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Well, the Chickenhawk web page did not stop the War in Iraq. Outing the warlords who themselves had not been in combat was embarrassing, but not fatal to the Bush battles in the Middle East. But ths story lives on, as does this classic archived review.

VISIT the CHICKEN HAWK web site

Maybe not, but the appearance of the Chickenhawk Database has at least given the world a new buzzword in the war on terrorism. A "chickenhawk" according to NH Gazette editor Steven Fowle of Portmsouth, is a highly vocal person, usually a white male, who advocates sending American soldiers in harm’s way without ever having served in the military or experienced a shooting war first-hand. His online list of 100 politicians, media moguls and public figures has become a hot topic on chat rooms and news sites around the world. The web page lists the name of each alleged "chickenhawk", his birth date, the major conflict in which he did not chose to serve, and where available, his excuse for not serving.

The database immediately caught the fancy of popular alternative media – including web sites like Hypocrites.com, Memepool.com, Buzzflash.com, IrregularTimes.com and Disinformation.com (whose slogan is "Everything You Know is a Lie"). But the traditional press is intrigued too. A recent online article by Terry M. Neal, staff writer for the Washington Post focused on the chickenhawk phenomenon and included an interview with editor Fowle. The London Guardian and the Seattle Post Intelligencer printed headline articles, and the database has been covered by the Amman (Jordan) Times and by publications in China and Turkey. The Palestine Independent Media Center reprinted the entire database and Yahoo made the page "Pick of the Day". USA Today this week included a detailed report on the military service of key pro-Iraq war politicians, although the article used the phrase "untested administration hawks" instead of chickenhawk.

Many web sites – underground and overground -- now include links directly to the web page and Fowle estimates that more than 150,000 individuals have visited it, largely in the last month.

And the momentum is growing. In a recent radio episode of the Diane Rehm show on National Public Radio, for example, a 20-year military man from Texas asked Iraq-war advocate Frank Gaffney, Jr. if he would serve or send a son or daughter to the same warfront line he vociferously favors. Gaffney is associated with the Center for Security Policy, a nonprofit organization that advocates, according to its web site, "international peace through American strength." Fowle rates Gaffney high on the chickenhawk list and describes him simply as "a missile salesman."

"I really wish I were in that position," Gaffney replied evasively, and was then pressed by the talk show host to answer the question fully. "I think we’re all on the front line," Gaffney responded, again, never directly responding to the chickenhawk factor.

"That’s what I’m talking about," says Fowle. "I believe this thing is political kryptonite. The closer they get to the word, the weaker the chickenhawks get."

THE WEB SITE MAKER

Fowle, originally from Newton, MA via Hillsborough, NH learned about the horrors of war in Vietnam. From 1967- 68 he was assigned to photograph the autopsies of slain American servicemen in a Saigon morgue. He doesn’t much like to talk about those days that have stayed with him ever since.

"Uncle Sam was handing out guns like they were M&Ms when I was a teenager," he says. "Where the hell where they (the chickenhawks) then? They were all in divinity school or teaching Law like John Ashcroft."

He tops his list with the President George W. Bush, whose period in the National Guard and reported "AWOL" incidence has been well reported. Vice-President Richard Cheney has been quoted as saying he "had other options" at the time.

Fowle says he has long been aware that a privileged class of white college-educated men seem to avoid battlefield service. As a longtime New Hampshire resident, he was acutely aware, he says, that five top editors and writers at the Manchester Union Leader were Vietnam "hawks", although not one, including arch-conservative publisher and editor William Loeb, had battle service records. This group is now listed on the database.

"Their attitude was – Let’s you and him fight, I’ll hold your coat," Fowle says. Today as editor of "The Nation’s Oldest Newspaper", he says, he is printing the truth as he sees it.

After years percolating the idea, Fowle created his first chickenhawk "almost as a lark at first" in March of this year, building it in an Excel database. He published the list in his biweekly Portsmouth newspaper and dumped it onto his web site. At this time after the tragedy of 9/11, he says, it was politically incorrect to criticize the military record of the President and Vice-President. Fowle was surprised to see how quickly the chickenhawk page was discovered by other web sites. From about 120 visitors a day, his web site jumped to 500. The chickenhawk concept was escaping its shell.

On March 20, readers of the popular web site BuzzFlash.com got wind of the database, and Fowle’s site logs leaped to 5,000 visitors a day. But the real activity began in around Labor Day, as people got back to business after a hot summer and talk of a war against Iraq began. The Guardian and the Washington Post interviews collided with White House activity around the time of the anniversary of the terrorist bombings.

"That’s when the President said – Hey everybody, I wasn’t kidding about that war, you know!" Fowle says.

With hundreds of email responses, Fowle admits he has fallen behind in updating the database, which is not dynamically generated. Instead he offers readers a guest book in which they can express opinions and offer potential new chickenhawk candidates. So far, the editor says, only one chickenhawk has written to complain, submitted his military record, and been expunged from the database.

THE UPSHOT

There was no Internet during Vietnam to spur and focus political discussion. Fowle, who has seen the human toll of war, is using the Internet to disseminate his thesis, providing both supporting research and a catchy new word.

Marty Jezer of the Brattleboro Reformer, writing for the progressive web site Common Dreams (commondreams.org) in Portland, ME, credit Fowle’s research directly in a recent essay on "Patriotism and Dissent." The term is so easy to grasp, and the Web moves so swiftly, that the term has taken on a life of its own, Fowle says.

One web site opposed to the current administration (toostupidtobepresident.com) has quickly produced a 986K animated cartoon. In "Flight of the Chickenhawk," a fictional Dick Cheney and other politicians named on the database discuss the ways in which they avoided military service. Another site (smirkingchimp.com) is offering "Send a Chickenhawk to War" T-shirts for sale. Neither product attributes the founding web page.

Fowle, who receives no online advertising or salary for his web work, says he is interested in the truth, not commercial gain. He is especially pleased by recognition and links from "free thinking" sites like Strike the Root (strike-the-root.com) that takes its motto from Henry David Thoreau – "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."

"These alleged conservatives are striding the planet in their seven-league boots kicking over anything they don’t like," Fowle says, "and a lot of perfectly reasonable, sensible, ordinary Americans are looking at them and saying – these people are unstoppable. Well they’re not."

"Be especially wary of chickenhawks who tell you a war with Iraq is going to be a cakewalk – now there’s word for you," he adds.

"In the end, Vietnam made as much sense as a firing squad, formed in a circle, facing inwards," Fowle writes in his own biographical notes on his NH Gazette web site. He fears, he says, that an Iraqi War could turn out worse.

Web sites linking to the Chickenhawk Database, show a diverse range of ideologies. Student and campus groups, peace advocates, feminists, libertarians, veterans associations, media watchers, ecologists and religions organizations. Google, the nation’s top search engine, currently places Fowle’s page #1 among 5,800 entries for the word "chickenhawk". His database is listed as a Google theme page under the topics "Military Conscription" and "Government Issues."

"I wish everyone would look at it," Fowle says. "Maybe when they go down the list they will see it includes the same people who sold them the Vietnam War and Gulf-and-Exxon War. When I went to Vietnam, they were saying – If we don’t fight in Vietnam, we’ll fight in San Diego. Now they’re saying -- We have to fight them in Baghdad. They were wrong then and they are wrong now."

Fowle’s frustration goes beyond political chickenhawks and extends to what he refers to as a corporate-owned national media that prints only the news handed out at White House press conferences. It is the myth of the Information Age, he says, that people are finally getting the truth.

"They (the tradition media) are a bunch of lapdogs," he says. "They are paralyzed with fear to challenge the line that the Administration puts out."

Will chickenhawk fever build? Will it influence the tide of war?

"That’s why I did it," Fowle says. "I just wanted to get this stuff on the record. Now it is, and I feel I’ve done my job. I don’t want this new war to happen without people knowing who was behind it."