Usually, hearings on Capitol Hill are decorous and, not infrequently, boring. Not this one before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Everyone in the room tensed as Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., glared at Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "Mr. Secretary," he said, "this war has been seriously and grossly mismanaged." He called it a "quagmire." He said, "Our troops are dying, and there is no end in sight." ...

"Isn't it time for you to resign?" Kennedy asked.

The furious defense secretary willed himself not to explode. He had offered his resignation to President Bush, who refused to accept it, Rumsfeld said levelly. ...

When Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, got the microphone, he praised the troops serving in Iraq, but said he is "very worried" that the United States is "overstressing our Guard and reservists," some of whom are going back to Iraq for a second and third time. He said he worries about recruiting shortfalls and retention. He said there are ongoing firefights over areas in Iraq that were already fought for and cleared as foreign insurgents pour across the borders into Iraq.

McCain, who thinks withdrawal would be disastrous for Iraq and the United States, also said he is frustrated with the Bush administration's reluctance to tell the American people basic details about Iraq, such as what percentage of the 170,000 Iraqis trained to fight are actually combat-ready.

Rumsfeld said that was classified. ...

At one point, Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., said he couldn't take it any more. He said Americans have a right to know what's happening in Iraq because they're paying for the war with the lives of their young men and women and billions of tax dollars.

Looking at Rumsfeld, Byrd accused him of sneering. "I don't mean to be discourteous, but I've heard enough of your smart answers. Get off your high horse when you come up here. I have to run for re-election and you don't. We represent the American people and they are asking questions. They haven't been told the truth. The administration says we're unpatriotic if we ask questions, but that's our job." ...

Bush is about to give a series of speeches about the war. They had better be persuasive. They had better have some hard and new facts. They had better be built on the premise that the only way the United States can lose this war is if the American people demand withdrawal, which is no longer inconceivable. Six out of 10 Americans say the dream of democratizing Iraq has become a nightmare.

Rumsfeld has nothing to sneer about.

 Letters to the Editor

     The Herald finds itself on the same side as Sen. Edward Kennedy, a rarity to say the least.

      We believe burning the American flag is a disgusting act. But it is not the flag which is in need of protection, it's the Constitution.

Letters to the Editor

President George W. Bush responded by taking the war to the sponsors of terrorism and attacking the conditions in which terrorism flourishes.

It was a bold strategy, which is the appropriate response to a bold attack. The attacks of Sept 11, 2001 were part of a war declared a long time ago. ...

Americans will either stay with it -- standing with responsible moderates all over the world in offering people a better alternative than Islamic fundamentalism -- or condemn their children and grandchildren to dealing with worse threats in the future. ...

This war must be won. Simply staying home when the going gets tough would not solve the world's problem. It would only make it more more expensive to face up to later on.

 Letters to the Editor

Flag-burning in the public square is offensive and most often used in support of unpopular causes. But popular speech doesn't need protection; the unpopular views of the minority do, and for that we have the First Amendment.

The Senate will take up the proposed flag-burning amendment, probably later this summer, and the early vote counts suggest it will fall two votes short of the 67 needed for passage.

Since 1789, the Constitution has been amended only 27 times. It would be a desecration of that hallowed document if the 28th Amendment weakened the First.

Letters to the Editor

Indeed, recent news reports indicate that the heroin that is reaching America from Afghanistan is so pure that it can be snorted rather than injected. ...

"As recently as last year, only 8 percent of heroin from Afghanistan reached the United States," Kirk told the Tribune. "Last year's crop was the largest in human history, all of it coming out of one country and flooding this country."

Thus is America "rewarded" for delivering Afghanistan from the clutches of the Taliban. ...

While U.S. forces in Afghanistan may understandably be more preoccupied with the prospect of a renewed Taliban insurgency than the resurgence of the international heroin trade, it is simply an unacceptable tradeoff that one of the "fruits" of victory in Afghanistan must be a flood of cheap, pure, addictive heroin into America's streets and neighborhoods.

Neither may the war on drugs be considered separately from that on terrorism itself, because the profits of the heroin trade are just as likely to support terrorist organizations as drug barons.

Cutting the new heroin pipeline from Afghanistan to the United States cannot take a back seat to mopping up the remnants of the Taliban. The objectives must be considered one and the same.

 Letters to the Editor

While not quite as audacious as President Bush's grotesquely premature "mission accomplished" speech two years ago, Cheney's observation is clearly intended to give war-weary Americans hope that there is indeed a light at the end of the Iraqi tunnel.

The problem is that American troops are being wounded, maimed and killed nearly every day in Iraq, with casualties passing the 1,700 mark and likely to reach 2,000 before year's end. ...

The Bush administration is learning one of history's most indelible lessons; that while the mightiest army in the world may be able to quickly and easily conquer an inferior enemy, a prolonged and debilitating occupation must inevitably eat away at the conqueror's will and ability to persevere.

This newspaper opposed the war from its very inception, and nothing that has happened since has served to demonstrate to us the wisdom of President Bush's determination to invade and occupy a hostile country in a hostile region half a world away.

Is it time to "cut and run?" Perhaps not. But it is certainly time for the Bush administration to stop misleading Americans with overly optimistic assessments of the "progress" being made in Iraq.

It is time for the president to be honest with the American people about the true costs and consequences of his Iraqi adventure.

And, yes, Americans deserve to know how much longer they can expect to see their sons and daughters putting their lives at risk on the arid deserts and in the dangerous urban streets of this "conquered" country. ...

Like President Bush's reasons for going to war in the first place, Cheney's depiction of a floundering insurgency are simply not to be believed.

Neither do we believe that Americans are prepared to see our troops remain bogged down in a bloody, hopeless occupation for another year, two years or five years.

It's time for an exit strategy before this brutal, bloody occupation tears apart this nation like nothing since Vietnam.

Letters to the Editor

My dictionary says that to desecrate is to "make unholy" or "take away the sacredness of." Therefore, this amendment is an attempt to make the flag a holy or sacred object. I strongly object to this attempt to make people worship the flag. Although I respect the ideals the flag represents, I will not worship it. That amounts to idolatry.

It is truly sad that our Congress is engaging in this exercise in flag-waving, which amounts to a fundamental assault on our freedom of religion, while there are so many real issues facing this country.

Andrew J. Vancil,
Fort Collins

Letters to the Editor

There is no elegant or gentle way to say it: The vast majority of the population of Latin America detests George W. Bush. Polls repeatedly have shown astronomical levels of rejection for the administration and its policies, with negative numbers that are exceeded only in the Muslim countries.

It is a fallacy to attribute this to a reflexive anti-Americanism. Latin American attitudes regarding American presidents have ranged from affection (Kennedy) to open dislike (Nixon), and opinions have varied depending on country, ideology and social class. Yet no American president in living memory has evoked such intense and broad public antagonism as the current one.  ...

The OAS is a good example of this new reality. Latin American rejection of the administration's latest proposal, a Declaration of Florida presented at the June OAS meeting, came as no surprise. It might seem paradoxical that Latin America in the post-dictatorship era would reject a plan sold as a democracy-promotion measure. But Latin Americans interpreted the U.S. proposal as an attempt to use the OAS as a tool for U.S. meddling in Venezuela and other countries of the region. The setback is only one of a recent series of defeats for the United States at the OAS. ...

Hawks in the United States like to play up the role of Washington's avowed adversaries, Cuba's Fidel Castro and Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, in the region's turn to the left. In fact, how the Bush administration has behaved toward its friends is more important in how Latin Americans see this country than anything that Castro or Chávez do or say.

For years, Argentina faithfully followed the United States to the point that an Argentinean official once remarked relations between the two countries were so close they were "carnal." But, when Argentina faced an economic meltdown and needed help, Washington left it to fend for itself and unravel.

More recently, Mexico's Vicente Fox tried hard to be Bush's one true-blue amigo among the big players in the region. The Mexican president even embarrassed himself in the eyes of his people when he was caught on tape trying to plead with, manipulate and flatter Fidel Castro into leaving early from an international meeting in Mexico just to avoid annoying George W. Bush. What Vicente Fox wanted from Washington in return was just one thing: a more liberal immigration policy. What he got, the Real ID law targeting immigrants and more massive deportations, was worse than nothing. While Bush has made some righteous noises about immigration, the president has been unwilling to spend any political capital on the issue. Meanwhile, in Mexico, Fox's popularity has sunk, in part as the result of his failure to deliver on immigration.

These lessons are not lost on Latin Americans. The time is past when the region moved in lockstep with the United States and the OAS was a U.S. rubber stamp. In Fort Lauderdale last month, the Latin Americans made all the right noises about democracy and good relations, but they declared their independence by refusing to do the bidding of the United States. For the truth is that today, politically and ideologically, George W. Bush's America and the nations south of the border are very far apart.

Max Castro, Ph.D, is the co-author of This Land

Is Our Land: Immigrants and Power in Miami. Letters to the Editor