Tilting at Windmills

...0 ne lie that the prowar forces .love to repeat is tha;, in the words of a recent article in The Washington Post, “Today’s enlisted recruits are broadly similar to the general youth population in terms of socioeconomic characteristics...

...Because it touched something real in his soul, it produced the most powerful oratory of his presidency...

...As Bush began to have to justify to himself and the world the deaths war would cause, he hit upon the moral argument that he began to emphasize during the last week of January...

...Since 1981, the federal government has paid a total of $500,000 for the operation of Kennedy’s house and those of two other Stanford administrators...

...Consider that it took the Pentagon press corps a week to wake up to the way they were being conned by that 80 percent success rate of air missions in the Gulf...

...The mindlessness of television news has never troubled me more than during the crisis in the Gulf...

...Wonder what they’re doing these days...

...Not quite...

...Fire Department still use two trucks...

...The lie begins to emerge in the article’s fine print, where there is a concession that “10 percent of American youth living in the country’s richest communities were about half as likely to enlist in the military as those from the poorest communities...

...2,370,000), and Iraq (pop...

...Does Favor for Key Ally” read the headline over a story describing how, at the urging of the State Department, the Turkish government was being permitted to tear down its chancery on historic Embassy Row, even though preservationist groups had united in opposing the demolition...

...And did you know that airborne accommodations included “a first-class seating configuration and the presence of military stewards, who cooked fresh meals, incongruously billing the passengers for the cost of the ingredients-the only unreimbursed expense of the trip...

...Did you know that congressional travel groups (designated as CODELs by the State Department) include not only members of the House and the Senate, their staffs, and spouses, but if a spouse is not going, other relatives of the members such as mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters...

...I therefore was delighted to see Do you remember that 10-day budget summit at Andrews Air Force Base in September...

...In fact, he should not have surrendered at all...

...Stark after it was attacked in the Gulf a few years ago...

...249,000,000) has been choosing to start wars with in the past decade: Grenada (pop...

...17,610,000...

...And did you know that at each stop, the State Department arranges Bisnow, a former congressional entertainment and sightseeing and provides a “control room” to provide local currency and alcoholic refreshment “around the clock...

...If you are a citizen of the District of Columbia, you,may have wondered why, even for the most insignificant fire, the D.C...

...Still, the percentage of whites with relatives in the military was four times that of congressmen-even when the representatives’ in-laws were counted...

...It just doesn’t make sense to use our military might to devastate a small country when all we really want to do is punish one man...

...Again and again we saw that tape of a poor bird desperately struggling to climb ashore...

...Movie projectors, slide and overhead projectors, etc., are either at the college or [in] the trunk[s] of the moonlighting teachers’ cars...

...At the front with our troops in the desert...

...The participants were high-level administration officials and congressional leaders such as Sununu, Darman, Foley, Mitchell, and Dole...

...One method, of which parents are ruefully aware, is to regularly raise tuition at about double the inflation rate...

...How do our institutions of higher learning find the funds to pay large salaries to top-heavy administrative staffs and prominent professors who teach only a few hours a week...

...Their regret will be that they should have taken both stands earlier and fought harder on behalf of their convictions...

...This is the exact kind of thing American executives never seem to do-take responsibility for their own mistakes...

...Similar thievery through clever accounting led me to conclude during my Peace Corps years that the people who used to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge are now all in academic administration...

...when I say I have some idea of where George Bush is coming from...

...A couple of interesting facts I hadn’t known emerged from Senator Ernest Hollings’s speech during the congressional debate...

...Speaking of our dedicated leaders, where do you think IO members of the House were caught at war’s outbreak...

...So far this year, there were 25 weekdays during which Szulewski’s business conducted a daytime wake or burial, services “I work in an office where half If you need further reassurance that Szulewski routinely handles himself...

...They even failed to listen when Colin Powell gave away the key to the hustle on the first day by explaining that the rate was based on “arriving at the target and delivering the ordnance...

...These facts, for which I am grateful to the Rivlin Commission, help explain why the lead story in the December 27 Washington Post was headlined: REACH $300 MILLION, REPORT SAYS” “D.C...

...But where we differ is that I don’t think we can afford the money, or more importantly, the blood, to use war to bring about that good world by ourselves...

...The experience of J. William Fulbright and Charles Percy, both of whom had been chairmen of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is cited by anxious legislators who want to avoid the electoral disaster that overtook those senators when the voters became convinced that they were too enamored of the exotica of foreign affairs...

...Time magazine proclaimed him the Man of the Year, saying that in foreign affairs he has risen “from competence to mastery...

...DEFICIT COULD The story quoted an expert on municipal finances as saying: “In my 11 years of working with governments in financial difficulty, I do not believe I have ever encountered a situation as potentially disastrous as this one . . . all the major actors in Washington have avoided their responsibility for many years...

...The $66 million was to pay them to irrigate land that produced surplus crops...

...The real estate sales abuse is so common throughout the federal government, according to Scott Shuger’s article on bureaucracy in our June 1990 issue, that the current real estate slump could only be a boon to good government: Finally, the daylighters will have time to do their real jobs...

...But if the 1 must admit, however, that a killing is still going on, surely stopping it is worth a lot of embarrassment...

...This tiny example of how the Gulf war has distorted our foreign policy is of little significance...

...that Stanford recently got caught gouging the government for $184,000 for depreciation of a luxury yacht the university owned, not to mention $2,500 to refurbish a grand piano, $3,000 to pay for a cedar-lined closet, and $2,000 a month to buy flowers, all for the residence of Stanford President Donald Kennedy...

...It is an error which is rooted in two less happy characteristics of the WASP-a tendency to deal too harshly or, less often, too indulgently, with the frailties of those whose skin is not lily-white and a tendency to think “we know best” in affairs involving such people-a tendency to which there is a related assumption that we should be the main if not the sole policeman on the world beat...

...How many graduates of Harvard and Yale...

...Have you noticed that what we have in today’s Germany is a chemical-biological-pacifist complex...

...The idiotic result such a policy can produce was illustrated last month in Minnesota when Cathy Nelson, the state’s Teacher of the Year, was laid off...

...TILTING AT WINDMILLS Charles Peters Recall how the oil spill dominated the news the weekend of January 26-27...

...The resulting legacy of hatred will be with us for generations to come and George Bush’s adventure in the Gulf will be remembered not as the enduring triumph of a Winston Churchill in 1940, but as the miserable mistake of an Anthony Eden at Suez...

...I) The Emir of Kuwait refused to open his hospital to the badly injured sailors from the U.S.S...

...I was 13 at the time of the Battle of Britain, and it remains to me the crucial moment in the history of the century...

...Photocopying machines are in almost constant use cranking out course outlines, notes, exams, and the like...

...As the months and years go by, the families of those who died on both sides will realize that their sons and daughters would still be alive if Bush had had the resolve to stick to the embargo...

...At the Andrews Offjcers’ Club, they ran up a bill of $58,900 for just food and liquor...

...Some of them spend half their time working on nonfederal jobs...

...On Monday the 28th, if you were listening closely, you may have heard the announcer say that the big spill had not yet reached the Saudi coast and acknowledge sotto voce that the oil from which the bird had been trying to emerge was not the result of the intentional leak, but came from an earlier one that was probably an accidental byproduct of Iraqi shelling on the first day of the war...

...Because there are too few really good teachers or really good bureaucrats, the country simply can’t afford the luxury of firing them to protect their seniors who have less ability...

...about how your tax dollars are being spent, I urge you to contemplate the fact that there are five state and local employees for every federal worker and then consider this example from a Boston Globe report about daylighting among state court employees: “Joseph Szulewski, 48, who earns $3 1,000 a year as a court officer, runs a small, familyowned funeral home in Cambridge-sometimes on courthouse time...

...The Post’s embargo on Bush’s intentions to go to war was so firm that, even when the very reliable Jack Nelson of the Los Angeles Times reported on before the Post article, that “President Bush . . . has decided that the United States should move quickly to launch a massive military attack on Iraqi forces, ” not a word of his story appeared in The Washington Post...

...staff member, is candid about the lures of seeing the world to those who work on the Hill...

...I, too, want a new and just world order...

...It seems to me that Saddam Hussein does enough real evil that it is silly for our propagandists to feel compelled to fake evidence of his sins...

...Palm Springs, California, where their sun, fun, and honoraria were being paid for by that great servant of the public interest, the Tobacco Institute...

...So why does the D.C...

...I would go to the boss, but he (and his wife) have a sideline too...

...As financial troubles and a desire for increased eficiency dictate reductions in public bureaucracies, it is important that we refuse to accept seniority as the basis for deciding which employees will be retained...

...What was wrong with that...

...Intelligent antiwar arguments, seldom presented before the war, have virtually disappeared since actual hostilities commenced on January 16...

...In the midst of his eloquent and persuasive speech on the Senate floor on January 11 against going to war, Nunn interjected a comment that the antiwar side was probably going to lose the vote in Congress and that if it did, he would support the president in the war that would come...

...While I fervently hope that the war will have ended by the time you read these words, I am confident that, even though it may have been relatively short, history will judge it severely...

...The protesters who get air time tend to be those who are sufficiently deranged to bum the flag or, even more incredibly, to riot in the Senate gallery during a speech against the war...

...The $379 million was to limit surplus crops...

...One of the original purposes of The Washington Monthly was to increase the bureaucratic sophistication of the American press, which in 1968 was just about zero...

...Because it takes more firemen to operate two trucks than it does to operate one...

...2) Kuwait has voted against us in the United Nations more often than the Soviet Union...

...To be sure, every step we have taken since the sensible embargo has made it more embarrassing to admit those steps were wrong and return to the embargo...

...I believe that consciously or unconsciously, he decided that the appearance of So you can see I’m not kidding decisiveness in foreign affairs would regain his popularity...

...so in effect, they are simply friendly gestures to one or two members who actually want to go with their entourages of staff and family...

...I, too, feel we have a moral duty to try to attain it...

...fatal concession was made by Senator Sam Nunn that helps explain the oversimplified distinction between supporting the troops and being against the war...

...All you have to do is consult your own experience to know that it is the people of modest means who have done the volunteering...

...He should not have announced his surrender in advance...

...Another, which I first became aware of while appraising the training of Peace Corps volunteers by universities, is to steal from the taxpayers through the device of exorbitant “administrative” costs tacked on to contracts with the federal government for research and training programs...

...Another way of getting at the truth is, if you happen to be among the more affluent yourself, to ask if you have any relatives in the military...

...Instead, because the Post did such a poor job of letting the people know, even someone as thoughtful and generally well-informed as Alice Rivlin could express polite disbelief as recently as the spring of 1990, when in the course of a lunch shortly after she had taken charge of the commission that was to bear her name, I told her that The Washington Monthly regarded the District city hall as a leading contender for the title of Worst City Government in America...

...I n 1986, according to a report by the Department of Interior’s inspector general, the same group of farmers received $66 million from the Bureau of Reclamations and $379 million from the Department of Agriculture...

...We have made some progress, but it is clear we still have a long way to go...

...M a r k Bisnow’s excellent examination of the folkways of Capitol Hill, In the Shadow ofthe Dome, makes an interesting point about how congressmen differ from presidents...

...The Chinese students who are being tried and sent to jail now are especially troubling...

...The reason is that, back in the old days the coal-fired engine used to power the water pump was so heavy that one team of horses couldn’t carry it and the necessary hoses to a blaze, so another team was needed to carry the hoses...

...My hunch is that in years to come congressional Democrats will look back on the past year with great pride at two stands that they took, the first in favor of making the rich begin to pay their fair share of taxes and the second in support of sanctions against the war...

...They are staying at luxury hotels like the five-star Dhahran International, at which the pool side area where the TV cameras are set up is called “Little Hollywood,” and those blue domes you see in the background are not mosques, but cabanas...

...Well, the latest course to be offered at the National Capital YMCA is “Investment Positioning in the Nineties” . . . . “U.S...

...The Japanese executives who run Mazda recently cut their own salaries to penalize themselves for quality defects in their cars...

...Rarely is a thoughtful opponent of the war given a chance to say that the best way to support our troops is to save their lives...

...But on 21 of these days, he was officially noted as working a full day in the courthouse...

...87,000), Panama (pop...

...F e d e r a l employees are up in arms about a prohibition of moonlighting in the Ethics Reform Act...

...T h e next great historic failure of the Post is going to be its coverage of the build-up to the war in the Gulf...

...There are no words that resonate more powerfully in my soul than the line from an old Protestant hymn, “Where duty calls or danger, be never wanting there...

...In a story that reminds me so much of the paper’s timely reporting on the Barry administration, Post reporters Ann Devroy and Dan Balz informed us after Bush had attacked Iraq that he had intended to go to war since August, a fact that Ben Bradlee had presumably decided was not news until after it was too late for the rest of us to do anything...

...When I was 17, Franklin Roosevelt’s call for a world police force made me an even more ardent advocate for a fourth term...

...This adds up to 168 unnecessary firemen, costing the District $9.2 million a year...

...But he yielded to his psychological weakness, his fear of wimpdom, and his practical political need to extricate himself from the budget debacle...

...I couldn’t help thinking as I read those words how much better it would have been if the Post had told its readers about the incompetence of the Barry administration back in January 1984, when we first urged it to do so...

...Bold positions in foreign affairs, much valued as a way of appearing decisive and statesmanlike by occupants of the White House, are viewed with anxiety by congressmen who fear the voters will think they are spending more time on Uganda than on the problems in the home district...

...The only cost will be an eyesore instead of a charming building...

...A couple sell household cleaning products to coworkers (which is an imposition and time consuming) and also sell to outsiders by phone...

...But there are other important examples that have truly evil consequences: We have deserted the brave students of Tiananmen Square in order to get the Chinese to side with us in the UN, and we have embraced a Syrian dictator who helped kill our Marines in Beirut and whose record on human rights abuse is no better than Saddam Hussein’s...

...The real standard should not be the wealth of the “community” or the ‘‘area’’-there are always people of modest means living among people whose wealth is so great that it raises the local average above the national...

...Fire Department always dispatches two fire trucks...

...Of course the truth is much worse than even this concession suggests...

...Isn’t there a bit of a danger that we might earn a reputation as the world’s bully from the opponents that the United States bop...

...An alerted citizenry might have been aroused to action in time to defeat Barry in 1986...

...And the embargo, if we continue to strongly enforce it, will still render Saddam Hussein impotent in the long run...

...Since I was a child, I have had a strong tendency to sentimentalize the virtues of the Anglo-American character...

...Somehow we have lost our sense of proportion...

...The world is split, in the language of the anchors, into those who “support our troops” and “antiwar protesters...

...They were in the desert, but at an oasis, a.k.a...

...The prohibition is a bit excessive, but that it is aimed at a real problem is made clear by the letter a civil servant wrote to Mike Causey of The Washington Post: “In my agency so many grade 14 and 15 types teach at the local college there is never any audiovisual equipment or supplies for our training...

...As indeed it did...

...Bush had the right idea in his grasp, the international embargo which would have killed no one while uniting the world in an effective response to Iraq’s aggression...

...Today’s fire trucks can pump the water and carry the hoses...

...There is, of course, no mention of the ordnance hitting the target...

...I doubt that this would be happening if the world spotlight was on China instead of the Gulf...

...R e m e m b e r when adults used to gather at the local YMCA to talk about how to help the needy youth of the community...

...The biggest abusers are those who sell real estate from the office...

...But when George Bush is asked if it’s right for the elite to let the rest of the country do the dying, he answers by indignantly defending the quality of the volunteer Army while carefully avoiding the issue of fairness-a debating technique reminiscent of another of our illustrious leaders, Richard M. Nixon...

...If the war was a bad idea on January 11, it’s still a bad idea today...

...And did you know that while the use of government aircraft requires a initial commitment of 10 members to go on the trip, these commitments can be canceled before the trip...

...I wouldn’t suggest you take these guys out to lunch...

...A second problem, illustrated by another civil servant’s letter, might be called “daylighting”: the people are engaged in other things while supposedly working for the government...

...Speaking of oases, have you noticed the hardship posts from which most of the American press-God bless the brave exceptions like Bob Simon-is reporting the war in the Gulf...

...But sincerity, alas, is not enough to excuse his error...

...When Time magazine recently asked whites and blacks if they had family members serving in the Middle East, the percentage of blacks who replied yes was more than twice that of the whites...

...Just stop and think: How many rich people do you know in the military...

...One could not escape feeling that this man was sincere...