WINNERS
Barack Obama
New Mexicans seem to be buying Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama’s argument that the US should be focusing on Afghanistan rather than Iraq. According to Rasmussen’s July 25 polling numbers, 47 percent of 700 New Mexican voters believe Afghanistan is the central front of the war on terror and 49 percent believe Afghanistan is the greater threat to national security. Compare that to the 58 percent who think Iraq is not the frontline and you begin to understand why Obama is leading his Republican challenger, John McCain, by five points in the state.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Helen Prejean is best known as the mother of the modern anti-death-penalty movement, even though she’s actually a sister of the cloth-and-cross variety. Now, the author of Dead Man Walking is tackling nuclear proliferation. She will be speaking in Santa Fe on Aug. 1 and in Los Alamos on Aug. 2 to commemorate the 1945 A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sister Helen will call for the end of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s nuclear program. For more information, contact Bud: 505-264-2838.
Kurds
While politicos debate what to do about the Sunni-Shiite quagmire (lately it seems less about policy and more about admitting or denying the success of The Surge), a New Mexico psychotherapist is leading a mission to northern Iraq. Dr. Kathleen O’Malley of Albuquerque will lead the five-member Christian Peacemaker Team to take testimony from the Kurds, who are Iraq’s oft-ignored third ethnic group (except when justifying the invasion with Saddam Hussein’s 1988 poison gas attack that killed 30,000 Kurds). The mission will focus largely on the human-rights implications of the ongoing conflict over the Iraq-Turkey border.
LOSERS
KBR
A federal appeals judge in Texas gave Silver City trucker Edward Sanchez some uplifting advice last week: His legal team should begin preparing to go to trial in September 2009 in their lawsuit against Halliburton spin-off KBR. Sanchez is one of several truckers suing KBR for allegedly intentionally sending them into an insurgent ambush in Iraq in 2005 [Outtakes, Feb. 6: “Line of Fire”]. OK, so it’s disappointing that the case is taking nearly half a decade to litigate, but considering it was initially thrown out in 2006, any inch of progress is a major victory.
Improvised explosive devices
American motorways are still more dangerous to troops than the IED-mined roads of Iraq, at least to the Army National Guard. The Guard’s Safety Office reports that, nationally, 65 percent of its annual fatalities come from accidents involving privately owned vehicles. Since 2003, the New Mexico Guard has lost more soldiers to these accidents than all other causes combined. To help bring down the statistic, Santa Fe Harley-Davidson is offering free motorcycle safety courses to guardsmen and their families, since motorcycle crashes have hit the highest levels since 1981. For more information, call Sgt. James Lombard: 505-474-1580.
Taxpayers
In the next fiscal year, New Mexico taxpayers can expect to pay $41.1 million for proposed ballistic missiles and $53.7 million for nuclear weapons. According to the National Priorities Project’s Cost of War Calculator, that’s the equivalent of health care coverage for 25,000 people, or 6 percent of the state’s uninsured population. If the US hadn’t invaded Iraq, New Mexican taxpayers would have saved $2 billion, enough to cover 133 percent of the state’s uninsured.