From the NY Times:
A War Against the Cities
By BOB HERBERT
Amid all the muscle-flexing in Boston this week ("my homeland security platform is bigger than yours"), it was impossible to hear more than the merest hint or offhand whisper about the demoralizing decline in the fortunes of America's cities over the past few years.
Paralyzed by a war in Iraq that we don't know how to end or win, we're in danger of forgetting completely about the struggling cities here at home.
Bill Clinton mentioned the 300,000 poor children being cut out of after-school programs and the increases in gang violence across the country. And he gave cheering delegates a devastating riff on the impending lapse of the ban on assault weapons and White House plans to scrap federal funds for tens of thousands of police officers:
"Our policy," he said, "was to put more police on the street and to take assault weapons off the street - and it gave you eight years of declining crime and eight years of declining violence. Their policy is the reverse. They're taking police off the streets while they put assault weapons back on the street."
But those brief comments were the exception. A clearer sense of the rot that's starting to reestablish itself in America's cities was offered in an article out of Cleveland by The Times's Fox Butterfield on Tuesday. "Many cities with budget shortfalls," he wrote, "are cutting their police forces and closing innovative law enforcement units that helped reduce crime in the 1990's, police chiefs and city officials say."
Cleveland has laid off 15 percent of its cops - 250 officers. Pittsburgh has lost a quarter of its officers, and Saginaw, Mich., a third. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department has waved goodbye to 1,200 deputies, closed several jails and released some inmates early. In Houston, police officers are taking up the duties of 190 jail guards who were let go.
This is nuts. We know that low levels of crime and violence are essential if cities are to thrive. Tremendous progress - in some places, like New York, almost miraculous progress - has been made in reducing crime since the crack-crazed, gun-blazing days of the late 80's and early 90's. To even begin rewinding the clock to that time of madness would in itself be an act of madness.
Yet that's what we're doing.
Mayor Martin O'Malley of Baltimore, who co-chairs the Task Force on Homeland Security for the U.S. Conference of Mayors, told me in an interview that budgetary horror stories are coming in from police officials all over the country. There are many reasons, he said, including the recession and the weak recovery that followed, the antiterror obligations that have fallen to the police since Sept. 11, and "the cascading effect" of enormous federal tax cuts at a time when the nation is at war. Local taxes have gone up sharply, and services have had to be cut back even as federal taxes have decreased.
"This is all compounded," Mayor O'Malley said, "by the fact that there is just less money coming in from Washington" for traditional crime-fighting efforts.
Local police, fire and other agencies have also been affected by the call-up of thousands of military reservists and members of the National Guard. In addition to losing their services, most cities pay the difference between the municipal salaries of these men and women and the substantially lower pay they receive from the military.
In an address to the Democratic convention Wednesday night, Mayor O'Malley echoed many other municipal officials when he said police and fire departments are not even getting sufficient help from the federal government to maintain their antiterror efforts. The first responders, he said, cannot continue to finance their homeland security responsibilities "with increased property taxes and fire hall bingos."
The crime-fighting difficulties and underfunded homeland security responsibilities are part of a parade of very serious problems that have descended on cities in recent years. Tax cuts for the wealthy and the administration's hard-right ideology have removed much of the social safety net that we managed to weave over the past several decades, leaving us with a swelling population of vulnerable men, women and children. This has had a disproportionate impact on cities, and the outlook, both short- and long-term, is bleak at best.
These are important issues that could be wrestled with if cities were on anybody's agenda.
But they're not.

Unbearable EmptinessBy NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
SALEM, Ore. — Ever since a group of Iraqis told me last year about seeing a redheaded American soldier who was captured, held naked and then executed, I've been haunted by the question of his identity.
The first clues were in Nasiriya, Iraq, where in the aftermath of the war I interviewed the doctors and hospital staff who had cared for Pfc. Jessica Lynch. They said that the Pentagon had exaggerated the drama of her rescue, but what I could never put out of my mind was their tale of another American, whose name they never knew.
Abdul Hadi, an ambulance driver, tried to pick up a male American P.O.W. being held by Saddam Fedayeen. The American, he said, had been stripped naked and handcuffed, but he was allowed to smoke a cigarette while under guard. The prisoner, Mr. Hadi said, was about 19, with short red hair, lightly injured in the leg.
The hospital staff said the guards refused to give up the American and threatened the ambulance crew with guns and grenades. So the ambulance retreated - and several hours later, the same P.O.W. was brought to the hospital as a corpse, shot dead.
I mentioned this American in a sentence in my column at the time, but cautiously, because I couldn't match him with any known P.O.W., and I later wondered if the whole tale had been concocted.
Then I heard about Sgt. Donald Walters. He was a cook who vanished in the same firefight in which Jessica Lynch was captured, and his body was later recovered in Nasiriya. But some details didn't fit. He was 33, not 19. And his hair was said to be blond, not red.
So I visited Sergeant Walters's parents, Norman and Arlene Walters, at their home here in Salem, Ore. As they sat in their living room, heavy with memorials, photos and grief, Mr. and Mrs. Walters said that Don's hair had actually been reddish-blond, he had been injured in the leg, and he had smoked. Photos also show he looked young for his age.
What's more, the U.S. military recently informed Mr. and Mrs. Walters that Don had been captured before being shot.
It also seems that the heroism originally attributed to Private Lynch may actually have been Sergeant Walters's. Iraqi radio intercepts had described a blond U.S. soldier fighting tenaciously, and the Army this year awarded him a posthumous Silver Star in implicit acknowledgment that he was probably that soldier.
The citation reads: "His actions and selfless courage under fire resulted in saving lives of several other members of the convoy" - perhaps including Private Lynch. His cover fire allowed fellow soldiers to escape, while he remained alone in a hostile city; when he ran out of ammunition, he ran but was captured. So it looks as if the paramount hero of that day was not the one we thought, but rather a soldier who died anonymously.
Sergeant Walters left three children, then 9 months, 6 years and 8 years old. A veteran of the first gulf war, he had re-enlisted out of patriotism after 9/11.
Red, white and blue are everywhere in Mr. and Mrs. Walters's house, and Mr. Walters says that if he were president, he would threaten to nuke Baghdad unless the insurgency stopped, although in his next breath he backs off. I asked Mrs. Walters if she felt that her son had fallen for a noble purpose.
"That's hard," she said, pausing. "I have to feel that way, because so many soldiers have lost their lives."
One of the revelations in the 9/11 commission report was the casualness of the resort to war. On the afternoon of Sept. 11, Donald Rumsfeld spoke of attacking Saddam Hussein, and President Bush began asking about Iraq the next day. Older men blithely found a war for younger men and women to die in.
The result is the unbearable emptiness in homes like the Walters's all across America - and, even more often, in Iraq. The American victims are disproportionately from working-class families, not well represented either in White House meetings or in this newspaper's readership. It is those families of the dead and wounded who are bearing 99.9 percent of the burden of this war.
When hawks say that the Iraq war was worth the price, they should remember that that price is measured in the lives of people like Don Walters, forever young, forever heroes, forever gone.