An excellent column this morning from Chicago Tribune columnist Carol Marin. Registration is requried to read the Trib on-line, so I provide it here in it's entirety. Mr. President, Ms. Marin would like to introduce you to Gabrielle Onyema, of Chicago, Illinois. Listen to her, please. You could actually learn something from this 8-year old wonder.
Getting Us Out of Bush's Adventure - War Through the Eyes of a Child
by Carol Marin
April 21, 2004
At the same time Bob Woodward was appearing with Mike Wallace Sunday night on CBS' "60 Minutes" to talk about "Plan of Attack," his bombshell of a new book on President Bush and the Iraq war, I was on Chicago-bound Southwest Airlines flight 1019. Armed with a stack of newspapers and notes, I pulled out my laptop to begin to write this week's column.
My seatmate was hard at work herself.
Dressed in a blue cable knit sweater, her hair pulled back in a prim braided bun, Gabrielle Onyema was staring into the screen of her GameBoy, fiercely negotiating a Pokemon game.
This was the last place I expected to have a conversation about the war. And the least likely person I thought I'd be having it with. It was a reminder, once again, of how little I know.
Gabby, as she is called, is 8 years old and in the 2nd grade at Beulah Shoesmith Elementary School on East 50th Street in Hyde Park/Kenwood. She was traveling home after visiting her father, who lives in the Boston area. He had put her on the plane. Her mother would be waiting for her when we landed at Midway International Airport.
I figured our flight would be a quiet affair, Gabby absorbed in her game and I in my writing.
"Let's have a race," she suggested, "I'll see if I can finish my game before you finish your column.
I bet you'll win!"
I bet I won't.
I was trying to write about the worsening war with Iraq, about the public hearings of the commission investigating the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and about the continuing revelations that contradict Bush administration claims of what officials knew and when they knew it. It wasn't coming easily.
As I started to type, Gabby leaned over and confided that she too is a writer. Not to mention one of the winners of a citywide essay contest. On April 30 she'll pick up an award at the Field Museum for her essay about a young girl who ran away from slavery.
"I wrote it really quickly!" she said.
I was envious. And stuck. And so I turned to my small and talkative seatmate and asked if she knew about the war in Iraq. She did. "If you were going to write about that," I asked, "what would you say?"
Quite a lot, it turns out. I began taking notes.
"We need to talk about plans," Gabby said, "how to stop getting American men killed and how to get fewer Iraqi people dead. We could make peace. We're all God's children, we're killing our brothers and sisters, that's not right."
Why, I asked, do you think we got into this war?
"People just need too much ... too much stuff ... too many cars that make smoke."
Was she talking about oil?
"Uh-huh."
Funny, isn't it? Bob Woodward, the famed Washington Post journalist, at just about the same time was talking about oil too. It was one of a number of explosive revelations he was offering up that evening in his appearance on "60 Minutes." Woodward told Mike Wallace that Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar, promised President Bush that before the November presidential election in the U.S., Saudi Arabia would increase oil production so that the skyrocketing price of oil in the U.S. would drop significantly.
"That's the Saudi pledge," said Woodward.
The White House is denying that there is a secret deal with the Saudis over oil. Secretary of State Colin Powell is denying another Woodward assertion that Prince Bandar knew of the Bush decision to go to war in Iraq before Powell did. And the war, according to Woodward, was secretly planned and funded long before Congress and the American public were told. The White House denies that too.
Who's telling the truth?
Well, let's review a few "truths" of the past, the ones President Bush used to take us into this terrible war we are not winning. There were the weapons of mass destruction that used to exist but don't anymore. There was Vice President Dick Cheney's assertions of Iraq's links to Al Qaeda that were never true. There was the evidence presented to the United Nations by Powell that turned out to be no evidence at all.
We got into this war to stop the terrorism that brought us the massacre of Sept. 11. Now thanks to the commission, we learn that there were many more warnings of Al Qaeda attacks than we had been told. And the only reason we know it at all is because the commission forced it out of a reluctant White House, which admits to no mistakes.
Saddam Hussein is a bad man and the bogyman of this administration. But this is a bad war in a country we now in good conscience cannot leave.
And even people who continue to like George Bush and give him high approval ratings know it. That includes one thoughtful and articulate 8 year old from the South Side of Chicago.
"I don't think he's trying to be mean," said Gabby. "He's trying to do his best, be a good president for the country. But everybody makes mistakes, you just have to learn from them. Even the president of the United States."