thedrifter
10-17-05, 06:55 AM
Oliver North sees need to rebuild New Orleans
Retired lieutenant colonel to visit Bossier City for book signing.
October 17, 2005
By John Andrew Prime
jprime@gannett.com
Romance and sentiment aside, New Orleans must be rebuilt, says national security specialist and author Oliver North.
The often-controversial retired Marine lieutenant colonel and Reagan-era anti-terrorism planner says that's because New Orleans is a city that has a reason to be. "Twenty-something percent of America's gross domestic product passes through that port," said North, who will visit Bossier City on Tuesday to sign copies of his latest book, "The Assassins."
The port also is crucial to national security, he added during a cell phone call from Delaware. "Military installations all over the planet rely on stuff that comes down that river. If you look up that river, you have the industrial heartland of the country.
"You've got some very important stuff that goes on down there that's got to be put back in shape because the country needs it. Ultimately, that infrastructure has got to be completely renovated, restored and put back into operation."
This will be the San Antonio native's third fall visit to the Ark-La-Tex in four years. He missed 2004 to be in Iraq, reporting on the war there. So far, the Vietnam War combat veteran -- decorated with a Silver Star, Bronze Star for valor and two Purple Hearts -- has been to Iraq six times reporting on the people he likes and respects most, the nation's young fighting men and women.
"I've spent my life around guys in uniform. And I'm blessed to have the job I've got today. All I do is hang around with heroes for a living. And I get to write about them."
That's why returning to this area, home of Barksdale Air Force Base and tens of thousands of military veterans from six decades, appeals to North. He will be at Wal-Mart SuperCenter on Airline Drive from noon to 2 p.m. signing copies of his third Peter Newman novel. His last visits, pushing the first two Newman books, drew hundreds of fans, some of whom stood in line hours for a few seconds with the author.
North remembers some of those folks. Among them is local reader Ronald McGinty, who brought a photograph that shows him and North when both, then young Marines, attended parachute jump school together in the 1960s.
"That was a million years ago, and I do remember," North said. He was glad to hear that McGinty's son Shayne, now a Marine major, acquitted himself well in recent combat in Iraq and has been put up for the Silver Star for heroism in the Battle of Hit a year ago.
North said he knows Hit, a suburb of Fallujah, well. "Been there a bunch of times ... an awful place. That was a big fight."
He mulled a question from the younger McGinty, asking how he compared the ability of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese to blend into civilian populations in South Vietnam to the terrorists in Iraq today. Can they blend in as easily?
Journalists today are enamored by comparisons of Iraq to Vietnam. But North made it clear that he, familiar with both, isn't.
"About the only parallel between the war in Vietnam, in which I was a young lieutenant, and this war is that the bullets still cut and the blood is still red. And that is just about it."
The everyday Iraqi, he said, can ID a terrorist. So can soldiers after learning what to look for. How Iraqis can tell, he said, "and this sounds terribly racist in our culture, (are) skin color, dialect, just the way they look, and the locals do that all the time. It's uncanny."
Iraqis are just as likely to spot a person from another province and call them a foreigner, out of place, North said.
"And the number of (locals) who cooperate with the resistance, whether they be Shia or Sunni, is dropping like a stone. The bad guys are increasingly isolated from the local population."
Part of the reason is that they're killing local people, local children, local leaders. And part of it is they are destroying the things that make life easier and healthier for everyday Iraqis. The momentum is building toward the everyday people of Iraq saying enough is enough.
"The local population is increasingly frustrated," North said. For that reason, the terror in Iraq "is not an insurgency in the classic sense at all. I wouldn't call these guys insurgents, I'd call them anarchists. They have no political agenda.
"The Viet Cong was a foreign-supported insurgency, (but) it was an insurgency. They had very little exterior leadership," he said. "It wasn't like what you've got in Iraq at all. Ho Chi Minh was an insurgent. Fidel Castro was an insurgent. These guys (in Iraq) are NOT insurgents."
North, who was targeted for assassination by the late terrorist Abu Nidal, noted a recently declassified letter from Al-Qaeda leaders to the organization's foreign-born terror leader in Iraq, cautioning the terrorists to develop a political arm. The purpose of terror by a true insurgency is to prevent cooperation with an unpopular government in power and to establish their own political power through fomenting a popular uprising. But the opposite seems to be happening in Iraq, North noted.
"Monday or Tuesday (of last week), there was suicide terrorist who slammed his pickup truck full of explosives into a line of police recruits," North said. "He killed nine, I think it was, and wounded 19. The next day, there were 50 more (recruits) lined up, ready to go."
And something is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan that frightens the rest of the Arab world beyond words, the admission of women as equal partners into political life and decision-making.
"The best antidote for terrorism is a purple finger raised by a Muslim woman," North said, describing the way officials use indelible ink to signify a person already has voted.
The governor of Al-Anbar Province, scene of much terror activity, told him as much in a recent interview. "'The women are going to vote. No woman who is going to carry a child for nine months, goes through the pain of childbirth, nurses that child at her breast, wants that child to grow up to be a suicide terrorist,'" North recalled the governor telling him.
The governor told him the women of Iraq want politicians to give their children something to live, not die, for. North predicted that that desire, that prayer, will make a crucial difference in Iraq that people outside that nation, including most journalists, will fail to see.
"I will predict that this election (Saturday) is going to be profoundly different, and the December election is going to be overwhelming. And the women are going to determine the course of history in Iraq."
Ellie
Retired lieutenant colonel to visit Bossier City for book signing.
October 17, 2005
By John Andrew Prime
jprime@gannett.com
Romance and sentiment aside, New Orleans must be rebuilt, says national security specialist and author Oliver North.
The often-controversial retired Marine lieutenant colonel and Reagan-era anti-terrorism planner says that's because New Orleans is a city that has a reason to be. "Twenty-something percent of America's gross domestic product passes through that port," said North, who will visit Bossier City on Tuesday to sign copies of his latest book, "The Assassins."
The port also is crucial to national security, he added during a cell phone call from Delaware. "Military installations all over the planet rely on stuff that comes down that river. If you look up that river, you have the industrial heartland of the country.
"You've got some very important stuff that goes on down there that's got to be put back in shape because the country needs it. Ultimately, that infrastructure has got to be completely renovated, restored and put back into operation."
This will be the San Antonio native's third fall visit to the Ark-La-Tex in four years. He missed 2004 to be in Iraq, reporting on the war there. So far, the Vietnam War combat veteran -- decorated with a Silver Star, Bronze Star for valor and two Purple Hearts -- has been to Iraq six times reporting on the people he likes and respects most, the nation's young fighting men and women.
"I've spent my life around guys in uniform. And I'm blessed to have the job I've got today. All I do is hang around with heroes for a living. And I get to write about them."
That's why returning to this area, home of Barksdale Air Force Base and tens of thousands of military veterans from six decades, appeals to North. He will be at Wal-Mart SuperCenter on Airline Drive from noon to 2 p.m. signing copies of his third Peter Newman novel. His last visits, pushing the first two Newman books, drew hundreds of fans, some of whom stood in line hours for a few seconds with the author.
North remembers some of those folks. Among them is local reader Ronald McGinty, who brought a photograph that shows him and North when both, then young Marines, attended parachute jump school together in the 1960s.
"That was a million years ago, and I do remember," North said. He was glad to hear that McGinty's son Shayne, now a Marine major, acquitted himself well in recent combat in Iraq and has been put up for the Silver Star for heroism in the Battle of Hit a year ago.
North said he knows Hit, a suburb of Fallujah, well. "Been there a bunch of times ... an awful place. That was a big fight."
He mulled a question from the younger McGinty, asking how he compared the ability of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese to blend into civilian populations in South Vietnam to the terrorists in Iraq today. Can they blend in as easily?
Journalists today are enamored by comparisons of Iraq to Vietnam. But North made it clear that he, familiar with both, isn't.
"About the only parallel between the war in Vietnam, in which I was a young lieutenant, and this war is that the bullets still cut and the blood is still red. And that is just about it."
The everyday Iraqi, he said, can ID a terrorist. So can soldiers after learning what to look for. How Iraqis can tell, he said, "and this sounds terribly racist in our culture, (are) skin color, dialect, just the way they look, and the locals do that all the time. It's uncanny."
Iraqis are just as likely to spot a person from another province and call them a foreigner, out of place, North said.
"And the number of (locals) who cooperate with the resistance, whether they be Shia or Sunni, is dropping like a stone. The bad guys are increasingly isolated from the local population."
Part of the reason is that they're killing local people, local children, local leaders. And part of it is they are destroying the things that make life easier and healthier for everyday Iraqis. The momentum is building toward the everyday people of Iraq saying enough is enough.
"The local population is increasingly frustrated," North said. For that reason, the terror in Iraq "is not an insurgency in the classic sense at all. I wouldn't call these guys insurgents, I'd call them anarchists. They have no political agenda.
"The Viet Cong was a foreign-supported insurgency, (but) it was an insurgency. They had very little exterior leadership," he said. "It wasn't like what you've got in Iraq at all. Ho Chi Minh was an insurgent. Fidel Castro was an insurgent. These guys (in Iraq) are NOT insurgents."
North, who was targeted for assassination by the late terrorist Abu Nidal, noted a recently declassified letter from Al-Qaeda leaders to the organization's foreign-born terror leader in Iraq, cautioning the terrorists to develop a political arm. The purpose of terror by a true insurgency is to prevent cooperation with an unpopular government in power and to establish their own political power through fomenting a popular uprising. But the opposite seems to be happening in Iraq, North noted.
"Monday or Tuesday (of last week), there was suicide terrorist who slammed his pickup truck full of explosives into a line of police recruits," North said. "He killed nine, I think it was, and wounded 19. The next day, there were 50 more (recruits) lined up, ready to go."
And something is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan that frightens the rest of the Arab world beyond words, the admission of women as equal partners into political life and decision-making.
"The best antidote for terrorism is a purple finger raised by a Muslim woman," North said, describing the way officials use indelible ink to signify a person already has voted.
The governor of Al-Anbar Province, scene of much terror activity, told him as much in a recent interview. "'The women are going to vote. No woman who is going to carry a child for nine months, goes through the pain of childbirth, nurses that child at her breast, wants that child to grow up to be a suicide terrorist,'" North recalled the governor telling him.
The governor told him the women of Iraq want politicians to give their children something to live, not die, for. North predicted that that desire, that prayer, will make a crucial difference in Iraq that people outside that nation, including most journalists, will fail to see.
"I will predict that this election (Saturday) is going to be profoundly different, and the December election is going to be overwhelming. And the women are going to determine the course of history in Iraq."
Ellie