Cubadebate

The New Hampshire Gazette which identifies as the oldest newspaper in the United States, has published a "Chickenhawk Database", which is a list of what the country's top public figures from every sphere of the nation's elite were doing during the Vietnam War. Each of the people mentioned was of draft age in the 1960s and 1970s and have all been staunch supporters of the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The paper defines the term "chickenhawk" as "a public person - generally male - who tends to advocate, or is a fervent supporter of those who advocate, military solutions to political problems, and who has personally declined to take advantage of a significant opportunity to serve in uniform during wartime."

Beginning with what the newspaper terms as Chickenhawk HQ, the list is headed by US President George W Bush who went AWOL (Absent Without Leave) from the draft, and Vice President Dick Cheney who, we are informed, "had other priorities" at the time of the Vietnam War. Others who successfully avoided the draft but support sending troops to war are US Attorney General John Ashcroft, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Elliot Abrams who was one of the principal figures to support murderous Latin American dictatorships in the 1980s; John Bolton from the US State Dept who falsely accused Cuba of manufacturing biological weapons and was soundly ridiculed by international experts for doing so; major hawk Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Texas Republican Tom Delay; US Supreme Court right wingers Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas; and rabidly reactionary radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh. The list is long and represents the worst of the hypocrisy of the US economic elite.