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War's cost intensely personal

Posted: Saturday, Feb. 15, 8:30 a.m.

Don't trade freedoms for a no-risk nation
By Denny Wilkins

Promoting fear is a lousy way to encourage, let alone enact, a public policy aimed at securing us from evil.

The Bush administration, using its director of the FBI, has tried to persuade Americans that its college-age children should fear imminent terrorist attacks. It's utterly shameful that our leaders try to frighten us into trading our privacy and freedoms of expression for increased security -- a security that cannot be guaranteed.

Robert S. Mueller III, the Feebs' top cop, told a Senate committee recently that colleges and other poorly defended locations may be targeted by Al Qaeda.

"Multiple small-scale attacks against soft targets, including colleges and universities," he said, "would be easier to execute and would minimize the need to communicate with the central leadership, lowering risks of detection."

Well, duh.

On Sept. 12, 2001, was there a college president in the land who had not thought of the possibility? Was there a campus security official who had not pondered what such agencies should do?

The nation has thousands of universities and colleges. Many, if not most, could be described as rural -- even isolated. Much of America has rural, isolated and secluded "soft targets" -- homes, hospitals, high-school football stadiums, downtowns, small-town malls ... that's the nature of rural life. We're sitting ducks. We know it. We keep a watchful eye and move on with our lives.

So why is the government telling us now that colleges and universities are vulnerable? Why is it saying that there "could be" a risk without being definitive about the risk?

Here's why: The Bush administration wants to increase its ability to conduct domestic surveillance. It wants to spy on us to determine if some of us are members of "sleeper cells" maintained by Al Qaeda. It wants to expand the spying powers foolishly enacted by Congress in the "Patriot" Act. That fearful mistake compromises due process and contravenes the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth amendments.

Sadly, the government plans a sequel. Watch for Patriot Act II, also known as the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003. This latest proposed erosion of your civil rights, brought to you by the Department of Justice, would permit increased surveillance on citizens with less judicial oversight -- that's even more eavesdropping, more wiretaps, more spying on us with far fewer legitimate reasons for doing so than the Patriot Act now allows.

To support this naked attempt to increase the power of the government over the governed, the Bush administration pushes fear at the soft targets in our hearts -- children.

"Fear the terrorist," the government says. "The terrorist can reach even your children away at college."

While it's trying to make us fear terrorist attacks on campuses, perhaps the government should spend some money to actually prevent crime on campuses -- such as rape, theft, assault and so on committed by students and non-students alike -- crimes that are far more predictable and costly.

A government that leads by promoting fear is a government that does not understand how to govern. It considers us cattle, easily swayed, easily moved, easily frightened into surrounding rights granted by the Constitution.

Yes, the risk of unprovoked attacks on our soil exists. But a government should not expect its citizens to swap its freedoms for a no-risk society.

A no-risk nation will never be a free nation. Oppose attempts to curtail rights guaranteed under the Constitution by those who seek an impossible, no-risk "national security."

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Posted: Monday, Jan. 27, noon

War's cost intensely personal for many
By Denny Wilkins

As President Bush gathers spears to cast at Iraq, remember that some of those spears are young men and women. In wartime, young people die.

Increasingly, Americans have begun to question whether the president has made his case. Polls suggest more than half of respondents don't think he has. War protests have emerged and made headlines. His coalition is crumbling as allies no longer find the president's evidentiary sleight of hand credible.

The president may not have a national consensus when ("if" appears out of the question) he sends young men and women to war against Iraq.

Other presidents have prosecuted an unpopular war, and that war haunts the national psyche. It reaches into states, communities and even neighborhoods. It has a monument -- the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, an elegant, intensely touching wing of black granite.

When presidents sent young men from Franklin County in Massachusetts into that scarring war, 23 died, according to memorial wall records maintained by the 4th Battalion 9th Infantry Regiment.

Pfc. Ronald Sherman of Greenfield became the first county native to die in that war -- on March 30, 1966, according to wall records. He was only 19. Three others were 19; seven were 20 years old. The oldest to die was Bosun's Mate William Batchelder of Shelburne. He was 32.

Spc. Frederick Parker Jr. of Northfield, only 20 years old, died on Christmas Eve of 1968. Spc. Robert J. Hallett of Erving, 31, died on New Year's Eve of 1967. He was married as were three others.

The men were Catholic, Protestant, Congregational Christian, Lutheran, Baptist, Episcopalian and Methodist.

According to records, the causes of death for these young men include explosive devices, burns, aircraft crashes on land and at sea, multiple fragmentation wounds, accidental homicide, small arms fire, illness and vehicle crashes.

The case against the war can be argued by much brighter people than me. Some would say war is simply wrong, that no good comes from killing. Some might suggest that the president's desire to kill Iraqi President Saddam Hussein sadly resembles John F. Kennedy's failed attempt at "regime change" in Cuba, otherwise known as the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

Some might say it's not a good idea to place the bulk of American military might in one place, given that North Korea represents a far more demonstrable threat to national security. Others might say that the cost of a war with Iraq, in purely economic terms, would be $50 billion. It would also force a painful delay for a majority of tax-paying Americans in recovering from a recession, if not a depression.

Others add to the litany of reasons to avoid a war. Iraq's leader only orders attacks on those who cannot defend themselves. Surround Iraq and starve him out. Another: The list of allies willing to shoulder the costs (human and otherwise) is shrinking. (Thank God for the Aussies; they haven't turned cold shoulder as the French and Germans have.)

Others astutely point out that it is not in the American psyche to shoot first, no matter what the provocation. We didn't do it at Bunker Hill, we didn't do it during the Cold War, and we shouldn't do it to a nation whose principal fault is its misfortune to have a monomaniacal murderer as a leader.

Far too many reasons exist, credible people say, to avoid war than to go to war. Young men and women should not die for a policy that would ensure the flow of oil into gas-guzzling SUVs driven by soccer moms.

I have 23 reasons to regret war. Fathers, mothers, friends, children still feel the loss of these young men. Each represents disrupted lives.

And for what? History does not record the nation's Vietnam experience as an American moral triumph, a victory for national political consensus or a shining moment of military execution.

A war with Iraq, unnecessary for numerous reasons, will leave young men and women dead on all sides of such a conflict. The Iraqis have a memorial to their war dead from the Iranian conflict just as moving as the Vietnam memorial.

It's likely that the American people, giddy over video-game war technology, will not tolerate American dead in a war with Iraq. Nearly 60,000 died in Vietnam. But near the end of 2002, a U.S. soldier who was creased by a bullet in Afghanistan made the evening news.

Perhaps President Bush should be reminded of the official casualty description of Ronnie Sherman, the county's first death in Vietnam:

"Ground casualty misadventure."

[This commentary appeared in the Jan. 24, 2003, edition of The Recorder in Greenfield, Mass.]

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