Letter #65 to friends and family

Security Cooperation: a ‘Plan Colombia’ for Iraq?

Introduction: current situation.
The current rush-to-consensus on applying Plan Colombia may prove over time to be pre-mature and a product of group-think.1 In working with the Iraqi government (GOI) to create a secure, stable and sovereign nation, the U.S. government (USG) must assist and support the GOI in avoiding three national catastrophes:

• a regional war between Arabs and Persians fought on Iraqi soil;
• a civil war between the Arabs and Kurds; and,
• a continuing relapse into civil conflict creating a culture of chronic conflict.2

The danger of the third point is clear: half of the failed states that emerge from civil war relapse into (often-times bloodier) conflict within ten years. Iraq may be starting to relapse. Why?

1. Iraq’s contentious factions remain trapped in a "security dilemma", complicating the prospects of long-term conciliation. (A security dilemma indicates that paramilitary and other armed groups outside the law tend not to surrender their weapons during programs of disarmament, demobilization and reintegration, or “DDR”.)3

Specifically, in Iraq, we do not know whether or not the Ministry of Interior really did weed out the death squads brought in during Bayan Jabr's tenure of 2005 and 2006 or thought to be lingering in the Ministry of Defence.4

The Norwegian government and the Iraqi Ministry of Planning have documented an absolute surfeit of weaponry dispersed throughout the extra-legal fighting elements. Any actual surrender of arms is likely to be nominal.

The Maliki government has squandered the substantial progress of "DDR" afforded by the U.S. program of funding the Sunni ‘Awareness Movement’ with concerned local citizens (a/k/a CLCs). This surge-related program protected the Sunni population from possible sectarian genocide and, more importantly, began bringing disaffected elements into the political mainstream while establishing the fundaments of community policing.

Community policing re-frames the current insurgency as a crime wave -- not as an insurgency -- effectively to cut these murderers off at the source. Whether the rationale is ethno-sectarian or economic, people who kill people are still criminals. Neighborhood residents are the best eyes-and-ears for the police as demonstrated in the Kurdish cities.

Perhaps most important, there are too many guns with too much ammunition combusting with pervasive poverty throughout Iraq.

Review of Plan Colombia as a Template.
Colombia and Iraq share compelling similarities -- high numbers of internally displaced people; drug (or illegal oil) trafficking as a source of funding primarily for government coddled militias; widespread corruption; human rights abuses; vulnerable oil infrastructure in need of protection; and, widespread homicide. A few crucial differences, however, trump these circumstantial parallels. Additionally, tactical gains against revolutionary groups aside, the ultimate success of Plan Colombia remains contested.5

Plan Colombia was basically a de-novo militarization by the USG of the counter-insurgency in Colombia. Over six years, the United States invested $5-6 billion in military aid, a significant portion of which funded fumigation of millions of acres of arable lands producing illicit cash crops; not so in Iraq. Over a six year period, the USG allocated $18 billion to the Iraq Security Forces Fund. Thus, Iraq’s equivalent to Plan Colombia has likely taken place already.

With the funding and equipping to date of the Ministries of Interior and Defence (MOI and MOD) as well as the 100,000 CLCs exceeding $18 billion, $3-3.5 billion (60% equivalent of the Colombian aid since Iraq has 60% of Colombia’s population) of funding over six years should prove to be superfluous. Such a situation would be like Noah, on the thirty-ninth day of rains, walking top-side with a pitcher of water to tend to some plants on deck. Instead, such a USG posture would more likely spoil the prospects for long-term stability as U.S. policies would be perceived – as they are already – as taking sides in a civil conflict.

Training more men to kill other men, as suggested by using Plan Colombia, will not enhance the rule of law in Iraq. The police force exceeds reasonable levels already; current infrastructure can not handle the levels of security forces using it. One of every 25-30 Iraqis is in the security forces (i.e., the military and police; or, ISF), meaning more police per population than any of the world's five most dangerous countries. At the height of Plan Colombia, there were -- at least -- one hundred people for every member of the security forces.

Iraq lacks the extra-governmental institutions reaching all levels of its society. Colombia has the Catholic Church and many mature peace-oriented non-governmental organizations (NGOs), allied with wealthier benefactors in the U.S. and Europe, to build a climate of reconciliation that can supplant a culture of conflict.6  Lastly, U.S. interests (i.e., the war on drugs and “narcorruption” sweeping Northward from Colombia) were more immediate and vital with respect to Colombia than they are with Iraq.7

A (Not-So) New Way for a New Day.
The ideal end-state toward which U.S. can point Iraq includes the following elements:

• police primacy through democratic, communally-based law enforcement;
• an end to ISF-sponsored violence against prisoners and detainees including torture, false arrest and neglect during custody;
• widespread enforcement for the protection of fundamental human rights; and,
• ethno-sectarian tolerance strengthened through mutual support.

These elements define President Obama's idea of a stable, secure and self-sustaining Iraq (or the words actually used in briefings). It may be prudent not to assume an eventual stay-behind U.S. force. Such a residual force would be unwelcome and, given its small number and attenuated lines of communication (LOC), far more vulnerable. A possible exception might be small U.S. Army training contingents in Kirkuk, Baghdad and Basra. These units would prevent potential regional peace-keepers -- about 20,000 in all (if requested) -- from a land-grab of Iraq. NATO or U.N. troops might be better suited than the U.S. Army for this dual-purpose exception. Such a training and oversight force would tap into the peace-keepers’ LOC.

This alternative approach addresses the constraints mentioned earlier to culminate in a post-kinetic partnership between Iraq and the U.S. starting in 2012. This alliance will aim for peaceful co-existence within Iraqi society to address poverty and essential service shortages that would tend to undermine the GOI's legitimacy and rule of law. The security cooperation office, then, would ideally consist of a security assistance component (8-13 people) supplemented by liaisons with civilian agencies (27-32 people) harnessing USG and NGO-sponsored resources.

The Legacy Issue.
For example, for every uniformed military personnel deployed as trainers in Iraq from the U.S., NATO or the U.N. (i.e., up to 3,000), there would be at least five field-workers drawn from the Peace Corps and NGOs as well as from the Iraqi population. These volunteers and the uniformed military would cross-train each other in grass-roots economic development and civil-military operations.

Iraqis could then re-build their villages and their lives in practical ways that they would begin to associate with the United States or the West over the long-term.8 The USG would strive, through this radically different OSC sponsored by the U.S. Embassy, to impart a legacy of democratic policing, law-&-order, human rights and communal self-improvement.9 The annual cost of this legacy-building would total less than 10% of the average ISFF burden.

REFERENCES
1. Irving Janis; Yale & Berkeley; 1972
Dr Janis did extensive work on the subject, defined it as: A mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation realistically to appraise alternative courses of action.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink)

2. Paul Collier; Oxford University 2004
“Around half of all civil wars are due to post-conflict relapses…The risks of conflict relapse are very high during the first post-conflict decade – typically around 50%.”
(http://www.un.org/esa/documents/Development.and.Conflict2.pdf)

Matthew Kirwin; Michigan State, 2006

“There are several factors that have led to the conflagration of a security dilemma in Cote d’Ivoire. First, a weak state and economic crisis compelled certain groups to revert to a primordial attachment to ethnic and religious background, which supersedes national identity and creates intense power struggles. This reversion to ethnic identity caused the parties to identify each other as offensive threats. Due to the dire economic situation in states such as Cote d’Ivoire, the struggle for the control of resources has become intense. “Any economic improvement by one ethnic group is frequently perceived as an example by the center: the ethnic security dilemma has an economic component, as all sorts of motives and fears are read into any change in the economic status of each ethnic group (Saideman 1998: 135).” Therefore the distribution of resources to one ethnic group and not another decreases the security of latter and increases the security of the former. Control and distribution of resources is primarily the responsibility of the government. Political appointments therefore confer power to the appointee and his entourage, which in turn can be interpreted as a security threat to certain groups. At one point other ethnic groups assumed that the government of Gbagbo and his ethnic group had a stranglehold on the means of entry into the police and gendarmerie.”
(http://www.njas.helsinki.fi/pdf-files/vol15num1/kirwin.pdf)

4. James C. Jones; U.S. Institute of Peace 2009; Colombia: Building Peace in a Time of War (page-365)
“Indeed doubts exist about the degree of real paramilitary [i.e., ‘government coddled militias’] demobilization. Recent reports the emergence of new groups, or reemergence of old ones, throughout the country. Moreover, investigations as well as informed testimony under the controversial Justice and Peace Law have revealed disturbing links between lawmakers – most of them [President] Uribe supporters [in favor of Plan Colombia’s militarized program] – and paramilitaries. And there is strong evidence of widespread paramilitary penetration of governmental institutions.”
Please note that the writing of Dr Jones is likely to be biased against the government of Colombia (GOC); he was under investigation by the GOC for possible ties with leftist guerillas opposing the rightist paramilitaries.
The Department of State gives the GOC higher marks but states in its 2009 narcotics report:

“The GOC does not, as a matter of government policy, encourage or facilitate the illicit production or distribution of narcotic or psychotropic drugs or other controlled substances, or the laundering of proceeds from illegal drug transactions. While criminal organizations are greatly weakened, concerns remain over their corrupting influences. In September 2008, two CNP [i.e., Colombian National Police] generals, Antonio Gomez Mendez and Marco Pedreros, were fired as a result of alleged ties to narco-paramilitary leader, Daniel “El Loco” Barrera. Separately, several members of the GOC were found to have supported right-wing paramilitary groups. Seventy members of the 2006-2010 Congress and 15 current and former governors have been investigated in the “para-political” scandal, with 34 congressmen and eight governors jailed as a result of the aggressive investigations.”
(http://www.state.gov/p/inl/rls/nrcrpt/2009/vol1/116520.htm)
Deborah Haynes; The Times of London, 2009
“….in January the human rights office of the Defence Ministry found more than 1,000 detainees at three centres in Ninevah, northern Iraq, including about 550 who had orders issued for their release…Many prisoners were held in cramped and unhygienic conditions. More than 700 were eventually freed.”
(http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article6737870.ece)  

5. Associated Content News; “Top 5 Nations Where Safety is Last” 2007

“Colombia. Infamous for its guerillas, illegal cocaine "industry", and corrupt government, no wonder Colombia ranks as ‘The Most Dangerous Country in the World’. Bombings targeting civilians are common and terrorism is a way of life for most citizens who have grown accustomed to the chaos. It has a high rating for kidnappings with ransoms, with businesspeople, tourists, journalists, and scientists being frequent targets, though no one is actually excluded from kidnappings. Hot spots include ATMs, taxis, restaurants, and simply walking down the street. Those who try to resist robberies usually get shot and killed. Bogota, Baranquilla, Cartagena, and Medellin are statistically categorized as the most dangerous cities, with Medellin holding the title of the Drug Capital and ‘Most Dangerous City in the World’. With 11 murders a day in a city of merely 2 million, its murder rates is quintupled that of New York City. In recent years, murders rates in Colombia have dropped, but not enough to pass the title to South Africa. Though what was previously mentioned [falling homicide rates] may be misinformation, as critics have accused President Uribe of manipulating the crime [rate], making Colombia seem safer than it really is. What is behind all the heinous crimes? An expanding drug market and a plethora of terrorist groups, and a government that does nothing about it. Colombia averages 47 murders a day in a nation of 45 million, giving it the crown of ‘Most Dangerous’.”
(http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/159175/top_5_most_dangerous_countries_in_the.html?cat=9)  
U.S. Office on Colombia; 2009

“The…Working Group on Extrajudicial Executions has identified new modalities of extrajudicial executions where killings are no longer publicly reported, as happened in the case of false positives, but rather hidden, with measures taken to conceal the identity of those responsible. One example is the increase in cases of forced disappearances of human rights defenders and social leaders, with the person being subsequently killed and put into unidentified graves in the majority of these cases. In many of these cases members of the armed forces are alleged to have been involved either directly, through cooperation, or at the least through acquiescence with paramilitaries. According to a recent report by the National Commission for the Search for Disappeared People, between January 1 2007 and October 21 2008 alone, there was a total of 1,686 people forcefully disappeared.”

(http://www.usofficeoncolombia.com/uploads/application-pdf/2009-%20June%20EJE%20memo.pdf)

6. Arturo Carrillo; U.S. Institute of Peace 2009; Colombia: Building Peace in a Time of War (pages 148-149)

“As a result, by 2000, the Colombian non-governmental human rights movement was a critical player…Colombian NGOs had powerful allies in the Colombian Congress as well as among foreign governments, intergovernmental organizations…[e.g., U.N.]…and, of course, international NGOs….”

7. Bruce Bagley University of Miami; 2001
“During most of the 1980s the Medellin cartel dominated the Colombian drug trade and its principal trafficking routes passed through (or over) the Caribbean into the United States via south Florida and elsewhere along the U.S. Atlantic seaboard. As these "traditional" smuggling routes came under increasing pressure from U.S. drug enforcement over the second half of the decade, a gradual shift away from the Caribbean routes to new ones passing through Central America and Mexico and across the U.S. southwest border took place. By the early 1990s 70 to 80 percent of the cocaine smuggled out of Colombia entered the United States from Mexico while only 20 to 30 percent continued to come in via the Caribbean.”
(http://clas.berkeley.edu/Events/conferences/Colombia/workingpapers/working_paper_bagley.html)

8. Eugene Burdick and William Lederer; The Ugly American; 1958
“But despite the dual meaning, the ‘ugly American’ of the book title fundamentally does refer to the plain-looking engineer Atkins, who lives with the local people, comes to understand their needs, and offers genuinely useful assistance with small-scale projects such as the development of a simple bicycle-powered water pump. It is argued in the book that the Communists are successful because they practice tactics similar to Atkins'. According to an article published in Newsweek in May 1959, the ‘real’ Ugly American was identified as an ICA technician named Otto Hunerwadel, who served in Burma from 1949 until his death in 1952.”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_American)

9. Bonnie Bucqueroux; Michigan State, 2004
“By embracing strategies that decentralize and personalize police service, police departments that have adopted the community policing philosophy have been able to engage communities in comprehensive, collaborative, community-based problem-solving aimed at crime, fear of crime, and disorder. Many efforts involve assigning individual officers or teams to specific beat areas, to foster a sense of ownership and responsibility. The marriage of police and community brings together the power of the formal criminal justice system with the informal social control that communities can exert. Police departments have also been a catalyst in forging new partnerships with other professional and civic institutions (municipal agencies, non-profit groups, the business community, schools, and the faith community).“
(http://www.policing.com/articles/rcj.html)
Ned McDonnell; Letter to President George W. Bush, 2006
“The three themes of this rationale – crime prevention, national sovereignty and economic development – are based on precedents in Afghanistan and New York City…The Ministry of Interior has been infiltrated by militias backed by Iran...Trustworthy policemen, vetted and approved by local inhabitants, will empower Iraqi citizens to turn over the insurgents who are nothing more than people enjoying the blood-sport of – and financial gain from – killing, destruction, kidnapping and mayhem. This plan will save time, energy and money which can then be better allocated to Afghanistan to complete Operation Enduring Freedom in support of a tenuous democratic government….”

Letter #64: typical week, waning

Dear everyone,

Fortunately for me, I serve with many fine people as Peace Corps volunteers.  Truthfully, each has honoured me – improved me – in his or her unique manner.  Many of us face the anxiety choking at our throats about what will follow.  Sincerely, I have always believed a disjointed path makes for a creative path; needless or heedless to say, I will surely test that notion soon.  This essay is to submit to you what a typical week is like for me.  Submitting openly to the judgement and criticism of others is not an easy task, especially as the value of my service remains uncertain and accountable to the starkest judge of all, time.  So, here is a brief journal of my last week to give you an idea of what I have really been up to down here in México.

Sunday, August 26th.  I enjoyed a nice luncheon with my former fiancée.  Hers is truly a beautiful soul.  The stresses she faces are consuming and yet she soldiers on, almost manly in her stoicism.  That we will not marry says more about me, little of which I want to dwell on here.  I then went out for a run for about two miles; damn, I am getting old and am out of shape.  That nano-second of stillness in motion hung like minutes and then my body slapped against the ground, hard.  Getting up, I noticed a curlicue of red migrating down my forearm, pain setting in.  “Shoot, mister, you have a run to complete…”  And so I did: this is the Neddy McDonnell I always knew, for better or, more often, for worse.  Stayed up until two in the morning working on a project to define the steps toward a financial structure to carry a new invention to market.  Felt like the old days in Manhattan.  Except that I was a financial structuring wannabe; truth is, I never really understood the whole ‘art’ of financial engineering; damn, neither did they, in retrospect.

Monday, August 27th.  A wasted day to be gotten through.  Having been through this drill before, I focussed on the collection of Spanish articles I distribute through my center each week on aeronautics, Querétaro, science, technology, energy and innovation.  In that mindless chamber of intellect and truth, I suspect that precious few people actually read these articles; damn, I wouldn’t either, in retrospect. Quickly, I reviewed the presentation once but did not present it as my counterpart was swamped, as always.  Finally, I sent out eight e-mails to professional contacts.  People love hearing from me, until I ask them for assistance and then they do not; not much different from me in the past, I have to admit.  That damn retrospect will eat me up and spit me out, I tell you.  I went for a run for the third day in a row, very slow.  It is a re-start if not refreshing.

Tuesday, August 28th.  Did a lot of revision of the presentation on this top-secret, compartmentalized, work for a counterpart with an invention.  I am plugging away at this project for two reasons.  Like so many other activities here at this national science center, it is new to me and I am learning.  While I feel inadequate and guilty for having neither answers nor experience, my counterpart likes what I am doing and so I keep on doing it.  Stubbornness about making some kind of difference persists; it keeps me working.  Today I analyzed carefully two key laws in technology transfer – besides the obvious two on intellectual property and on promoting science and technology – about forming corporations and promoting small businesses.  Mexican law is a lot like the bible: so many inner-contradictions that one can justify just about anything.  And so I piece together the bread crumbs of solemn paragraphs -to plot a way out the thickets of bureaucratic legalisms toward the wide and sunny market.  Only time will tell if that sun is the optimism key to the three out of a thousand who succeed with new things or if it is that of the blazing, coursing inferno of the desert, devoid of promise and happiness, consuming the forgotten 997.  

Enjoyed a dinner with one of the volunteers in a supposedly unsafe state.  Interestingly, the stress that has weighed him down is not what I felt in Afghanistan of that unacknowledged possibility that, on any given day, one might be killed.  No, while that possibility exists, his difficulty was the uncertainty of whether he would be pulled from that state, thereby undercutting his work.  Like the others, he has worked hard.  Frankly, I admire these young volunteers in the countryside, living in poor communities without comforts we take for granted and being alone.  I salute them for I am not sure I could do what they do.  In particular, I found this volunteer’s gratitude toward the Peace Corps management in Mexico to be refreshing.

Wednesday, August 29th.  Did a lot of research on how other states are faring in the automotive industry and engineering-related direct foreign investments in general.  It seems that Querétaro is losing out.  Such a fate is unsurprising for two reasons.  First, the state has only two million people.  Second, the advantage of the state’s investment clime has been its relative freedom from violence.  This advantage has lain, it is widely thought, in the many rival narco-families placing their wives and children here.  The honor among gangsters seems to be: hey, pal, we can blow each other’s head off but the mujer and niños are off limits, okay?  That advantage is fading fast as international investors get it that organized crime is having its private under-world war here in Mexico; for everything else there is Mastercard.  

I finally made the one-on-one presentation on the tech commercialization ideas.  So far so good.  Lots of revisions but lying in those critiques is not an indictment of my ability but guidance on where we need to go.  Had an interesting dinner with friends about the role of conscience.  PRI disdain for seven decades or no, Mexico is an intensely Catholic country, even for those who no longer believe.  One old fellow pointed out that a man of conscience, real conscience, is not the one who refrains from action when he espies a despised ulterior motive; he is the fellow who sees that motive but takes the right action in any case.  How like Blaise Pascal that notion is.  It is when I believe my own bullsh*t – or in contemporary slingo, ‘drink my own kool-aid’ – that I am likely to stumble.

Thursday, August 30th.  Wrote an essay about the corporation and small business laws for the book-let I am putting together for CIDESI (i.e., my host country agency) on technology transfer, my only physical legacy.  That book-let will be some sixty-five pages with three volumes of annexes of readings totalling 125-150 pages, with 65-75% being articles germane to the various subjects of tech transfer that I have translated plus my vision of what transferring technology with entail for a far-seeing Centro with a highly hierarchical structure.  Felt sad about the death of Neil Armstrong.  I wish we had a way of knighting our finest heroes.  

Such secular sainthood would befit that MidWesterner well, not so much for his walk on the moon or his timeless tribute to the mission – “one small step for man, a giant leap for mankind” – but for the virtues of humility, modesty, excellence and decency this man exhibited for the forty three years he remained on earth after returning from the moon.  How like the namesake of the university where he taught, Cincinnatus.  True heroes rise to the occasion when the situation calls for it and then recede quietly afterward, if fortunate enough not to be assassinated.

That latter action of public quiescence and private humility that proves who they really are.  It also reminds me of how Massachusetts led the intellectual ferment for abolition while three Generals from Ohio preserved the union.  A century later another, another fellow from Massachusetts threw down the gauntlet for space and getting to the moon.  And two astronauts from Ohio did more than any of the others to realize that murdered man’s mission.  

How fortunate I am to be a MidWesterner, notwithstanding excellent schooling in New England and the South.  That’s it: the essay will be deferred a week in favor of a tribute to Neil Armstrong – if this is not Peace Corps II, then nothing is.  Caught most of Governor Romney’s speech at my party’s national nominating convention.  Great speech, if he had just ended it with his biography.  Going negative on President Obama is unstatesmanlike and with pit-bull-sh*tters like Governor Sununu around, Governor Romney can take the high-road. 

Friday, August 31st.  Got the weekly articles out after I had goofed and lost the leaders.  Damn, what a pain in the pizats.  Nothing like bogus time pressure.  I quickly translated an abridged version of the speech by President Kennedy at Rice University when he threw the gauntlet down for the space program.  Did the rarity of including to illustrations in the weekly e-mail: one of the National Geographic cover with Neil Armstrong on the moon and the other of a map of how effective I believe my Centro’s strategy might be.  

Another meeting on the invention – again, more revisions; I was not getting it.  Stinging to the ego as these comentarios are, they do guide me toward the more important goal of the mission.  My counterpart is a typical engineer in that his patience for my liberal arts loftiness is limited and yet he is a far more sensitive scientist than people realize. 

At the end of the session, after we drew out another diagram of what the immediate tasks are, he patted me on the shoulder and said he would like me to extend my service because of my intelligence which, he believes, no one else has; he implied that the Director of the Center agrees.  Such a rarely given and gratefully received compliment fired my engines up – I will figure out a way to get there, dammit…before retrospect.  I have done it before and I shall do it again.  

Closed out the day with the second evening in a row of teaching conversational English, this week being ‘letra-libre’, a fight to the death or suicide between Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson.  Honestly, I picked these two for two very selfish reasons.  For a while now, I have wanted to sample a little of the poetry of these two women but would never do it any other way. Second, I want to go around saying I have been reading Plath and Dickinson – though I have read 1-2% of the poems of each. 

The classes came off really well.  Emily Dickinson, at least the little I read, is majestic – so clear with the big questions.  By the same 2% token, Sylvia Plath’s command of the language is unbeatable but the self-absorption is a little much.  It is like suicide was the logical and timely terminus of her analyzing an endlessly inward but illusory fractal geometry of her humanly limited personality.  The fun part was collaborating on the interpretation with my mexican friends; there was so much more ‘there’ there than I could have imagined.

We switched rather quickly out of Plath and into a beautiful poem by Ramon Lopez Velarde.  He seemed to strike a profound balance in his discussion of death between the breathtakingly detached veracity of Dickinson and the breathlessly dispatched tenacity of Plath.  That makes sense since Lopez Velarde was born in the middle of the century intervening between the lives of the two estadounidenses.

We also talked about many other things like Mexican culture and the place of her traditions in the winner-take-all new economy that appeals to old sins like greed. Of course, we debated whether an after-life exists to which I graced my interlocuteurs with my customary response, "I'll let you know when I get there." We laughed and now my students want to marry me off -- this is a bloody rebellion...Refreshing evening; home at one.  

Saturday, September 1st. Anxiety quite a lot today as my networking is proceeding slowly and the dread of my service ending sets in.  I went for a 2.5 mile run and felt it every step of the way.  I was worried I would quit and was whining inwardly about the all too real decline of my physical strength, speculating that running on an empty stomach was the cause.  I finally looked at the sweat shining in the sun on my arm and said, “Oh, shut-up and glisten!!!”  I kept going, slowly, but trying.  

The first one did not really hurt much; the second sure did.  It was May of 1972 and a bunch of us from Saint Edmund’s Academy -- an idyllic episcopal grade school reserved for the smart or well-born (and, then, me) -- had gone to a garden fair in our uniforms before heading home and getting ready for dancing school later that evening.  The slicks had been giving us a hard time for at least half an hour. 

Finally, it came to a head when some little urchin walked close by me and shrank back, feigning that I had elbowed him.  Picking on a punk was not in my repertoire; the slicks now had their Gulf of Tonkin.  My classmates – one now dead for ten years – split in holy terror.  I started to flee, too, for about five strides.  But the big invisible hand of manliness caught me and turned me around. So, I walked right back to the most overtly menacing slick, a good two years older (and many more wiser) than I, and looked him in the eye. 

Now I had a dilemma: I knew I could not fight worth a sh*t, especially with two other slicks standing nearby, ready to put a whuss in his pusillanimous little place; nor would I run away.  My big dancing school crush – whose great uncle had contributed three buildings, including what turned out to be I.M. Pei’s prototype for the east wing of the national gallery, at my imminent high school – might be watching all of this; I had really spazzed that year in showing her my poorly expressed, if sickeningly polite, desire. 

Yes, I was delicate but I would not be cowardly; this reaction to bullies has not changed much over the years. So I looked at the slick in the eye and said, “So are you going to hit me?”  The slick hit me in the chin, maybe even in the dimple.  Though I lost my balance a little, I quickly steadied myself and looked at him in the eye.  In fairness to the slick, I left him with little choice.  My slight frame and recognizable blazer established my bona fides as a card-carrying whimp. 

Now, in the real world, slicks – or most men for that matter – can’t afford to be upstaged by a self-evident cissy, like me, lest they be castrated publicly.  Now, the slick could have broken my nose or damaged my eye.  He kept his aim to the least harmful part, the chin.  Seeing that I was not moving, the slick wound one up and hit me 'but good' in the same spot.  I winced in pain autonomically, without choice.  Though unsteady, still I would not cut and run.  The slick, really not a bad fellow, knew enough was enough and led his friends away.  

Later that afternoon, we crossed paths again and the same guttural noises ensued, at which I said, with what little moxxy I could muster up, “Oh for sh*t’s sake, not THIS again…”  The slick instead smiled and punched me, not hard, in the shoulder which, in slick etiquette, meant a sign of respect and acceptance and said in the harsh but friendly Pittsburgh accent, “You’re a pussy, alright, but you’re a HARD pussy…” 

Elated, I felt like a debutante being presented; like my sister would feel just five years later on her big night and like my darling niece will be feeling just after I return to the States, which brought me back to why I was subjecting myself to this puritan torture of running in the first place – to fit into my full dress not worn since a winter’s ball put on by the Blue Hill Troupe in Manhattan fifteen years ago.  So, I kept running: this is Neddy McDonnell.  

Got home and watched hours worth of the Republican convention on C-Span.  What an uplift to hear the sheer intellectual majesty of Secretary Condoleezza Rice.  Nevertheless, I am getting tired of people pulling quotes out of context. And I am smiting, smokin' peeved that Representative Ron Paul was blitzkrieged by the "party establishment" like Governor Sununu.

On the misquotes, if we conservatives cannot make our case honestly and triumph, then we should re-think our case.  Another line that annoyed me was this notion that President Obama somehow took credit away from small business owners by saying “we built it”; what rubbish – the President simply stated that thought so well put centuries ago by that great Christian philosopher, John Donne, that no man is an island.