Shopping at one of those "big box" stores the other day, I was struck by something the attractive young checkout lady said to me, quite out of the blue: "What scares me more than anything is global warming."
We had been talking about something innocuous -- I forget what -- when she made the comment while handing me the bag. If it had come up earlier in our conversation, I might have asked her the basis for her fears or try to calm her in some way. Alas, I had the bag of items I bought and my receipt, so I was on my way.
In this age when we are at war, with men and women of her age fighting and sometimes dying halfway around the world, global warming was her biggest concern. Being a checkout girl, I wondered if she lived in a blighted neighborhood threatened by crime. Or if her parents were facing foreclosure of their home. Or if she were able to afford the schooling necessary for her to get a better job.
Maybe she was otherwise content with her lot in the world. Perhaps she had nothing else to worry about other than global warming.
I thought about her statement every so often until last week, when it gained new relevancy with the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore, who has spent the past few years on a crusade to raise awareness of global warming. He certainly made his point with this young woman.
I wonder if it was Gore's intent to instill fear into a young cashier. Maybe it was. That doesn't sound like a very peaceful act to me. My opinion on global warming is stated in the header on this blog -- it's something we need to deal with and plan for but the claims of worldwide catastrophe are way over the top. And it's Al Gore who has been the King of Catastrophe on the subject.
It was rather funny that the Nobel Committee in Norway announced the Peace Prize winner the day after he was rebuked by a judge in the United Kingdom for including numerous falsehoods in the film "An Inconvenient Truth." He misrepresented data to support his claims, exaggerated the projected rise of the sea level and based his presentation on worst-case scenarios. He also did something that global warming naysayers are guilty of -- point toward individual weather events like a heat wave, unusual snow storm or destructive hurricane to prove his point of view.
And there are a lot of people right now who disagree with claims about global warming. That's a shame, because there is a strong basis of information that the world has been warming significantly over the past few decades. I don't know what share of blame we people have, or cows have, or Mother Nature has in her natural cycles.
Al Gore did not need to depend on hyperbole and falsehoods to prove that something was indeed taking place with our world. But he did. Now there are two strongly diametrically opposed camps on this extremely important subject. It didn't have to be that way, but it is, and is in large part due to the former vice-president of the United States.
Strange to think that the leading global warming advocate on the planet has POLAR-ized us on the issue. Not cool. (Sorry, couldn't resist).
For that, and scaring a young woman just beginning life as an adult, Al Gore definitely did not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.
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The Washington Post has answered the New York Times story of a couple months ago in which a number of U.S. airborne troops discussed how poorly things were going in their Shiite section of Baghdad despite the surge. The Post's own article is from 12 former Army captains who served in various times in Iraq, and they also write about how bad things were.
The media lately has ravenously consumed any military opinion that opposes U.S. policy in Iraq, including recent stories on criticism by retired generals and troopers who turned out to be less than what they said they were, giving rise to talk radio host Rush Limbaugh's now-infamous "phony soldiers" label.
There's a couple of problems here. First, the airborne soldiers -- a couple of whom have tragically died since the article was published -- were billeted in one of the worst areas of Baghdad while surge operations were taking place outside the city. Of course things were bad where they were. Only in recent weeks have our soldiers and Iraqi troops been concentrating on Shiite areas. The stories of those soldiers were true, but meaningless in the debate over Iraq policy.
Second, the criticisms of Gen. Mark Sanchez, who led the military effort, who called the Iraq operation "a nightmare with no end in sight," are also true. The trouble is, he was the commander from June 2003 to June 2004. That's now a long time ago. His complaints are best left for the history books.
Now, the Washington Post article posted today. It was written by 12 former Army captains and exposes the rampant corruption and crumbling infrastructure they witnessed. They told of how the lack of manpower hinders operations even today.
At the bottom of the article, the names of the authors appear, along with when and where they served. None of them have been in-country this year. Zero. Two of them were in Iraq as recently as last year. This being mid-October, that was a while ago, well before the surge started. Most of them served their tours in 2003 and 2005 -- the second one certainly coming at a time when things weren't so good.
So be vigilant when reading articles from former and current members of the military who criticize the war effort. What they'll tell you is interesting and probably true. But so far, in the media's rush to put some armed forces credibility behind it's anti-war stance, there have been none who can legitimately say that the war is lost based on current conditions.
