‘Next Domino’ Could Fall on Latinos

Some wannabe machos from the Ivy League come up with a domino theory. But kids who just hope to finish East Los Angeles College are the ones who must fight and die on distant battlefields putting that theory to a test.

We have seen it before -- three decades ago in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

But Iraq is not Vietnam. That is why the many Latino activists opposed to the current war in the Persian Gulf must move beyond antiwar rhetoric from the Vietnam era if they are to have an impact on the debate that must take place in this country when the war is over. That is the only way they can help prevent yet another war in pursuit of a Pax Americana pipe dream.

Like their predecessors in the 1970s, antiwar Latinos criticize the war against Iraq as a misguided foreign adventure that distracts from social problems at home, especially the lack of decent education, housing and well-paying jobs in urban barrios and rural colonias. A few cite old casualty statistics from Vietnam, where Mexican Americans were 20% of the war casualties from the five Southwest states.

But though some of their arguments are valid, they seem to have forgotten that the draft is long gone and that every Latino now serving in the military is a volunteer.

In fairness to antiwar Latinos, their counterparts on the political right have not shown much imagination during this war either. Most of their rhetoric is patriotic pap about supporting the troops.

Both sides are sadly predictable.

And their debate will prove futile unless they look beyond their differences and realize that they both want better options for all the Latinos who are now in school but who could someday soon be the soldiers and sailors who must face off against Iran, Syria or North Korea.

That could happen because of a new domino theory that President Bush seems to have been sold by some smart, but delusional, advisors from places like Harvard, Yale and Princeton. During the Vietnam War another group of White House advisors -- one historian called them “the best and the brightest” minds of their day -- were obsessed with keeping countries from falling like so many dominoes to communism. Bush’s deep thinkers would like to make over the Islamic countries of the Middle East, starting with Iraq, into model democracies, one at a time. Based on a study put together in the 1990s by a right-wing think tank, Project for the New American Century, this new domino theory makes no more sense than the original did.

Don’t look for conservative blowhards who signed off on that study and now serve in the Bush administration -- like Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz or Richard Perle of the Pentagon’s Defense Advisory Board -- to lead the charge into Tehran or Damascus.

No, they’ll leave the dangerous work to Marines like Lance Cpl. Jesus Suarez del Solar, late of Escondido. He was one of the Latinos killed in the Gulf. A native of Tijuana, Suarez was so proud of being Mexican that his father declined a government offer to bestow U.S. citizenship on his son posthumously, as was done with other noncitizen Latinos killed in Iraq.

Although his son died a war hero, don’t look for Fernando Suarez to be invited to the White House anytime soon. He has said some things to the news media that make the Bushies uncomfortable, like his suspicion that he lost a son for “Bush’s oil.”

Having watched war coverage mostly on Spanish-language TV, I suspect Suarez’s views are typical of how many Latinos in this country feel.

“I feel both betrayed and proud,” he told one interviewer. “Bush has not demonstrated to me or to thousands of other people that the war is justified.”

Suarez should be proud, because his son’s efforts may help bring down a brutal tyrant. But this grieving father is also right to ask whether an all-out war against Iraq was necessary to accomplish that. It probably wasn’t.

Once the war is over, we must put aside arguments over Iraq (and Vietnam) and focus on what comes next. The ideologues who got us into this war have their agenda. The rest of us must ask hard questions about whether we want to sacrifice more of our sons and daughters to their game plan.