Gulf War I

It's time for the thirty-year-old thread of cartoons at this here blog to go to war with Iraq.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Wis., January 14, 1991

President George H.W. Bush gave Iraqi President Saddam Hussein an ultimatum: withdraw from Kuwait by January 15, or the international coalition Bush had been painstakingly assembling since Iraq annexed the emirate in August would attack. Hussein called Bush's bluff.

in UW-M Post, January 22, 1991

And it was no bluff.

There was no "Khattam Shud military base," by the way. Khattam Shud is the villain in Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which I had recently read. It also translates as "completely finished."

in UW-M Post, January 29, 1991

Not that we could know in January that the war would be over in a matter of weeks. As Hussein and his commanders pulled their army back from the front to defend the capital (and seemed more committed to shelling Israel than hindering U.S. military advances), coalition forces prepared for a possible siege of Baghdad, urban warfare, and the prospect of heavy civilian casualties.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha, Wis., January 31, 1991

The retreating Iraqi army burned oilfields in their wake, to the alarm of environmentalists the world over. 

"Don't Look Now" was a follow-up to "Before, During and After," even though my parents may have been the only people to see both cartoons at the time.

in UW-M Post, January 31, 1991

I liked this cartoon so much I drew it twice, once for the Parkside Ranger and a week later for the UW-M Post. The second cartoon is a slight improvement over the first, in which there was only one cot; the Bushes in the later cartoon are also doing more than just standing around in their cell.

'Twas the Noughts Before Christmas

December, 1980

In honor of Monday's Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, Spaceback Saturday opens today with a cartoon I drew 40 years ago this month to mark Voyager 1 having passed beyond Saturn. The probe sent back our first pictures of the dark side of the planet on its way out of of our solar system.

And we did indeed come again; Voyager 2 made a more extensive visit the following August, and the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft reached Saturn in 2004

in Manitou Messenger, St. Olaf College, MN, Dec. 5, 1980

My Saturn cartoon was just something I drew in my sketchbook and never published. This was the only cartoon I drew for publication in December; it featured Utah's brand new Senator-elect Orrin Hatch, of whom I didn't have a wealth of photos to draw from. Republicans won a majority in the Senate that year, but not in the House, so Hatch's proposal for a less-than-minimum wage didn't get very far.

It didn't go very far away, either. Republicans have kept hauling the idea out of storage again and again ever since.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, WI, Dec. 6, 1990

Jumping ahead ten years, we find leaders of the U.S. and Iraq heading inexorably toward Gulf War I. 

in UWM Post, Milwaukee, WI, December 13, 1990

Back in September, I posted a poster I had drawn for the UWM Post for which I had left the colorization to someone else — with dubious results. Here's a cover drawing I made for their Winter Sports issue three months later, for which I took care of the colorization myself. 

Having only two colors to work with, black and blue, simplified matters a bit; but unlike today, I didn't have a graphics program and computer to work with. The specific shades of black and blue were accomplished with halftone sheets, very thin plastic with a dot pattern on one side and adhesive on the other. Placing the larger pieces onto the drawing without any folds or wrinkles was one of the more challenging aspects of this drawing.

An advantage of this process over the easier Duoshade is that the originals created with their chemical process discolor over time. I still have the original drawing with the black halftone sheets on it (but not the separate blue overlay), and it hasn't discolored at all. 

I suppose if its artist portfolio were more heavily trafficked, the halftone plastic could have torn or come loose — and who knows what might have happened if I had hung this on a wall and exposed it to light for 30 years.

Okay, let's jump ahead another decade.

Q Syndicate, December, 2000

Setting aside some of the more dominant issues of December, 2000, we have this: the management of the Gospel Rescue Mission in Tucson issued an apology to their Republican Congressman for turning away his help at their homeless shelter over the Thanksgiving holiday.

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) - Rep. Jim Kolbe was asked not to volunteer at a Tucson homeless shelter's Thanksgiving dinner because he's a homosexual.

"This decision is based on your publicly announced sexual orientation that is diametrically opposite to admonitions in the Bible,'' Gospel Rescue Mission board member Evelyn H. Haugh wrote in a faxed memo. ``This mission is founded on biblical principles, and we cannot give a public forum to a public official who is blatantly flaunting those principles."

Kolbe, the only openly homosexual Republican congressman, downplayed the snub but said biblical teaching "tells us that no people should be made to feel smaller than others.''

"It would undermine the very essence of Thanksgiving if the good works of the Gospel Rescue Mission and others were eclipsed in controversy,'' Kolbe said. ``The mission has provided noble service to (the) community and I wish it only the best in its efforts to feed and clothe the downtrodden.''

Kolbe, a seven-term congressman who acknowledged his sexual orientation in 1996, helped serve meals at the shelter's Thanksgiving dinner last year.

Skip Woodward, board vice president, said Kolbe had been allowed to serve because "he just showed up and took us by surprise.''

"Kolbe's very public stand on homosexuality is inconsistent with our beliefs,'' Woodward said. ``We wouldn't want anyone who advocated adultery to serve either.''

Arizona Gov. Jane Hull expressed disappointment at the mission's revoked invitation to Kolbe, saying "hunger sees no sexual preference.''

in Milwaukee Business Journal, Dec. 14, 2000

The other day, NPR had a story about the death of the shopping mall. I don't remember the editorial I drew this cartoon to accompany, but apparently it had something to do with one shopping mall being pretty much like every other.

Which was pretty much the point, wasn't it? You could go shopping secure in the knowledge that there would be a Nordstroms, an Orange Julius, a WaldenBooks, a J. Crew, a Kay Jeweler, and a Sam Goody in whatever mall you went to, in whatever town you lived in. All in the comfort of the great indoors! What could possibly be more convenient?

Alas, the only constant is change. Adapt or die. Evolution is inevitable.

Q Syndicate, December, 2010

Which brings us to a cartoon from the waning days of 2010. Say, I hear this fellow has been back in the news again lately.

Slouching Toward Fallujah

in UWM Post (Milwaukee, Wis.), Nov. 13, 1990

One of the currents running through these Somewhatback Saturday posts of mine has been 30-year-old cartoons of mine. That current is now hitting the warm-up to Gulf War I, which I've covered in a number of other posts already, including just four years ago. Which seems a long time ago, I know. Well, I will probably want to mark the 50th anniversary of Nixon's resignation if I'm still around four years from now, in spite of reminiscing about it here last week. I guess four years is long enough.

in UW-Parkside Ranger (Kenosha, Wis.), Nov. 15, 1990

So here we go again. In case you haven't gotten to 1990's history in whatever education system has been cobbled together in your area, the war came about in response to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's invasion and annexation of the emirate of Kuwait in August, 1990. U.S. President George H.W. Bush spent the rest of the year cobbling together a coalition of nations in support of diplomatic and military action against Iraq to restore Kuwaiti sovereignty.

in UWM Post, Nov. 15, 1990

Diplomatic pressure on Iraq yielded only defiance from Hussein.

in Journal Times, Racine, Wis., Nov. 23, 1990

This is one of very, very few of my Journal Times cartoons that were not about local or state issues. I would have preferred not to have to label Neville Chamberlain or Lyndon Johnson, but one can't always count on every reader to recognize every caricature.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Nov. 29, 1990

The Bush administration reached out to and received encouragement from Syria's President Hafez al-Assad, long a foe of U.S. ally Israel and an ally of the Soviet Union. At this point, war with Iraq became inevitable.

in UW-M Post, Nov. 29, 1990

Even if Saddam Hussein refused to believe it.

The News or the Blues, Depending, of Course, on Your Perspective

Smokeback Saturday takes a break from the 1920 election campaign this week so that I can dredge up share a few of my cartoons from September, 1990.

in UW-Milwaukee Post, September 4, 1990

1990 was an election year, too — not for the presidency, but for Congress and several governorships including that of my home state, Wisconsin. The liberal student newspaper at University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee asked me to draw a cover for their election feature section; I've stitched together four scans of the poster-sized (17.5" x 23.5") sheet.

I have no idea what's the deal with the blue guy in the foreground, or that bunch of people sitting under the traffic light. Whoever did the colorizing of the cartoon did just fine with some of the African-Americans in the crowd, while others could use a little yellow shading. 

I guess blue lives matter, too.

in UW-M Post, Sept. 13, 1990

Meanwhile, the George H.W. Bush administration was enlisting our NATO allies to go join us in declaring war over Iraq's invasion and annexation of Kuwait. Saddam Hussein's idea of diplomacy was to keep NATO citizens from leaving his country.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Sept. 20, 1990

By coincidence, Republicans had an opportunity to replace one of the Supreme Court's most liberal justices with a conservative thirty years ago this month. Justice William Brennan had resigned from the Court in the summer, and George H.W. Bush nominated David Souter to replace him. Despite Bush's claim not to know where Souter stood on abortion, affirmative action, or other divisive issues of the day, liberals suspected that Souter would prove to be a right-wing ideologue in the mold of William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and Robert Bork. But Souter made it through his Senate confirmation hearings without saying much of anything controversial, and handily won confirmation.

To Republicans' dismay, within the next decade, Souter tended to vote with the Court's liberals more often than its conservatives on closely decided cases. He voted in the minority in Bush v. Gore, and generally left precedents stand in the cases Republicans hoped to overturn. He left the Court in 2009 and was replaced by Obama nominee Sonya Sotomayor.

Souter now lives in New Hampshire, and celebrated his 81st birthday Thursday of last week.

in UW-M Post, September 25, 1990

With social pressure against smoking depressing domestic sales, Phillip Morris and RJR Nabisco, the two largest tobacco sellers in the U.S. in 1990, secured deals to export more than 34 billion cigarettes to the USSR. No such social pressure existed in the Soviet Union; in fact, demand for cigarettes exceeded supply.

It may have been a quickly forgotten news item, but gosh darn it, I spent a good long time with a straight-edge and ballpoint pen on all that tedious shading, and I liked how this cartoon looked in the end.

in Journal Times, Racine, Wis., October 3, 1990

A couple months ago, I included a cartoon about the local shopping mall refusing to allow the city bus system to have a bus stop at its doors. In September, 1990, the city of Racine had its way, getting the stops on route #7 moved in from the ring road around the parking lot's perimeter. (The Journal Times ran this cartoon in October, but my cataloguing notes indicate that this was the penultimate cartoon I drew in September.)

Someone at the JT must have decided that Mayor Owen Davies, speaking in the cartoon, needed a label. Maybe they thought that readers would confuse him with Christopher Columbus. Or Sir Francis Drake. I used white-out, ballpoint pen and felt-tip pen to add a medallion bearing his name around Davies's neck; everything else in the cartoon, including the shading, is drawn with India ink.

I dunno... I thought it was a reasonable caricature of Hizzoner.

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The headline for today's post, aside from referencing the blue men in today's color cartoon, pays homage to a Milwaukee radio institution, the late Ron Cuzner. His phrase led every one of his hourly news breaks.

But of course, you don't care. 

Riders on Desert Storm

Awe shucks, it's Shockback Saturday again; and I read this week that it's the 25th anniversary of the end of Gulf War I. 25 years ago today, Saddam Hussein ordered the withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, although combat continued at the Kuwait City airport for four more days, and the retreating army set fire to hundreds of oil wells as they fled.

I was drawing for two college newspapers and the Racine Journal Times in those days, so here are only a few of the cartoons I drew about that war. You may look to other sources for the factors that led up to the war, but as far as most Americans were concerned, it all started in August, 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded the sheikdom of Kuwait.

The Bush administration (Pappy, not Dubya) had, through Ambassador April Glaspie, earlier told the Saddam Hussein regime that "we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait," but that an actual invasion would be cause "for me to be concerned." Now that the invasion was a fait accompli, President Bush had some serious decisions to make.

Throughout the remainder of the summer and fall, both sides engaged in a great deal of saber rattling and bellicose talk. Bush swore that the invasion of Kuwait would not be allowed to stand, and Hussein promised "the mother of all battles" if the U.S. and the coalition of allies Bush was gathering tried to do anything about it.

For civilians stateside, it was an opportunity to fight the Vietnam War Protests all over again.

If the U.S. military had learned one lesson from Vietnam, it was that having TV news cameras out filming the troops and civilians and broadcasting whatever they witnessed back home the next day allowed the American public to form their own opinions about how the war was going. This time, the press had to be largely satisfied with military briefings showing successful missile strikes on guaranteed military targets.

This time, once the U.S.-led coalition entered the ground war in mid-January, the actual fighting was surprisingly short. Hussein quickly evacuated his forces from Kuwait all the way back to Baghdad. The ceasefire agreement was signed shortly afterward.

Q Toon: Tony Perkins

I was almost done drawing this cartoon Sunday night when I turned on the TV for the local news and instead found George Stephanopoulos, Christiane Amanpour and Mike Boetcher eagerly awaiting an announcement from the White House. They had already spilled the beans that Osama bin Laden was dead, and were filling the time by getting reactions from New York firefighters and 9/11 widows.

Clearly, terrorists this week were not going to give a rat's ass that the president of the Family Research Council said on April 29 that terrorists are just like LGBT activists.

The actual quotation isn't exactly as brief as one would like for a cartoon. He's talking here about gay and lesbian activists, boycotts against corporations that support antigay constitutional amendments and candidates, and publicizing the names of those who sign antigay petitions:

"This has moved from cultural terrorism to corporate terrorism. That's what this is. Now, back in the '80's and early '90's, I worked with the state department in anti-terrorism and we trained about fifty different countries in defending against terrorism, and it's, at its base, what terrorism is: it's a strike against the general populace simply to spread fear and intimidation so that they can disrupt and destabilize the system of government. That's what the homosexuals are doing here to the legal system."

At the risk of mockery from Editorial Explanations, I went ahead and finished the cartoon (I had nothing left to do but ink the background). By morning, I hadn't thought of any way to tweak the cartoon to take the previous night's news into account, so I sent it in to my syndicate for distribution. Q Syndicate, after all, is interested in providing LGBT content to LGBT publications, and would be less interested in the cartoon that I posted here yesterday.

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And since I've brought up yesterday's cartoon, a few words about it.

A number of my friends posted that misquoted quotation of Martin Luther King yesterday, so I have to ask myself whether it was unseemly to crow about the death of an enemy. Looking back, I did not exult in the death of Saddam Hussein; and even though I would hold him responsible for the deaths of innocent Americans, Britons and Canadians, I probably wouldn't feel any elation over the death of Muammar Khaddafy were that to come to pass. How I would have felt about bin Laden's death if the U.S. had succeeded in bombing him to smithereens in 1998 I can no longer remember, although I would probably have forgotten his name by now. (Like that blind cleric who fomented the first bombing of the World Trade Center.)

Maybe it was the sheer scale of Al Qaeda's appetite for death and destruction. Maybe it is the lingering memory of Al Qaeda sympathizers exulting in the carnage of 9/11. Maybe it's the nagging feeling that we'd better celebrate while we may, because somebody somewhere is eventually going to do something horrible in retaliation.

Jesus' admonition to love one's enemies notwithstanding, I'm happy that bin Laden is dead and that it was Americans who dispatched him. And I just can't apologize for that.

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And then there is Christian Broadcasting Network commentator David Brody, who not only let his heart rejoice over bin Laden's death, he actually criticized President Obama for not gloating, too:

"I know President Obama understands that getting Bin Laden doesn't mean an end to the war on terrorism but how about a smile? How about showing a little joy? How about a word or two saying something about how this is no doubt a happy or joyous occasion for Americans? We got nothing like that at all... Any hint of gloating or happiness might be rubbing it in the face of some of the crazies in the Arab World and heaven forbid we get them upset! How dare we Americans look like we’re celebrating his death! The travesty of it all! Give me a break. Isn’t it time to stop catering to thugs?"

Apparently, Brody forgot about President Obama cracking a great big smile over Osama bin Laden the night before: