One year ago today.

One year ago today, Sergeant Christopher Gonzalez died when his unit was ambushed near Salmon Pak, Iraq. I attended his funeral a few days later, and blogged on it A hero is buried and what his community still needs.

John Edwards used to speak about 'two Americas.' One is the America of plenty, where people are employed,have health coverage, have food on the table and can take basic services like electricity and running water for granted (though they still may have trouble paying for them.) Sergeant Gonzalez came from the other America.

I'd been visiting Birdsprings chapter regularly until I got a church calling and a time for church this year that overlaps chapter meetings. But I will try and make it to this Sunday's meeting anyway. I understand they have a new flagpole. They dedicated it to Sgt. Gonzalez yesterday.

A hero is buried-- and what his community still needs

Today was a long, hot day.

I went as an invited guest of the Birdsprings chapter (Navajo communities are called chapters) to the funeral of U.S. Army Sergeant Christopher N. Gonzalez, a native of Birdsprings who was killed on May 14 when his unit was attacked near Salman Pak, Iraq.

Sergeant Gonzalez was part of the first battalion of the 15th Infantry regiment of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team.of the 3rd infantry division based at Fort Stewart, Georgia (where he and his wife had bought a home). He was in his second tour of duty in Iraq. He leaves a wife and a young son.

His family asked that the media not report specifically on the funeral (which was planned and arranged by Sgt. Gonzalez himself, pre-planned in the event it occurred) so although as a blogger I am not a member of the media, I will honor that request and not discuss the details of the funeral, except to say that it was clear that Sgt. Gonzalez was very proud to be a member of the United States Army.

I will also say that I've been privileged to be going out to Birdsprings for almost two years. Originally it was to do political work, but as I've been going out there I've discovered a most amazing and wonderful group of people. They are willing to open their doors and their hearts and share what little they have (and believe me, it is little) with even a stranger (though by now I'm not such a stranger anymore.) I’ve always felt very welcome there.

Poverty in Birdsprings is extreme. I've tried to describe it to some people who haven't been there and been accused of exaggerating (I've been told that 'nobody in America lives like that,' by people who have themselves never had to face it.) I've been told there that the unemployment rate there gets as high as 50% (though most who are unemployed are simply classified as 'not in labor force.') But even in 2000 when jobs were plentiful elsehwhere the reported unemployment rate of those who were actively in the labor force was still over 16%-- about the same level as it was nationally during the Depression-- and it's risen since then. And everyone is very poor-- even the people who are fortunate enough to have a job end up sharing their paycheck because they certainly have family members who don't have a job; the per capita income in 2000 was less than $8,000 per person, and almost half the homes lack some or all plumbing (no surprise because of how many don't have running water). Two thirds have no phone. Very few people have health insurance.

There are dozens of homes in Birdsprings (and over 18,000 on the Navajo Nation as a whole) which have never been hooked up to the electric grid. If they were then it might even be possible to drill some wells and provide running water (right now they have to haul water for miles, which is itself very expensive using old, inefficient trucks that get poor mileage-- but that's all most people have, because not very many people on the reservation can afford a new vehicle, or even a relatively new used one.) And yes, some people go to the outhouse in the dark, year round with a flashlight or an oil lamp-- I've met quite a few of them by now. So many of the young people leave the reservation to go to work, and many of them go into the military (like Sergeant Gonzalez); if they didn't, the unemployment rate would be even more horrific than it already is.

To hook the dozens of homes in Birdsprings that need it to the electric grid would cost about $700,000. Then wells could be drilled and pumps operated to provide them with water.

And here is where it went instead: The cost of the Iraq war is now at about $1,150 per person (plus whatever is being allocated in the 'new' Congressional funding sham). There are (census data) 829 people in Birdsprings. That means that Birdsprings chapter's share of the 'investment' (all borrowed, to be paid back later) in Iraq is just under a million dollars (with the new funding bill, it will go over that). Ironically, we’ve spent millions to build electric, water and other infrastructure—in Iraq (in addition of course to the hundreds of billions that have gone to destroy what was built before.)

So if they just had their proportion of the money we've been spending in Iraq, Birdsprings chapter could pay for these basic needs for their own people. But instead they've received, like most communities, no return for their 'investment' in Iraq.

Until now. They've finally gotten a return for their share of the debts run up to finance the war in Iraq. And they buried him today.

New war funding bill is a defeat-- and it shouldn't be taken otherwise.

A loss is a loss, no matter how you spin it.

I've heard a lot of Democrats who support the 'new' war resolution (the funding minus a withdrawal deadline) suggest that this is some sort of a 'win' because it includes a new minimum wage bill without some of the tax cuts that Republicans wanted.

Now, I'm not discounting the importance of raising the minimum wage (especially with gas prices at record highs, and talk of maybe $4 per gallon by the end of the summer). People are hurting out there and we needed a minimum wage hike. However if we were going to give the GOP a win, it would have been much better to do so on the small business tax cuts (since most of the tax cuts in the original Bush tax cut package went to big, not small businesses anyway) in order to get the minimum wage done. But compared to the importance of the war vote, it is at least an order of magnitude less, and no amount of whitewashing will change that fact.

So far, over 3,400 American soldiers have died and $340,000,000,000 plus whatever is in the new spending bill has been poured into an endless rathole with only a civil warn and a fundamentalist Islamic government to show for it.

So last November, voters in America made their opinion of Mr. Bush's war clear. By an overwhelming margin, voters cited Iraq as their number one issue, and among those voters who did cite Iraq, they voted overwhelmingly for Democrats, especially for Democrats who promised to work towards getting us out of Iraq.

Prior to this week, it was plainly Mr. Bush's war. And it was plainly a Republican war-- the GOP Congress and Senate had essentially given the administration a blank check every time he had come to them in regard to the Iraq war.

Even the original Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) to enforce the U.N. sanctions, which Republicans will cite as proof that Democrats were complicit, does not make Democrats so. First off, the final Senate vote was 77-23, and of the 23 who opposed it even when the Bush administration was sitting at 80% plus approval and ratcheting up the rhetoric for war, 21 of them were Democrats (plus one independent and one Republican.) So what opposition there was then, did come from Democrats, and a significant number of Democrats. Second, the text of the resolution authorized the administration to use military force to make Iraq comply with U.N. sanctions. The specific sanction cited at the time was Iraq's refusal to allow back in U.N. weapons inspectors they had kicked out in 1998. But, after that, Iraq did allow the inspectors back in. It was George W. Bush's decision-- and his alone-- to order the inspectors to leave before completing their job and go to war anyway. He can't hide behind the AUMF for that decision, and it is a pity that he hasn't been called on it more often-- if we'd let Hans Blix finish his job, he'd have presumably told us exactly what we discovered after the war-- that Iraq had no WMD's and think how many lives and dollars that would have saved us.

But with the new war funding bill, Republicans can claim that Democrats are complicit. This occurred in a Democratic Congress and was negotiated by Democratic leaders. The two previous bills, tying funding to withdrawal deadlines were reasonable, and the American people in numerous surveys agreed that they were reasonable. So what Congress should have done was send essentially the same bill back to the President, then back again, then back again. Not just twice, but two hundred times, if they had to. They were giving the President the funding that he asked for. Let him explain why he kept vetoing his own funding request.

Some might argue that this just shows that Democrats and Republicans are exactly the same and that neither one will get out of Iraq. But I would disagree with that assessment. Certainly if the voters hand Congress back to the GOP and elect a Republican President, we will stay there. But in this case, it is not even certain that the new bill will get a 'majority of the majority' (which Republicans used to say defined whether they would vote for a plan on the house floor-- saying that not only did a majority of the full house have to support it, but also a majority of the Republicans (who were then the majority party.) I hope that it becomes a case where not only does the house leadership need Republicans to provide a majority of the support to pass it, but that in fact most Democrats themselves vote against it. So the best thing that voters can do next year is to elect more Democrats, especially Democrats who have come out very strongly and specifically against continuing to hand the President a blank check in Iraq. Further a Democratic President becomes an absolute necessity, so we don't get back into this veto battle. And I might add that one reason why I support Bill Richardson is that instead of saying he will keep some troops there as advisors or to just fight al-Qaeda, etc. he has said that he wants to withdraw them all and make a clean break, while relying on dimplomacy to determine the future of Iraq. Most of the other candidates (several of whom voted for the AUMF) have not suggested this-- but I would only add that I believe that half a withdrawl is still not a withdrawl. If half of the troops are withdrawn, it would probably reduce American casualties, but the people who want to kill Americans would still be there and continue to kill Americans. Only a complete and total withdrawl is realistic.

CORRECTION: The post originally discussed the makeup of the Senate in 2002 and described it as a GOP Senate. However, Indy Voter (who this is his third 'catch') corrected me. In 2002, the Senate was split, 50-49-1 for the Democrats (Jeffords was the one independent and caucused with the Democrats.) That makes 8 errors total in 621 posts, so I still have a .987 fielding percentage.