Keep us blessed with the right to dissent

I’m writing this the morning after the sheriff from Texas gave those

varmints 48 hours to get out of town.

I can no longer remember what I was planning to write before I

heard the ultimatum, but trying to write about anything else today is

impossible.

The president’s last words were “God bless America.”

If God is to be called on in this crisis, I would strongly suggest

extending the appeal for his blessing to all mankind. For starters,

it seems like we need to broaden our base a little to make contact

with the Almighty.

I’m wondering where the president’s ultimatum leaves the 60% of

our population which polls last week told us did not support military

action without UN sanction. Or the nearly 50% who didn’t support it

at this time at all.

Since I’m a member of both groups, it was helpful to hear strong

evidence in support of these positions by retired Marine Col. David

Hackworth, speaking at the Newport Beach Public Library. He was

accused in hostile letters to the Pilot and in news stories of being

antiwar. That’s not true. He is anti-this-war.

Hackworth was billed as “America’s most decorated living soldier,”

and I have no reason to doubt that. It also makes him impervious to

personal attack, along with retired Marine Brig. Gen. Francis

Quinlan, who introduced him. These are high-level, high-caliber

American soldiers who are speaking outside the active duty

restrictions of the chain of command.

I suspect more than a few American soldiers who can’t speak out

share their views -- or at least their contempt of politicians,

especially those without military experience, who would send us into

a preemptive war that lacks domestic and international support.

Hackworth made two principal points that Americans who feel

disenfranchised might find helpful: first, that Iraq is by no stretch

of either the evidence or imagination threatening to the United

States, and, second, that we must not use this as a reason to repeat

the lack of emotional and technological support our military men and

women had to put up with in Vietnam.

“I just can’t find in my soldier’s soul a threat, no matter how

hard I look in Iraq,” Hackworth said. “And I can’t see a moral

authority for attacking them, either. There’s a whole mess of bad

guys out there, and Saddam is No. 7 on my threat list. Among the

three members of Bush’s axis of evil, Iraq is the pussycat, which is

why we are concentrating our attention there.”

Support of the military is a different matter. The colonel has

just published a book about a battalion he took over and changed from

hopeless to one of the best fighting units in Vietnam.

“My book is a thank you to the Vietnam vets, who to this day

haven’t been welcomed home from fighting a bad war,” he said. “I

would hate to see the men and women who will be fighting in Iraq get

the same kind of treatment.”

Hackworth made, perhaps, his most important point just by being

here and speaking out. His presence raised the flag of free speech in

a war environment in two quite different ways: first, by raising the

issue of balance in the Newport Beach Public Library’s various series

of distinguished speakers; and second, by speaking to a group of

students at Newport Harbor High School.

Balancing the message Hackworth delivered seems absurd to me

because the members of both his audiences have been exposed for

months to the opposite view from the president of the United States

and members of his administration.

The question is also moot because any fair examination of the

library speakers over a period of time offers ample evidence of a

commendable breadth of viewpoints. A tilt to “liberals” could only be

discerned from the skewed vantage point of the Orange Coast political

center.

Our schools, Newport-Mesa School Supt. Robert Barbot said to me,

“offer all sides of controversial issues we present academically.

Academic freedom isn’t involved because we’re never going to tell a

teacher how to go about it.”

Hackworth’s subject matter caused a mild flap at Newport Harbor

High that resulted in his speaking to students after school rather

than during classroom hours. It also brought a promise from

sponsoring faculty to bring in a contrary speaker if President Bush

isn’t available.

The bigger issue here, however, is the importance of citizens who

aren’t as immune as Col. Hackworth from personal attack continuing to

speak out, especially since too many of our representatives in

Congress have been plagued by weak spines.

The terrorists who crashed those planes into the Twin Towers have

been successful beyond their wildest dreams. The crowning success for

them would be breaking down the most important bastion of our

society: free speech.

Efforts to quiet opposition on the grounds of “patriotism” have

always been successfully resisted in this country.

But free speech has never been more seriously threatened than it

is by the Ashcroft Syndrome, which seems dedicated to rewriting our

Bill of Rights, starting with the edict that if you aren’t with us,

you’re against us. Nine-tenths of the world and half of the United

States is strongly opposed to this war.

We must not allow a military attack and the incantations of our

attorney general to silence us.

But we must also not allow these convictions to denigrate in any

way the sacrifices and performance of the men and women required to

fight this war.

How do we walk that tightrope? I don’t know. We paid a terrible

price in Vietnam in broken lives and a divided United States that was

finally beginning to heal itself in the last decade. All we can do at

this point, it seems to me, is to hope devoutly this war can end

quickly and that we won’t even consider the insanity of using nuclear

weapons.

Once the killing has stopped, we can address the issue of spending

billions to try to democratize Iraq while our own schools and health

care and environment and economy flounder.

But let’s stop the killing first. God bless us all.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.