think is right. I believe that those of us, Democratic or Republican, whatever the issue is, if we don’t do what’s right, we cheat the people.”

“Right!”

“Yes.”

“Hear! Hear!”

“But I found last week this quote from candidate Bush chastising President Clinton because he did not have a timetable [for withdrawing from Kosovo]. I would like to read this, then I’ll close.
 
“April 9, 1999: ‘Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the president to explain to us what the exit strategy is . . . ’ ”

As quickly as he had appeared, Walter Jones—“French Fry” Jones, as he is known on the left, the congressman who once called for renaming the French fry the “Freedom fry” after the French refused to join us in the invasion of Iraq—vanished, and the room rocked to life. Max Cleland, the former Georgia senator who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam, said that Jones was a profile in courage. The Reverend Ed Bacon said that Jones certainly had gravitas if not charisma. Veteran antiwar leader Tom Hayden said it was the first time he’d ever seen a Republican holy man.

“Didja see, they bowed three times? In California, we only bow the head once.”

I was sitting behind Hayden and in front of Daniel Ellsberg, which meant that throughout the ad hoc hearing it was my privilege to pass along (the many) folded notes of the antiwar past. Hayden never thanked me for doing so, and before long I stopped politely tapping him on the arm and merely smacked the shoulder of his blue suit with the latest piece of origami. I was happy to do it. I demonstrated against the war, have always seen it as misguided and evil. Now I wanted to find out what the progressives’ ideas are, how the playbook differs from the one we got in Vietnam.

It’s the right time. The country is in a crisis of leadership. The deaths of fourteen Ohio Marine reserve troops in Haditha in early August gave the national media a heartland tragedy to focus on. Days later, Cindy Sheehan’s brilliant bivouac in Crawford, Texas, provided a TV-ready image of the president’s aloofness, which was only reinforced by Katrina and its aftermath. Now public opinion appears to be in an avalanche. Polls say a firm majority regard the war as a mistake, with a recent New York Times–CBS poll showing that a remarkable 52 percent of Americans think we should withdraw immediately. Even John Kerry has said that the failures of Katrina underline American failures in a misbegotten “war of choice” (one he voted to fund). And the blood you see running in the Washington gutters belongs to the neocons, their heads now impaled on spikes of They will welcome us with open arms. And last Saturday, in Washington, the movement had its biggest moment since last year’s Republican convention in New York.

All this signals an opportunity for the antiwar brain trust. “The rate of change is going to be very swift, and we’re right in the middle of it now,” says Eli Pariser of MoveOn.org, the movement’s Wal-Mart. Pariser adds that any politician who thinks he can straddle the issue in 2006 is courting disaster—a Democrat who takes the DLC line that success is possible in Iraq or the Republican line that we must stay the course is going to face a challenge from a dark horse who gets a pile of money off the Internet. “People want to see change,” he says. “They want to see Democrats standing up and making policy calls Bush doesn’t want to make.”

“The Democratic Party folded up their mental tents,” says Norman Solomon, an antiwar author and movement figure. “The conventional wisdom was that the war as an issue was a nonstarter. Because the Washington Post and New York Times and the rest of the conventional media were telling them that Bush was not vulnerable on the war.”

But now that is changing. The antiwar movement is, to use that great seventies expression, relevant once again. Outside the hearing, chairman Lynn Woolsey told me that the left has the “responsibility to be more than a protest movement.” What makes this moment unique is that, finally, the public seems to believe that the protesters occupy the moral high ground, with a new set of ideas for where to go from here. Is there any chance America will give us the keys to the car?

The first thing you notice about the antiwar movement is that it isn’t your father’s. It has a populist, womanly flavor. In the Vietnam era, the male elite were at the head of the parade—Über-pediatrician Benjamin Spock, Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Harvard intellectual Daniel Ellsberg, and barefoot poet Allen Ginsberg. The campuses were on fire, and The New Yorker had editorials every week telling the privileged what to think.

This time around, the movement’s one household name is a mom in straw hat and white shorts, Cindy Sheehan. “In Crawford, you could drive from the [pro-war] rally at the stadium to the [antiwar] rally at Bush’s ranch and not be able to tell which one you were at,” says David Swanson, an activist with Progressive Democrats of America. “Red-white-and-blue banners and clothing, SUPPORT OUR TROOPS everywhere. It’s no longer the good workers of America against the crazy liberal elitists.”
 
Today’s antiwar activists describe their movement as grass roots, thereby distancing themselves from three sectors: the press—which they routinely describe as the corporate media or big-business media; the Democratic Party, which they seem to regard with the same fondness as the politburo; and the liberal thinkers who gave such comfort to neoconservative ideas in the run-up to the war.

The antiwar movement is calculated about the importance of putting the military families out front. At rallies, you see more Gold Star mothers than members of Code Pink—the theatrical feminist group whose wardrobe is pink slips. The mom’s message is always from the heart: I don’t want anyone else to go through what I’ve gone through.

“One of the things that used to silence the antiwar movement is, ‘You’re being disrespectful of the troops. Please, please support our loved ones.’ We’ve given permission to the rest of the country to speak out,” says Nancy Lessin, co-founder of Military Families Speak Out.

When you think about it, there is no good reason why the opinions of grief-stricken parents should bulk so large in policy-making. But two things amplify the Gold Star families of Iraq. First is the understanding that there’s never been such a wide divide between the people who decided to go to war and those who bear its greatest costs. During the Vietnam era, middle-class college kids were in the streets because they were in actual danger of going to Vietnam. This time they don’t have a personal stake. “If you don’t have to go over to Iraq, it’s hard to get emotional about it,” says Congressman Charles Rangel. The undemocratic nature of service is understood especially by politicians who are veterans, from either side of the aisle (John McCain notwithstanding). Republican senator Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam veteran who has begun to stake out antiwar ground as a possible prelude for a presidential run, has argued that there’s a “disconnect developing” between the Army and “the rest of society.” Another vet, Max Cleland, says that by offering cash incentives to rural kids, we’ve outsourced the ideal of citizen soldiers. “We are moving close to a mercenary foreign legion, and that’s not the American way. It’s immoral and violates the right to life of these people.”

The second thing about the Gold Star mothers is that they perform for reality television. Vietnam unfolded under the gaze of Walter Cronkite, a sober father figure who almost single-handedly destroyed Lyndon Johnson’s political career by pronouncing the war a “stalemate” in 1968. Today, in the Oprah era, hard-won spiritual truths are the coin of the culture. These moms all have a journey that they can tell you about.

But emotion gets you only so far. After the Cindy wave hit this summer, the left had to “move past the bumper sticker OUT NOW” toward a program—in the words of one of the guys I was passing notes for the other day, Tim Carpenter—that can’t be written off as softheaded and seventies.

In the mainstream as well as on the left, there’s a growing fatalism about Iraq—if not a civil war yet, the situation seems close to it. Partition or fragmentation are real possibilities. Still, a precipitous withdrawal is a difficult sell. “If you look at the poll numbers, people want to have a plan. Everyone thinks the job has been botched, but they don’t want to leave a country in chaos,” says another note-passer, Erik Leaver of the Institute for Policy Studies. “That is the biggest job for the left. How do we make the case for withdrawal? How do we show that the president’s policy is completely bankrupt? We need to put a face on withdrawal.”

Though it is swarming over the political high ground now, like soldiers coming into Saddam’s palaces, the left is hardly in agreement on what to do. But there’s a growing consensus on one crucial point: The war cannot be won—not now, not ever. And there is an opportunity now, in a way that there hasn’t been since Vietnam, to change America’s view of itself and its imperial reach—all else will flow from that.

The first thing the U.S. has to do is change course—admit its policy is a failure and try to open a dialogue with those it has been trying to erase. We must “publicly give up the war-fighting role,” says Antonia Chayes, a professor with affiliations at both Harvard’s law school and school of government. We must declare that we have no long-term interest in Iraq and don’t want bases there, says Tom Hayden. All the solutions arising on the left look to an international Jesus for Iraq who is not named George Bush, who is not, in fact, American. David Mack, former ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, says America must abandon the neoconservative delusion that “Washington is the new Rome” and allow Iraq’s future to be worked out by an “ad hoc international coalition” that includes two great neocon Satans, Syria and Iran.

This is not anti-American. It is realpolitik, of the sort that used to be practiced by the likes of Henry Kissinger. From the time that it dissolved the army and the Baathist party, the U.S. has erred by repeatedly disenfranchising the Arab nationalist segment of the country—the Sunnis, who regard every development in the new Iraq as a power grab by competing factions. If the new constitution goes into place, there could be fifteen years of civil war, Congressman Jim McDermott of Washington State warns, based on meetings he had with exiled Iraqis in Jordan. The insurgents operate inside a support “envelope” of the Sunni population, explains Ken Katzman of the Congressional Research Service. “The Sunnis have accepted nothing that has happened to them.”
 
But none of the experts at Lynn Woolsey’s hearing agreed on just when the U.S. should leave. It’s pretty evident in these discussions that, for most of the movement, calls for an immediate withdrawal are a form of sloganeering—a tactical way of calling out the war-makers, forcing them to concede that they failed miserably. At the hearing, no one actually said to get out now. Still, the thrust of the position is to set benchmarks for withdrawal in the next year.

During Vietnam, the left always called for an immediate withdrawal and meant it. Others had started the war we’d entered; the puppet state of South Vietnam had never reflected the will of the people. We could argue that whatever bloodbath ensued was a piece of homegrown postcolonial business long deferred. When Harvard professor George Wald was asked how we could extricate ourselves from Vietnam, he said, “In ships.” This time around, the movement by and large does not have that sangfroid. The thinking is, We created the problem, we have obligations. Iraq could become a failed state, Ambassador Mack says; its quagmire could become a “sinkhole,” destabilizing an entire region. Max Cleland says, “You need the international community to cover your rear end on your way out.”

That is not to say that there aren’t proponents of the out-now program. Norman Solomon says we have to get past the imperial narcissism that says the U.S. is “indispensable,” that if we walk away the whole world falls apart. “Where does it end?” he asks. “Are we going to police every aspect of the Mideast?”

And the interesting thing about this view is that it seems to be the most popular with the American people—it resonates most strongly with an isolationist strain in the American psyche that has gathered strength only since Katrina showed we have a world of problems right here in our backyard. Senator Russ Feingold says that he held seventeen town meetings in northern Wisconsin this summer, and over and over he heard people say, “You know, if we don’t have an idea of how long this thing’s going to last, let’s just cut and run.”

The redoubtable Walter Jones made a similar comment at the hearing. “If I can use a football analogy, there would be a fourth quarter, and we would declare victory after a fourth quarter.”

In that sense, the amazing irony may be that the American people are out-lefting the left. And ultimately, so could George Bush. There is a growing belief in Washington that, as Woolsey told me she feared, George Bush’s next plan will be “just cut and run.”

It’s a fascinating scenario: Knowing that the war will be a huge liability in ’06, he will slowly withdraw troops without announcing that he is retreating, and within a year, we will simply be out of there. In that sense, the antiwar movement may have already won. Of course, not many on the left accept this scenario. They insist that Bush has a long-term interest in occupying Iraq.

After the Woolsey hearing, I waited for Dan Ellsberg to finish talking to various bloggers, then accompanied him to a basement cafeteria. Relentlessly cerebral and oddly egoless at 74, Ellsberg seems undiminished from the Vietnam days. Apart from a suitcase on rollers (full of documents, no doubt), he shows little sign of fatigue.

We got egg-salad sandwiches, and he offered me a grim scenario. It’s 1968 again. The war will go on, as Vietnam did, for many more years. Bush is building bases in Iraq so that an air war in the Mideast can be carried out even after Iraq’s civil war has been Iraqified.

“Public opinion doesn’t do it by itself. It just doesn’t do it. A president can ignore the public or fool it. By early 1968, 20,000 Americans had been killed. Well, another 15,000 were killed in ’68. The people were against the war before we lost them, but we went ahead and lost them. Nixon got in and told people he was getting out. He had no intention of getting out.”
 

Ellsberg believes that the Bush administration is holding out for another 9/11. “I think they’re counting on a 9/11 to change opinion. Then he gets whatever he wants, and the chances of thwarting the president are very negligible.”

What does Bush want? A draft, a civil-liberties clampdown “that will make the Patriot Act look like the Bill of Rights—the public will ask for detention camps.” And an invasion of Iran, with tactical nuclear weapons to get at the underground facilities.

His sandwich lay untouched amid the torrent of words, and I remembered a phrase from the Watergate era—“Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office.”

I said, “You’re nuts, Dan.”

He shrugged, unoffended. “Okay, tell me where I’m wrong.”

“You’re like a general fighting the last war; you’re a prisoner of the Vietnam experience. They’ll never invade Iran; they got a bellyful in Iraq. Bush isn’t Nixon. He’s not a paranoid introvert. He doesn’t want this.”

“I hope you’re right,” Ellsberg said. “If you know Vietnam from the inside, the harder it is to explain that Johnson could have gone ahead in the face of the secret reports of how hopeless it was. But he did. And Iran actually is preparing weapons of mass destruction. I think an attack on Iran is in our future. That likelihood is only increased with Bush’s popularity going down.”

Ellsberg rushed off, but not before offering one ray of hope. He’s beating the bushes (or the Internet) for the next Ellsberg, a brainy whistle-blower who will show up at the New York Times with the next big box of Xeroxes, this one to show the crime in Iraq-war planning.

“Before the war began, the [former] Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki said that it would take 500,000 troops to stabilize the country, and [Paul] Wolfowitz told him, ‘I think that’s wildly off the mark.’ I never heard a chief of staff reproved in that way by a civilian. But he didn’t pull that figure out of the air. I am sure that Shinseki had a six-foot-high stack of Army estimates. We still haven’t seen those studies.”

A few minutes after saying good-bye to Ellsberg, I ran into Tom Hayden at a Senate office building.

“Ellsberg bummed me out,” I said. “He says this war is going to go on for seven years. Give me a more optimistic scenario.”

He stood leaning on a banister to talk.

“There’s no optimistic scenario. It’s all tragic. We won’t end the war without people seeing all kinds of dead bodies on television.” He sighed. “But okay—here you go. Bush comes in in January wanting $200 billion for Katrina, $100 billion for Iraq. Republicans face a revolt from their base—they say, ‘Big spenders in a losing war.’ Behind the scenes, they say to Bush, ‘We need you to get out of Iraq.’ He gets out, it’s removed as an election issue in 2006.

“On the other hand, it drags on. Hillary will run in 2008 as a hawk [who changed her mind]. Politicians can do that. She’s got to say, ‘Look, I gave them time. Look, I was raised to believe, when you make a mistake, you learn from it.’ ”

This is the next big goal for the antiwar movement: pressuring the leaders who got us into this to admit they made a mistake. The word on the left is that French Fry’s epiphany came because he had made a commitment to write personal condolence letters to all the families of the dead in his district. You can imagine that. “I want you to know that your son died for freedom . . . ” “I want you to know that your son died for—”

Late that afternoon, the antiwar leaders had a demonstration in Lafayette Park, across from the White House. The demonstration showed just how far the movement has to go. Fifty people in the unmoving late-afternoon heat, a lot of shouting into the microphone, rehearsing for the next demo. I found a spot of shade and fell asleep on the ground.

I woke up when a Gold Star mother with curly graying hair was at the mike, talking about her stepson who was killed in Fallujah last November 12.

“David was shot in the throat by someone defending their country,” she said.

It was a riveting statement. When her speech was done, I walked up and asked her if we could talk about the role of Gold Star families. We sat on a park bench. Her name is Tia Steele. David Branning was her stepson. “You know, when you feel all alone, it’s just hard,” she said. “Cindy’s been working hard for a long time. She’s been away from home for months and weeks at a time. Now she’s got incredible support. Bill Mitchell [a Gold Star father] told me that a long time ago Cindy was at an event, and he said to her, ‘Why don’t you talk?’ She said, ‘Oh, no, I wouldn’t know what to say!’ Well—Cindy found her voice. That’s her path. No question about it. But we all have an obligation.”

Steele told me about her son. His biological mother had died when he was 11; he’d resolved always to rely on himself. At 17, he read Atlas Shrugged. “And you know how a book like that affects you when you’re 17?” He was determined to test himself and enlisted in the Marines though his parents had reservations. The family was on hard times. His father lost his job as a data analyst around that time. David let his parents drop him off at boot camp, and the recruiter came up to them with a giant smile and a handshake. “You’ll never have to worry about him again.” David had joked about buying his parents a yacht before long. But war changed him. When his things came home, there was a copy of War and Peace in it, dog-eared from being read. He was 21.
 

Steele has a photograph of David in Fallujah, taken the day before he died. In the photograph, David isn’t David. It looks as though he is sitting in someone’s house they had occupied. “David wasn’t the kind that wanted to sit in someone else’s house [without permission]. Oh my God. I see it in his face. David was a person of soul and spirit.”

He and another boy were killed a day or two later, when they kicked someone’s door in.

Dusk had begun to descend. The speeches kept going. Ellsberg went to the mike and said his line about the next Patriot Act making this one look like the Bill of Rights.

A guy with curly hair edged up to me. “Who’s he?”

“Dan Ellsberg.”

“Who’s that?”

I tried to explain. “How old are you?”

“Thirty-two. I was in the first Gulf War.”

“How do you feel about this one?”

“I’m here.”

A girl with a long ponytail went jogging right through the demo, right past the podium, on her iPod run. Like we were Scientologists or something. That’s one reason this isn’t going to be Vietnam again. No one has the attention span. Who wants to sit through all those speeches again? The best answer to Ellsberg’s grim scenario is that it’s the old paradigm. We hadn’t perfected television in Vietnam, let alone the Internet. In 1965, antiwar protester Norman Morrison burned himself to death outside Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s Pentagon office, and more than 30 years later, McNamara finally admitted how much this had disturbed him. He was able to repress that confession through all the years of murder in Vietnam. Such moments play differently today. TV craves emotional immediacy, and it’s majority-oriented. TV will ignore a disturbing trend as long as it can, but when it stops ignoring the issue, it will demand immediate response. It will speed up the Vietnam curve. Cindy Sheehan was just a taste.
 

Army Lowers Bar for New Enlistments

Army Secretary Noel Harvey and Gen. Richard Cody, the vice chief of staff, said Monday that the Army is using looser Defense Department rules that permits it to sign up more high school dropouts and people who score lower on mental-qualification tests, but they denied that this meant it was lowering standards. Until Army recruiters began having trouble signing up enough recruits earlier this year, the Army had set minimum standards that were higher than those of the Defense Department. The Army has had a recruiting shortfall of 6,000 to 8,000 soldiers during the past 12 months. It hasn’t fallen so short of its annual goal since 1979, several years after the Vietnam War. Harvey and Cody addressed the recruiting issue in news conferences during the annual convention of the Association of the U.S. Army. The Department of Defense “standards on qualification tests call for at least 60 percent Category 1 to 3 [the higher end of testing] and 4 percent Category 4,” the lowest end, Harvey said. “The other services follow that standard and the Army National Guard always followed it as well. But the active Army chose a standard of 67 percent in Categories 1-3, and 2 percent Category 4.” It now will use the Defense Department guidelines. Cody said that increasing the number of people with General Education Diplomas allowed to enlist in the Army wasn’t really a lowering of standards. GEDs are certificates granted in lieu of high school diplomas to dropouts who can pass an examination. The Army’s figures show 6.5 percent of all enlisted soldiers held GED certificates at the end of 2004, the last year statistics were available. The Army plans to keep its limit on new soldiers with GEDs at 10 percent in any year. He said the number of soldiers on recruiting duty is increasing from 9,000 to 12,000, and the Army is asking Congress to increase enlistment bonuses from a maximum of $20,000 to a new limit of $40,000 for some who choose branches where there are shortages. The advertising budget for the Army was being boosted by $130 million.

In February 1971, 125 Vietnam War veterans gathered in Detroit to talk about what they had seen and done in the war. News reporters and activist filmmakers descended on the Howard Johnson’s where they met.

The reporters — if you have a long TV-news memory, you’ll recognize some — didn’t do much with the tales they heard. But the filmmakers captured it all and made Winter Soldier, a wake-up call about just what “our boys” were doing over there.

This long-unseen documentary — it takes its title from Tom Paine’s 1776 patriotic pamphlet, “Common Sense” — earned renewed interest during last year’s presidential election. John Kerry was one of those Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Jane Fonda was also involved.

That’s all some needed to know.

But the film, opening today at Orlando’s Downtown Media Arts Center, is a stark document of that time, that organization and that war. Kerry is barely in it, a young Navy officer questioning the motives of his fellow veterans against the war, bearing witness about what he saw and was told.

And the stories these men tell will chill you if you’re capable of being chilled. “Villes” wiped out, “291 of them, women, children, everybody,” to “send a message.” Marines gunning down children who give them the finger. Officers “gutting” injured female civilians. Beheadings.

“We took ears from living people, sure,” one haunted soldier mutters.

Winter Soldier is an artlessly arty film, all simple, grainy black-and-white close-ups or press-conference testimonials and the odd color photograph of a scene of carnage. But that very lack of artifice adds to its power and authority. Nothing cute or fancy, just the unvarnished “what I saw,” no spin to it.

A lot of people spent a lot of money last election cycle telling American voters that these things never happened. But this film has photos. And it has witnesses. As one soldier says in the film, “They can’t deny the testimony of all the dudes in this room.”

The astonishing tales of savagery in this film, told by men who witnessed them or even took part in them, would silence any Vietnam revisionist, no matter how many Swift Boat Veterans ads he or she has seen. This was a war where helicopter pilots were told “not to count prisoners as they’re being loaded, but when they were unloaded” because who knew what “accidents” might happen on the flight back to base.

“It wasn’t like they were humans,” one soldier says.

It takes a dehumanizing sort of training to make effective soldiers, creating automatic responses in the troops, removing the humanity from “the enemy.”

But Vietnam exposed what this does to the men who follow through on that training. And the results weren’t going to win any “hearts and minds.” They were just upping the body count and turning draftees into monsters as they did.

Winter Soldier captures what many regard as a turning point in the protests against the war, when many of the men who fought it spoke out about what was being done in our name in the quagmire of Southeast Asia.

Dismiss it if you want. Treat it as just history, if you dare. Plainly, this couldn’t happen again. And we’re not five years into Iraq. Yet.

Apparent suicide bomb kills one outside Oklahoma University stadium

NORMAN, Okla. (AP) — One person was killed in an explosion in a traffic circle about 100 yards from a packed football stadium at the University of Oklahoma on Saturday night in what authorities were calling a suicide.

“We are apparently dealing with an individual suicide, which is under full investigation,” OU President David Boren said in a statement.

There were no other reports of injuries. There was no word on the identity or sex of the person who died.

The loud noise of the explosion could be heard clearly inside Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, where 84,000 people were watching the Oklahoma Sooners play Kansas State.

Officers cordoned off an area west of the stadium, known as the South Oval, and nobody was allowed out of the stadium immediately after the blast, which occurred shortly before 8 p.m. People were allowed out of the stadium about 8:30 p.m.

A police bomb squad detonated explosives found at the site of the blast. The detonation could also be heard in the stadium area. The area near the stadium was searched by bomb dogs.

“At no time was anyone in the stadium in danger,” Boren said.

Kerry Pettingill, Oklahoma homeland security director, said the incident was under criminal investigation and the motive behind the explosion was not known.

As fans streamed out of the stadium after the game, they were routed around the crime scene. Some fans leaving the stadium were escorted by police to buses that were parked near where the explosion occurred.

The state Medical Examiner’s Office was on the scene as was the Norman Police Department, firefighters, the FBI and officials of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

FBI spokesman Gary Johnson said an FBI bomb technician was providing assistance to local police. Emergency vehicles, including fire trucks, surrounded the area.

OU police Sgt. Gary Robinson said the body had not been removed as of late Saturday night as a bomb team continued to check the area for possible explosives before detectives could move in for their investigation.

Jaclyn Hull, an OU freshman, said she was leaving the game shortly before the explosion.

“We saw a little bit of smoke, about as much as you would see coming up from a grill,” she said.

Stan Hilton of Tulsa said he heard the explosion while he was watching the game from his seat near the field.

“I became afraid at halftime when they had us locked in the stadium,” he said after he left the stadium.

Larry Lucas II, an OU senior, said at the time of the explosion he was in the university’s architecture building near where the blast occurred.

“At first I thought it was a prank because that’s where the Kansas State buses were parked,” he said. Lucas said he saw Kansas State players leave the bus before the game.

Authorities could be seen searching Kansas State players and coaches amid tight security as they boarded buses to leave the area.

Marine Mourns 11 Friends Killed in Bombing

AP Exclusive: Last Marine in Ohio-Based Squad Devastated by Roadside Bomb Mourns His 11 Friends

By ANTONIO CASTANEDA

The Associated Press

Oct. 1, 2005 – Cpl. David Kreuter had a new baby boy he’d seen only in photos. Lance Cpl. Michael Cifuentes was counting the days to his wedding. Lance Cpl. Nicholas Bloem had just celebrated his 20th birthday.

Travis Williams remembers them all all 11 men in his Marine squad all now dead. Two months ago they shared a cramped room stacked with bunk beds at this base in northwest Iraq, where the Euphrates River rushes by. Now the room has been stripped of several beds, brutal testament that Lance Cpl. Williams’ closest friends are gone.

For the 12 young Marines who landed in Iraq early this year, the war was a series of hectic, constant raids into more than a dozen lawless towns in Iraq’s most hostile province, Anbar. The pace and the danger bound them together into what they called a second family, even as some began to question whether their raids were making any progress.

Now, all of the Marines assigned to the 1st Squad, 3rd Platoon, Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Regiment, based in Columbus, Ohio, are gone except Williams. They died in a roadside-bomb set by insurgents on Aug. 3 that killed a total of 14 Marines. Most of the squad were in their early 20s; the youngest was 19.

“They were like a family. They were the tightest squad I’ve ever seen,” said Capt. Christopher Toland of Austin, Texas, the squad’s platoon commander. Even though many did not know each other before they got to Iraq, “They truly loved each other.”

All that is left are photos and snippets of video, saved on dusty laptops, that run for a few dozen seconds. As they pack up to return home by early October, the Marines from Lima Company including the squad’s replacements sometimes huddle around Williams’ laptop in a room at the dam, straining to watch the few remaining moments of their young friends’ lives. Some photos and videos carry the squad’s adopted motto, “Family is Forever.”

In one video, Lance Cpl. Christopher Dyer, who graduated with honors last year from a Cincinnati area high school, strums his guitar and does a mock-heartfelt rendition of “Puff the Magic Dragon” as his friends laugh around him.

In a photo, Kreuter rides a bicycle through a neighborhood, swerving under the weight of body armor and weapons, as Marines and Iraqis watch and chuckle.

Each video ends abruptly, leaving behind a blank screen. Some are switched off as soon as they start some images just hurt too much to see right now.

The August operation began like most of the squad’s missions with a rush into another lawless Iraqi city to hunt insurgents and do house-to-house searches, sometimes for 12 hours in temperatures near 120 degrees.

On Aug. 1, six Marine snipers had been ambushed and killed in Haditha, one of a string of cities that line the Euphrates, filled with waving palm trees. Two days later, Marines in armored vehicles, including the 1st Squad, rumbled into the area to look for the culprits.

Like other cities in this region, Haditha has no Iraqi troops, and its police force was destroyed earlier in the year by a wave of insurgent attacks. Marines patrol roads on the perimeter and occasionally raid homes in the city, which slopes along a quiet river valley. Commanders say insurgents have challenged local tribes for control and claim Iraq’s most wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, once had a home here.

Since their arrival in February, the Marines had spent nearly all their time on such sweeps or preparing for them, sometimes hurrying back to their base to grab fresh clothes, then heading off again to cities that hadn’t seen American or Iraqi troops in months.

The intense pace of the operations, and the enormous area their regimental combat team had to cover an expanse the size of West Virginia caught some off guard.

The combat was certainly not what the 21-year-old Williams had expected.

“I didn’t ever think we’d get engaged,” said the soft-spoken, stocky Marine from Helena, Mont. “I just had the basic view of the American public it can’t be that bad out there.”

In some sweeps, residents warmly greeted the Marines. But in others, such as operations in Haditha and Obeidi near the Syrian border, the squad members met gunfire and explosions. In the Obeidi operation in early May, another squad from Lima Company suffered six deaths. Williams himself perhaps saved lives, once spotting a gunman hidden in a mosque courtyard, said Toland, the platoon commander.

The night before the Aug. 3 operation, an uneasy Toland couldn’t sleep. Instead he spent his last night with his squad members talking and joking, trying to suppress worries the mission was too predictable for an enemy that knew how to watch and learn.

“I had concerns that the operation was hastily planned and executed, with significant risks and little return,” Toland said.

The road had been checked by engineers and other units, Marine commanders say. But insurgents had been clever hiding the massive bomb under the road’s asphalt.

Several Humvees first drove over the bomb, but the triggerman in the distance apparently waited for a vehicle with more troops. Then, as the clanking sound of their armored vehicles neared, a massive blast erupted, caused by explosives weighing hundreds of pounds. It threw a 26-ton Amphibious Assault Vehicle into the air, leaving it burning upside-down.

The blast was so large that Toland and his radioman, Williams traveling two vehicles ahead and not injured thought their vehicle had been hit by a bomb. They scrambled out to inspect the damage, but instead found the blazing carnage several yards down the road.

A total of 14 Marines and one Iraqi interpreter were killed.

There was no time for grieving not at first. There was only sudden devastation, then intense anger as the Marines pulled the remains of their friends from the vehicle.

Then there was frustration, as they fanned out to find the triggerman. Instead, they found only Iraqis either too sympathetic toward the insurgency, or too afraid, to talk.

Although the bomb had been planted in clear view of their homes, residents claimed they had seen nothing of the men who had spent hours digging a large hole several feet deep and concealing the bomb.

It was a familiar and frustrating problem.

“They are totally complacent with what’s going on here,” said Maj. Steve Lawson of Columbus, Ohio, who commands Lima Company. “The average citizen in Haditha either wants a handout, or wants us to die or go away.”

In a war where intelligence is the most valued asset, the Marines say few local people will divulge “actionable” information that could be used to locate insurgents.

Some Iraqis apparently fear reprisal attacks from militants. Many just want to stay out of the crossfire. Others hate the Americans enough to protect the insurgents: Marines say lookouts in cities would often launch flares as their vehicles approached.

In this region ruled by Sunni tribal loyalties, few voted for the new central Iraqi government, and many suspect the U.S. military is punishing them and empowering their longtime rivals, the Shiites of the south and the Kurds of the north.

“From a squad leader’s perspective, the intelligence never helped me accomplish my mission,” said Sgt. Don Owens, a squad leader in Lima Company from Cincinnati, who fought alongside the 1st Squad throughout their tour.

“Their intelligence is better than ours,” Owens said.

The first night after the attack, Williams couldn’t sleep. He stayed near his radio, listening to the heavy sobbing of fellow Marines that punctured the night around him.

He thought of his best friend, Lance Cpl. Aaron Reed, a 21-year-old with a goofy demeanor and a perpetual smile, now dead.

A world without his second family had begun. The young men Williams had planned to meet up with again, back in the States, had vanished in a matter of minutes. He was alone.

Yet from a military standpoint, it was important to press on to show the enemy that even their best hits couldn’t stop the world’s most powerful military. The Marines were ordered away from the blast site, to hunt insurgents, just one hour after the explosion.

They stayed out for another week, searching through dozens of homes in the nearby city of Parwana and struggling to piece together intelligence about who had planted the bomb.

“I pushed them back out the door to finish the mission,” said Lawson. “They did it, but they were crying as they pushed on.”

As word spread back in the United States that 14 men had been killed, the Marines on the ongoing mission couldn’t even, at first, contact their families to let them know they had survived.

Marine commanders say the large-scale raids in western Anbar province have kept the insurgency off-balance, killing hundreds of militants and leaving a dwindling number of insurgent bases in the area.

They say the sweeps are critical to beat back the insurgent presence in larger cities such as Ramadi and Baghdad, where suicide bombings have been rampant.

But, among some Marines and even officers, there are doubts whether progress has been made.

The insurgents lurk nearby capable of launching mortars and suicide car bombs and quietly re-entering cities soon after the Marines return to their bases on the outskirts.

“We’ve been here almost seven months and we don’t control” the cities, said Gunnery Sgt. Ralph Perrine, an operations chief in the battalion from Brunswick, Ohio. “It’s no secret.”

Even commanders acknowledge that with the limited number of U.S. and Iraqi troops in the region, the mission is focused on “disrupting and interdicting” the insurgency that is, keeping them on the run and not controlling the cities.

“It’s maintenance work,” said Col. Stephen W. Davis, commander of all Marine operations in western Anbar. “Because this out here is where the fight is, while the success is happening downtown while the constitution is being written and while the referendum is getting worked out. … If I could bring every insurgent in the world out here and fight them all day long, we’ve done our job.”

For Williams, the calculation is much more visceral and personal.

“Personally, I don’t think the sweeps help too much,” he said quietly on a recent day, sitting in a room at the dam, crowded with Marines resting from a late mission the night before.

“You find some stuff and most of the bad guys get away. … For as much energy as we put in them, I don’t think the output is worth it,” he said.

Williams, a Marine for three years, has decided not to re-enlist.

Instead, in these last days in Iraq, he thinks of home and fishing in the clear streams of Montana. He hopes to open a fishing and hunting gear shop once he returns and complete his bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology. He looks forward to seeing his mother, his only surviving parent, and traveling to her native Thailand this fall.

He said his “best memory” will be the day he leaves Iraq. His only good memories, he said, are of his friends:

Of Dyer, 19, an avid rap music fan who would bop his head to Tupac Shakur. He played the viola in his high school orchestra and had planned to enroll in a finance honors program at Ohio State University.

Of Reed, his best friend. He was president of his high school class from Chillicothe, Ohio, and left behind a brother serving in Afghanistan.

Of Cifuentes, 25, from Oxford, Ohio. He was enrolled in graduate school in mathematics education and had been working as a substitute teacher when he was deployed.

“I think the most frustrating thing is there’s no sense of accomplishment,” Williams said. “You’re biding your time and waiting. But then you lose your friends, and it’s not even for their own country’s freedom.”

EDITOR’S NOTES:

Associated Press reporter Antonio Castaneda spent three weeks in western Anbar province in Iraq with Marines in Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Regiment, 4th Division, earlier this year. He was with the unit when they led an offensive into the city of Haditha in late May. And he returned to the area after an August blast killed 14 Marines and shortly before the unit began demobilizing to return to the United States by early October.

The ranks listed for the Marines were those they held when they were killed. Some of the men were promoted posthumously.

An Arizona Army National Guard sergeant killed this week in Iraq didn’t agree with the war, his wife wrote on a Web site she maintains.

“I’m so very proud of my husband and all that he believed,” Sgt. Howard Paul Allen’s wife, Patience, wrote. “He didn’t agree with this war but it was his duty. He did a job he wasn’t meant to do and he did it well and the price he paid was not recognition for a job well done. He paid with his life and felt so let down that he wasn’t getting recognized for the job he was doing.”

Allen, 31, of Mesa was killed Monday in Baghdad when a roadside bomb exploded near his military vehicle. He was assigned to the Guard’s 860th Military Police Company, which was sent to Iraq on March 5.

His family declined to comment through a military spokesman.

“On September 26, 2005 this world lost a true hero,” Patience Allen wrote, “not just any hero but my hero.”

Allen is the second Arizona Guardsman killed in the war.

Senior American officials say they are confident that Iraq’s draft constitution will be approved in the referendum to be held Oct. 15, even though Sunni Arabs in Iraq are mobilizing in large numbers to defeat it.

In testimony before Congress on Thursday, the senior American military commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr. of the Army, said the most recent analysis of intelligence from across the country supported the Bush administration’s optimistic predictions that the referendum would pass.

But if the constitution is defeated, several officials said they feared that Iraq would descend into anarchy.

Approval “is critically important,” a senior administration official said, “to maintain political momentum. That is the critical thing for holding this whole thing together.”

Private organizations in Iraq, many working with government financing, say their own analyses, based on discussions with hundreds of Iraqis, polling data and other information, have also led many of them to believe that the constitution would be approved.

Their calculations are complicated, because by law the constitution will fail if it is rejected by two-thirds of the voters in any three of Iraq’s 18 provinces, even if a majority of voters nationwide approve it.

In regions dominated by Sunni Arabs, opinion polls have shown sentiment running just about two to one against it. It is unclear, in those provinces, how get-out-the-vote campaigns by the opposing factions may tilt the balance, or how much the turnout on either side may be suppressed by the continuing violence.

But no matter how the vote goes, several officials said in interviews, the violence in Iraq is likely to increase significantly.

That prediction stands in contrast to the upbeat previous assessments from President Bush and others in his administration before other major turning points in Iraq, like the transition to Iraqi sovereignty in 2004 or the national elections early this year. The administration argued that insurgents would be demoralized by the success of democracy and that violence would decline.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, asked General Casey in a pointed exchange during the hearing on Thursday, “If there’s a strong majority of Sunnis, which is very possible, that vote against that constitution, could that not possibly lead to a worsening political situation rather than a better one?”

“I think that’s entirely possible,” the general replied. “I mean, as we’ve looked at this, we’ve looked for the constitution to be a national compact, and the perception now is that it’s not, particularly among the Sunnis.”

Officials say that if the constitution is defeated, insurgents will most likely believe that they have won a significant victory and be encouraged to fight on. Conversely, it is said, the insurgency will grow stronger if the voters approve the constitution, because that will anger Sunnis who opposed it and empower Sunni insurgents who can claim that their views were ignored.

“A vote for the constitution doesn’t mean we’re headed for peace and prosperity,” Gen. John P. Abizaid, head of the Central Command, said in an interview this month. “Iraq is going to be a pretty difficult security environment for a while.”

A senior official said the Bush administration believed that the insurgency was likely to continue for years and would start to decline only “when Iraq’s political and economic system begins to consolidate.” The administration officials agreed to talk only if their names were not used, under administration policy for their departments.

Sunni Arabs, who held power when Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq, boycotted the election in January. But now, American officials and officers of private organizations working in Iraq say Sunnis are registering to vote in record numbers that exceed 80 percent in many areas.

“There’s a massive, massive effort, in mosques and other places, to get them to register,” the Iraq country director for the National Democratic Institute, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. He asked that his name not be used, because of security concerns. The institute is an organization financed by the United States government that works to promote democracy abroad.

Many Sunni Arabs are upset that the draft constitution grants Kurds and Shiite Arabs significant new authority to set up semi-independent areas but offers little specifically for them.

Still, the country director and others say they do not believe that the Sunni vote is likely to be monolithic. Many Sunni moderates, they say, are likely to vote in favor of the constitution and hope to influence how it is put into effect. The constitution seems likely to be approved by substantial majorities in the heavily Kurdish north and the predominantly Shiite south. In ethnically mixed Baghdad, the situation is more fluid.

Senior Pentagon and military officials who have been closely monitoring reports from Iraq predict that the referendum will fail by the two-thirds majority in the Sunni-dominated – and violence-plagued – Anbar Province in western Iraq. But intelligence reports indicate that only one other province at most will vote no by two-thirds.

“Nobody will be surprised to lose Anbar, and maybe one other province,” one Pentagon official said. “We’re not going to lose three.”

American political and military officials say a large Sunni vote will be a sign that democracy is taking hold in Iraq. Still, the United States is working hard to be sure that the Sunni opponents will not prevail. Among many steps, State Department officials said, Zalmay Khalilzad, the United States ambassador to Iraq, is meeting with Sunni Arab leaders almost every day, trying to persuade them to vote yes.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting for this article.

What is the Radical Middle?

The Founders of this nation represented the first Radical Middle. Back then they called it “being liberal.” As George Washington said, “As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality.”

They didn’t want King George or his military or corporate agents snooping in their houses, mails, or private matters; preventing them from organizing together and speaking out in public in protest of government actions; imprisoning them without access to attorneys, due process, or trials by juries of their peers; or reserving rights to himself that they felt should rest with the people or their elected representatives. (They ultimately wrote all of these in the Bill of Rights in our Constitution.)

They also didn’t want giant transnational corporations dominating their lives or their local economies. When, in 1773, King George III signed the Tea Act – a massive tax cut for the British East India Company – they protested this first attempt to WalMart-itize America by preventing the Company’s ships from landing in several cities up and down the eastern seaboard, and boarding and destroying over a million dollars (in today’s money) of tea in the ships that did dock in Boston. This was the beginning, by the Radical Middle, of the American Revolution.

The Radical Middle has always believed in fairness and democracy, and understood that completely unrestrained business activity and massive accumulations of wealth into a very few hands can endanger democratic institutions.

As James Madison said, “There is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by … corporations. The power of all corporations ought to be limited in this respect. The growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses.” Similarly, John Adams wrote that when “economic power become concentrated in a few hands, then political power flowed to those possessors and away from the citizens, ultimately resulting in an oligarchy or tyranny.”

Thomas Paine, among others, wrote at length about the dangers to a free people of the massive accumulation of wealth, and following the excesses of the Gilded Age – which led to massive corruption of the American government by corporate and wealth-based interests – laws were put into place limiting the size and behavior of corporations (such as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act), and taxing inheritance of the most massive of family estates so that a new hereditary aristocracy wouldn’t emerge in the nation that had thrown off the economic and political oppressions of the hereditary aristocracy of England.

The Radical Middle always believed in the idea of a commons – the things that we all own collectively, and administer the way we want through our elected representatives. Our parks, roads, police, fire, schools, and our government itself. Our ability to vote in fair and transparent elections. Our military and defense. Our systems for protecting our air, water, food, and pharmaceuticals. Our ability to retire in safety if we’ve worked hard and played the game by the rules, and to know that an illness won’t financially wipe us out.

Regardless of electoral politics (since both of the major political parties often overlook these values, and both have become corrupted by wealth and corporate influence), poll after poll shows that the vast majority of Americans embrace the values of the Radical Middle.

In recent years, America has been hijacked by the Radical Right. Corporations now write most of our legislation. Our elected representatives cater to the interests of wealth rather than what is best for the commons we collectively own, or what will sustain that bulwark of democracy known as the middle class. They have, in large part, seized control of our media, wiped out our family farms, and wiped out small, middle-class-owned businesses from our towns and cities. They seek a “merger of corporate and state interests” – a definition Mussolini used for what he called “fascism.”

The Radical Right has even gone so far as to use sophisticated psychological programming tools, like Newt Gingrich’s infamous “word list,” to paint the Radical Middle as some sort of insidious anti-Americanism.

We in the Radical Middle are calling for nothing less than a restoration of democracy, of government of, by, and for We The People, in a world that works for all.