The jailed life - Paris is the poster girl for DUI

For those who say that jail doesn't work as a deterrent, I give you Miss Paris Hilton.

If, by some chance, you were in one of the five or six places in the world where you don’t get up-to-the-second news on Paris’ comings and goings, she was arrested for DUI last September; driving erratically without headlights in a Mercedes McLaren that cost half a million dollars (the same car, incidentally, that showed the world Britney Spears’ c-section scar). She pleaded no contest to a “wet and reckless” - that’s DUI for most of us, but people who can afford $500,000 cars can also afford good lawyers — and was sentenced to 36 months probation. Just stay out of trouble for three years and it will be like it never happened.

What nobody realized back then was that 36 months is a lifetime to a Hollywood socialite. In fact, three years before, hardly anybody had even heard of Paris Hilton — then came Rick Solomon, the sex tape and the “Simple Life” in Arkansas. The rest is history.

It took six whole months, but Paris was in trouble again in March. Somehow, the police noticed her again, speeding in her $250,000 Bentley convertible with no headlights. And she had forgotten to take the court-appointed alcohol education class (like anyone needs to be educated about alcohol — pour, swallow, repeat), so her license was suspended. She said she asked her publicist if it was OK to drive and he said “yes.” In spite of that, she was still arrested and charged with driving with a suspended license, speeding without headlights on, and not taking the alcohol class.

She was humiliated. Her publicist was fired.

She spent the next month acting like everything was fine. She partied with her boyfriend in L.A. She was on stage with Prince in Las Vegas. She shopped. She ate pinkberry. She basically did what Hollywood socialites do, oblivious to what was coming. So imagine her surprise when, at her sentencing hearing in May, she got 45 days of actual jail time. Ouch! That’s half the summer (so not “hot”). Her mother said, “I can’t believe all the money we spent on this.” Mom’s been around long enough to know that, unlike Martha Stewart (who can cook), Paris has nothing to offer the women who will be calling the shots in the yard. And they made it known that they were eagerly expecting her arrival: Paris got death threats on her Myspace page, and one inmate even threatened to steal her shoes and beat her up if she complained.

She was terrified. Her lawyer was fired.

Her new lawyer, working with her re-hired publicist, convinced Paris that her only chance to avoid spending all 45 days in general population as the personal property of a biker chick serving 10 to 25 was to get off on good behavior. Paris has been trying her best to become a saint ever since. It seems that in order to avoid any unnecessary jail time, Paris will do anything: She’ll ride a bike, she’ll walk the dogs, she’ll stay home at night, she’ll go to church, she’ll even be nice to Shana Moakler (OK, that may be a little too much). Anything to keep from spending too much time in a place where people hate her for her money, her beauty, her fame and her lifestyle - and can actually hurt her. Maybe that’s why she’s been in the gym working out every day.

Ironically, Michelle Rodriguez was arrested for a probation violation from a DUI last year. And her sentence was 60 days. Michelle turned herself in on a Thursday morning and the L.A. Sheriff ’s Department let her out in time to get drinks at the bar at the Roosevelt Hotel later that night. And nobody noticed. The only reason Paris is actually going to serve her time is because she’s so unfathomably rich and so mind-blowingly famous. Soon, there will be a 24-hour press camp outside the Century Regional Detention Center and because the world will be watching, the L.A. Sheriff ’s Department will have to make an example of her. Young girls all over America watch her every move and Paris’ punishment will show them what happens when you drink and drive.

Miss Paris Hilton’s jail sentence and her public anguish before she serves it will be a deterrent for an entire generation of drunk American girls who might have tried to drive themselves home if they weren’t petrified of some prisoner punching them in the face for their Pumas.

If anybody deserves break it's our boys - The Iraqi government's summer vacation

One of the three high schools I attended had a policy called “credit reduction.” Two unexcused absences from any class meant you lost a credit-and-a-half for that class. If you got your credit reduced in two classes, then you didn’t have enough to matriculate from one grade to the next and you had to make it up in summer school. The lesson was clear: If you don’t show up, you don’t get a vacation.

The Iraqi Council of Representatives is like our Congress. It was formed about a year ago and is made up of 275 members who pass laws, elect ministers and basically run the government. The Iraq Index is a compilation of on-the-ground statistics measuring life in Iraq. In the absence of a voting public, it’s basically the ICR’s report card. And according to the Index, it doesn’t look good. Of their eight political benchmarks, they have made, literally, no progress on four of them — passing new election laws, scheduling provincial elections, planning national reconciliation and disbanding militias.

Their record on the remaining four benchmarks is also spotty. On the issue of amending the constitution to include the Sunnis, the Shiite-led government missed their September 2006 deadline, breaking U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad’s (and President Bush’s) October 2005 promise to the Sunnis that they would be included later if they participated in elections that December. On the issue of reversing de-Baathification, the prime minister sent Parliament’s de-Baathifiaction Committee a draft law in March, but as of April, the head of the committee hadn’t received it. On oil revenue sharing, the Cabinet passed a law, but Parliament hasn’t voted on it yet. The one bright spot is that a group of Sunni sheiks opposed to al-Qaida will form a political party and take part in future elections.

It’s safe to say the Iraqi government is not the model of democracy the Bush administration had hoped it would be. And having failed to make any kind of meaningful progress on any of their benchmarks (and no progress at all on half of them), the ICR cannot get full credit.Yet, it is planning to take off on vacation for all of July and August.

While some Democrats in Congress are looking at a June deadline, there is now bipartisan agreement that tangible results from the “surge” tactic should certainly be evident by September. And with General David Patraeus and Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker set to testify before Congress in September, the president apparently agrees.

But to the ICR, meeting benchmarks by June or September doesn’t seem to matter. They seem to be saying that they’ll get to them by June or they’ll get to them in September. If that’s going to be their attitude, fine, so will we. As long as the ICR is on vacation, so are the U.S. Marines, the U.S. Army and the U.S. Treasury. No patrols, no troops, no guns, no equipment and no money until the ICR comes back to work. In a word: Consequences. That will be progress in and of itself.

We can use the time to practice our eventual, inevitable withdrawal and we can give some of our troops a bit of well-needed R&R at the same time. Then, in September, we’ll make the return of our troops, equipment and money contingent on the Iraqi government meeting their now world-famous benchmarks. We effectively change the deal from “if you don’t start to make progress, we have to think about leaving” to “if you don’t continue to make progress, we won’t be staying".

I realize that Asia is a continent more of tribes than nations, and that Western Asia (also known as the Middle East) is no different. But the fact remains that these two main tribes — the Sunni and the Shia — live within the borders of the nation of Iraq. It is long past time for the leaders of these tribes, in Iraq and elsewhere, to make some concessions to each other so their people in Iraq might have a future.

I say lock the Iraqi Council of Representatives in the Parliament building and tell them the clock is ticking and they’re not getting out until they’ve made a deal. If they get a deal done in time, we’ll still be there to let them out. If they don’t, when they break the doors open we’ll be gone, and they’ll be face-to-face with what they’ve brought on themselves: A civil war between Sunni and Shia which has been brewing for 1,350 years and in which they must all immediately pick a side — and fight to the death for it.

Who's in control of this crazy thing - The lunacy of a "war czar"

"Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country."

President George W. Bush spoke those words under a banner reading "Mission Accomplished" on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003. The key words in that statement are "securing" and "reconstructing" — because those two objectives fall into two very different departments. The "securing" was to be done by Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department and the "reconstructing" was the job of Colin Powell's State Department. The assumption was the two departments, and the two men, would find a way to work together. But because Rumsfeld wanted total control of Iraq (at one point he said to the President that he would be 100 percent accountable if he had 100 percent responsibility), that's not how it played out.

In Powell's defense, there was nothing more he could have done. He's a soldier and he's spent most of his adult life developing a respect for the chain of command. As such, he took his orders from the Commander in Chief. So even though he is the author of the "Powell Doctrine of Overwhelming Force," he went along with a paltry invasion force of only about 120,000 soldiers — with no increase in troop levels for the reconstruction phase. As a diplomat, he waited until after the general election in December of 2005 so he could claim that the Iraqis had elected a government. But Iraq was still the exclusive domain of Rumsfeld's Pentagon.

Enter National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice who, when offered Powell's old job told the President, "I think maybe you need new people." She was correct. But, as with most "loyal Bushies," she did what the President wanted her to do, not what she thought was right. She took the job, knowing that the State Department had been marginalized to the point where the President told Saudi Prince Bandar about plans to invade Iraq before he told Colin Powell. Her most valuable quality was that she already knew her place in the administration's pecking order when it came to Iraq policy: First the President, then the Vice President (very much a hawk), then the Secretary of Defense (very much a war monger), then her. In the past, she had tried to talk to Secretary Rumsfeld about war planning or troop deployments and was told that the chain of command did not include the National Security Advisor. Needless to say, she was inconsequential in Rumsfeld's universe and she knew once Cheney and Rumsfeld were in agreement on something, the President always goes along.

So when I read that current National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley was looking to create and fill the position of "war czar" (an administrator to oversee military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan), I was blown away. The official plan is to create a position with "tasking authority" (the ability to give orders) and "clearly assigned responsibility, deadlines, performance metrics (as appropriate), and a system of accountability to ensure progress." Is the President finally fed up with the pace of progress in Iraq and looking to create a Cabinet-level position to get it jump-started? No. Did the President decide that the stagnation of the Iraqi government was unacceptable and that a new face on the ground in Iraq is needed to motivate them? No. So what happened?

Apparently, deputy National Security Advisor Meghan O'Sullivan (who reports to Hadley), the highest-ranking White House official whose full-time job revolves around operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, is resigning. So a low-level White House staffer is quitting and because of that, I'm supposed to believe the administration has come up with a plan to finally get the departments of Defense and State on the same page after four years? I was born at night, but it wasn't last night.

Someone should tell Hadley that the job of overseeing and managing the deployment of the United States military already exists: He’s called the Commander in Chief. And the job of refereeing disputes between cabinet secretaries and their departments already exists: He’s called the President. And that job is already filled. I completely understand his desire to distance himself from his own failed Iraq policy, but as our first "CEO President," it's time for George W. Bush to take responsibility for America's falling "stock price". As one person who had been offered the job, retired four-star General John Sheehan said, "The very fundamental issue is, they don't know where the hell they're going." Not only do they now know where they're going, this idea of creating a "war czar" shows that they don't even know who's driving.