“Peace” activist Cindy Sheehan is speaking at Augsburg next Tuesday.
A local peace through strength activist (whose name I’ll omit) writes:
Please let people know if they would like to protest Cindy Sheehan, we can meet across the street at 10:30 on tuesday since it is public property. And i do have a student id; or at least my daughter does.
It’d be nice to show that not everyone in the Twin Cities is pro-surrender.
See if you can see what’s missing from this Op-Ed by Barbara C. Crosby this Monday in the Strib:
A friend of mine, whose son was just notified that his National Guard unit will have its tour in Iraq extended, asks, Why aren’t there massive protests against this misguided war? She remembers the Vietnam era and the sustained protest movement of the time.
Of course, only a tiny portion of the American people ever protested against the Vietnam war.
But I digress. While “a genuine memory of what happened in this nation during Vietnam” is indeed missing, that’s not what I’m shooting for.
Easy answer: No draft. Indeed, the antiwar movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s was dramatically subdued by President Richard Nixon’s replacement of the existing draft with an annual lottery that, in effect, cut in half the number of young men who were vulnerable to conscription. Later, the nation adopted an all-volunteer policy for the armed services.
It’s an “easy answer” – and wrong, as far as it goes. It’s true, we don’t have a draft – but then, a minority of those who served in Vietnam were draftees, and the majority of the protesters were on deferments.
Now our nation is at war with terrorism, and the volunteer army is stretched to the limit, even with a questionable reliance on National Guard units. So should our policymakers reinstitute the military draft administered by the euphemistically named Selective Service?
A few members of Congress say yes, and perhaps they are right. A truly universal draft would diminish the current system’s disproportionate burden on low-income and minority communities. And, no doubt, a return to the draft would heighten opposition to the current military strategy in Iraq.
And for the first time, Ms. Crosby skirts perilously close to…not the truth, but a truth.
Conscription – the draft – forces a nation to be very conservative about the wars they fight. If a war doesn’t have very broad, popular support (like World War II, which was largely fought with draftees) or involve the nation’s survival (all Israeli males serve), draftee armies are very blunt instruments that tend to fight poorly (see the Russians in Chechnya) and/or with draconian enforcement from above (the Russians in Afghanistan).
My own proposal is that our nation consider instituting a universal draft of nearly everyone between ages 18 and 65, male and female, except for parents of minor children.
Admittedly, the oldsters in this group (and I’m one) can’t do a lot of heavy lifting (unless we’re talking ideas and such), but we could work on nation-building endeavors, such as microfinance projects or educational programs.
Can we see what’s missing yet?
Of course, the designers of a new draft would have to be creative in order to minimize central bureaucracy. One idea is to rely, as in the past, on local draft boards that would randomly call up eligible individuals until a board’s quota was filled.
Something else is missing here. No, not the big kahuna thing I’m really looking for – but I have to wonder if Ms. Crosby really knows what she’s talking about. She seems to be mixing up “the draft” – a lottery that picks and chooses what it needs – with “universal service”, like in Israel or Switzerland, where everyone between ages 20 and 50 (and sometimes older) serves in the reserves, civil defense or some other area.
They are very different ideas; the “draft”, as it was practiced in the US from the forties to 1973, was inherently vastly more unfair than the “disproportionate burden on low-income and minority communities” Ms. Crosby kvetches about; upper-middle-class kids, from families with money or influence or savvy, routinely got deferred or found less-dangerous ways to while away their eligible years.
Universal service – where everyone who’s medically able serves 1-3 years in the regular military and then a number of years in the reserves, like in Israel and Switzerland (and in some ways Norway), whether your parents are plumbers or Senators. The CEO’s son drives the tank commanded by the farmer’s kid; the mayor’s son loads bombs onto a plane flown by a bus driver’s son.
They couldn’t be more different, with one exception; they both impel a nation to be much more conservative about using the military. Most heavily-draftee or universal service militaries are only notionally able to serve outside their own nation’s borders (nations like Israel and Germany can only send their special forces and all-volunteer elites like paratroops and fighter pilots overseas, usually only for very brief periods or with immense support from the US).
Talking seriously about a universal draft might cause us to question our current reliance on the youngest adults to bear so much of the war burden… Maybe we should send tough grandmas to war at an equal rate.
And this is just stupid. Fighting – and having a reasonable chance of surviving against an enemy that really does want to kill you (something few Democrats recognize in the current world situation) takes springy knees and sharp eyes and keen ears, not to mention the ability to be taught to do something utterly unnatural to you. Ask any drill sergeant who is easier to turn into a soldier, an 18 year old or a 25 year old…
I hope the nation also would consider an ongoing requirement that every 18-year-old put in two years of public service either in the military or in a community development program. Such a move could vastly expand VISTA and the Peace Corps, which in turn might do much to improve conditions that spawn hopelessness (and prime the terrorist recruitment pipeline) in the poorest parts of the world today.
Would volunteers “improve” jihadist hatred of everything the West stands for – indeed, be proof of it? – or would they be merely hostages on the hoof?
In such a scenario, special incentives may be necessary to ensure that enough young people sign up for military duty.
Here’s one: make serving the nation an honorable profession, or at least a time in one’s life where one is part of an elite brotherhood set apart from the rest of society by a code that outsiders just don’t understand.
Sort of like what we have today, in a military that actually does the job.
Another approach would be to require all young citizens to go through both military training and nonviolent conflict resolution and serve two years as members of the military or peace brigades.
I’m not sure what the best approach is.
Obviously.
Ms. Crosby seems to think that military is like high school – a captive audience that needs to be exposed to a bunch of abstruse concepts for their own good, as judged by society.
It’s not. It’s an arm of the government that tries to kill, maim or drag to the bargaining table by force those who would do us harm. It’s a specialized trade, with skills and standards that occupy mens’ lives for decades in the learning. The professionals that make up the backbone of our military, the greatest on earth, devote their lives to learning the craft and art of war every bit as much as any other professional – and their lives depend on it more than most.
And that is what’s missing from Ms. Crosby’s piece; any sense of what a military is for, and why it exists. Is it a social program? A vehicle to engineer society?
Because Ms. Crosby certainly shows no understanding on any other level:
This policy shift makes sense if we are truly serious about fighting a War on Terror and improving global and domestic conditions.
Actually, as noted by people who differ from Ms. Crosby in knowing what they’re talking about, draftee armies are the worst instrument for fighting that kind of war.
Michelle Malkin is back from Baghdad:
I came to Iraq a darkening pessimist about the war, due in large part to my doubts about the compatability of Islam and Western-style democracy, but also as a result of the steady, sensational diet of “grim milestone” and “daily IED count” media coverage that aids the insurgency.I left Iraq with unexpected hope and resolve.
The everyday bravery and consummate professionalism of the troops I embedded with has strengthened my faith in the U.S. military. These soldiers are well aware of the history, culture, and sectarian strife that has wracked the Muslim world for more than a millennium. “They love death,” one gunner muttered as we heard explosions in the distance while parked in al Adil. Nevertheless, these troops are willing to put their lives on the line to bring security to Iraq, one neighborhood at a time.
They have teamed with Sunni and Shia, Iraqi civilian and soldier, alike to establish local government structures and security framework districts. “We are not here to build the Iraqi Security Forces,” Lieutenant Colonel Steven Miska, deputy commander for the Dagger Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, said. “We’re here to grow them. You can’t just plant and walk away.” Capt. Aaron Kaufman of Task Force Justice added: “It’s not a six-month or year-long process, especially when you’re talking about training the Iraqi forces.”
The troops I met scoff at peace activists’ efforts to “bring them home now.” But they are just as critical of the Bush administration and Pentagon’s missteps—from holding Iraqi elections too early, to senselessly breaking up their brigade combat team, to drawing down forces and withdrawing last year in Baghdad and Fallujah, to failing to hold cities after clearing them of insurgents. They speak candidly and critically of Shiite militia infiltration of some Iraqi police and Iraqi Army units and corruption in government ministries, but they want you to know about the unseen good news, too.
Read the whole thing.
…but Matt Lauer, “interviewing” Hillary! Clinton, seems to be feeding the former First Lady her answers re her recent trip to Iraq.
I’d hope that her big idea – a “phased retreat”, first from Baghdad (!), then from the rest of the country – is her own, since it’s pure madness.
And I had to wonder who it is that briefs Clinton on these things; she said “we’ll need two new battalions in Afghanistan – why should those two battalions be in Iraq”. Of course, “two battalions” is about 1,500 troops. Is she merely parroting information from people who don’t understand the field very well (likely, given the Clinton Adminstration’s history), or does she just think the American people won’t know the difference?
Victor Davis Hanson on the Democrats’ approach to Iraq:
Apparently the party line is that we can’t win, but we’re afraid to pull out in case we do, and so we will equivocate as we watch the battlefield and make the necessary rhetorical adjustments just in time.
They’ll vote for it, before they vote against it. Before they vote for it again.
Generals in the bedroom, lotharios on the battlefield.
Al Quaeda leader killed by US airstrike in Somalia:
The suspected al-Qaeda militant who planned the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in east Africa was killed in an American airstrike in Somalia, an official said Wednesday.
Watch for editorials and leftyblog posts about the lack of due process any moment.
I have a new parlor game.
Here’s what you do: When reading a Strib editorial, try to guess which overwrought hamster is doing the writing. Different editorial writers, like different species of deer, leave different clues where they’ve been grazing. The key is to figure out which one dropped this pile…
…in this case, “supporting” the growing meme that Hussein’s execution was unjust because his trial was “unfair”.
Saddam Hussein has been executed. Friday evening, U.S. authorities transfered the fallen dictator to the custody of the Iraqi government, which then hung him. It is an ambiguous moment:
Self-righteous, morally-blind equivocating? That smells like Boyd…
I’d urge the writer to ask the people of Dearborn, or Mosul, or the marshes of southern Iraq, exactly how “ambiguous” the trial was.
• While Saddams crimes against humanity cannot be denied, neither can his trials fundamental unfairness. Numerous international rights groups followed his journey through what passes for an Iraqi court system and found the proceedings deeply flawed. The verdict was just, but in legal affairs, how a verdict is reached matters a lot.
That’s dumb enough to be Kate Perry.
No, there’s a point hidden in there – along with a glob of reeking hypocrisy. It is important for the Iraqis to have a valid court system to build a viable nation; it’s through such a system (and the means to enforce the laws), among other things, that Iraq will finally emerge from its current nightmare.
But the show and tell of an elaborate civil trial was more than Saddam deserved – and there is ample precedent, when dealing with tyrants, for skipping the entire charade. Douglas MacArthur held courts-martial for Japan’s mass-murderers and war criminals – people with, individually, less blood on their hands than Saddam – and excecuted dozens, without harming Japanese society one iota. Ditto Germany, although Nuremberg was slathered with civil-court decorations.
A military court-martial, or a summary court of Iraqis, could have tried and killed Hussein without ceremony, and the world – and Iraq – would have been better off for it. And Iraq’s justice system would have suffered not one jot.
Its the difference between an assassination of a thug and the execution of a war criminal.
When Ed showed me the footage of the blow-dried anchorbot in Orlando calling the execution an “assassination” over the weekend, I thought it was an isolated instance of a dolt in a $1000 suit transposing words under the heat of the set lights.
But I’m wondering if this isnt’ the latest shrieking point issues from loony-left central – that we’re agents of tyranny, ourselves, because Hussein – a mass-murderer – didn’t have the same chance to get off on a technicality or perversion of justice that OJ Simpson did.
To that end, there are longstanding international norms for how charges of crimes against humanity are to be prosecuted.
[Crushing ignorance of history? Could be Nick Coleman]
Yes, there are; military tribunals and quick executions.
To claim otherwise is…
…well, the province of Strib editorial writers.
Saddams trial did not meet those norms. Amnesty Internationals Malcolm Smart had it about right
Perfect is the enemy of good enough.
And while the Strib didnt’ see fit to mention it to their readers (a Jim Boyd hallmark), Amnesty International tends to oppose capital punishment first, and worry about petty moral issues like guilt later.
Amnesty came down on the side of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a killer for whom there is really no defense.
“Ba’ath Party Warns It Will Hold The US Responsible”, warn the headlines, if Hussein is executed. So says a Ba’ath-affiliated website:
“Our party warns again of the consequences of executing Mr. President and his comrades,” the statement said.
“The Baath and the resistance are determined to retaliate, with all means and everywhere, to harm America and its interests if it commits this crime,” the statement added, referring to Baath fighters as “the resistance.”
Oh, goodie. Launch an attack on U.S. soil. Try to ding us on our home field.
You want to guarentee a hard-line response from the American Street? You want to neuter the pacifist, accomodationist wave that is about the slither into Congress? Do it. Attack us here in the States. I triple dog dare you.
Even Democrats, mostly, aren’t stupid enough to ignore that.
Captain Ed’s advice on selecting an executioner…:
pick a Kurd, any Kurd.
…might might actually give lawyers an Eighth Amendment case against Hussein’s sentence. (*)
Ed notes my prediction from three years ago, and predicts:
I suspect that the Maliki government will actually execute Saddam within 72 hours, before the protests can gather steam. I also predict that they will televise it, just to ensure that the Iraqis don’t fall into a new conspiracy theory that they executed someone else as a stand-in for Saddam.
We’ll see.
Since we’re into predictions, I’ll float another. Mark your dead pools for Saturday, 3PM Central time (midnight Baghdad). Here’s why; Ronald Reagan and the Pope both passed away moments after the NARN show let off the air. Now, you’d be right in saying that there’s no comparing Hussein with either of those two great men, or comparing the natural deaths of two men after long, rich lives to the execution of a genocidal Napoleon. That might well throw my prediction off. But I gotta start somewhere.
My first prediction was a very slightly educated guess. Here, I have tradition on my side.
Hussein’s death sentence has been upheld.
As I’ve written before, I think it was a mistake to “try” Saddam in a court, as though there were some doubt about the murderous nature of his regime, and that doubt could somehow be resolved by a judicial proceeding. I’ve also been critical of the manner in which the trial has been conducted. It has dragged on much too long and has far too often served as a platform for Saddam’s grandstanding.
It’s worth noting, at this time, that – ahem – it looks like my dead pool entry was, er, dead on, if all goes according to plan.
Someone notify Hewitt.
John Kelly at Irish Pennants has among the best discussions going anywhere about fighting and winning a counterinsurgency war (and not just the linked post).
General Jack Keane, former vice chief of staff of the Army, and former West Point professor Frederick Kagan have a different view. They headed a study group for the American Enterprise Institute which issued its report Dec. 14. They think it’s about time we tried the only thing that’s ever worked in fighting insurgencies.Every counterinsurgency that’s succeeded has done so by protecting civilians from insurgents, Gen. Keane noted.
But protecting Iraqi civilians isn’t even formally a mission for U.S. troops, which explains in part why we’re doing such a poor job of it, Prof. Kagan said.
That’s one of the things the British have always done when fighting insurgents; secure the local population.
Along with the increase in the number of troops would be a change in strategy. Currently, after U.S. troops ‘clear” a neighborhood, they return to their bases, permitting insurgents to slip back in. Any civilians who cooperated with U.S. or Iraqi troops are subject to retribution, which discourages cooperation. The higher troop levels would permit a constant presence in the disputed neighborhoods.The AEI study has a specificity the Iraq Study Group report lacked. It identifies the particular mixed Sunni/Shia neighborhoods in Baghdad where the security problem is worst.
Read the whole thing.
Mike Kelly at Irish Pennants on the ISG report:
The truth, which the ISG’s aging luminaries lack more the guts than the brains to grasp, is that Iran and Syria are now our principal enemies, both in Iraq and in the broader war on terror. Without their interference, sectarian violence in Iraq would swiftly and sharply decline.
If there’s been one big overarching mistake in the War on Terror, it may have been that Iran and Syria needed to be taken out of the war (not necessarily militarily) at the same time, or before, Iraq.
The fact that the US government is doing effectively nothing to destabilize Ahmadinejad – in the same sense that Reagan, Thatcher, Pope John Paul II and, of all people, the AFL-CIO’s Lane Kirkland – did to destabilize the Soviets and the Warsaw Pact with their support of Polish labor unions and Czech and other Eastern European dissidents – is, to use my gift of understatement, a crying shame.
Katherine Kersten on the propaganda value of the imam publicity blitz:
But the report on the Iranian website, which has appeared on a variety of Muslim websites worldwide, had a larger primary focus. After the imams incident, it quoted Bray as saying Muslims want “new, broad-sweeping legislation that will extract even larger financial and civil penalties for any airline that participates in racial and religious profiling.”
The report is optimistic that Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, will lend his support to new legislation. Ellison, it says, has expressed his opposition to “such racial and religious profiling.” Ellison, through a spokesman, declined to comment.
He’s wising up, at least.
And by the way, I’ll support such legislation!
(When the Iranians stop “profiling” Jews, Ba’hais, gays…
(From Cox and Forkum)
Kersten continues:
One piece of legislation in the works is the End Racial Profiling Act. It is an important priority of Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, whose district includes one of the largest Muslim populations in the country. Conyers introduced the bill in 2004 and 2005, but it went nowhere. Now the alignment of forces may be changing. Conyers will probably be chairman of the House Judiciary Committee when the new Democratic-controlled Congress convenes next month.
Nancy Pelosi, who called herself a “proud” cosponsor of the Profiling Act in 2004, is the incoming House speaker. And in January, Ellison, who represents the district where the imams incident occurred, will take his seat in Congress.
Watch for a determined effort to make the term “profiling” equal “discrimination” in the public mind.
The New York Film Critics name United 93 the year’s best film:
Marshall Fine, the group’s chairman, said it was a tough vote for best picture, with critics slugging it out over “United 93,” “The Queen” and “The Departed.”
In choosing the winner, “I think everybody agrees it was an amazing film in terms of telling the story without pushing a political point of view,” said Fine, film and TV critic for Star magazine. “It puts you right in the middle of the scene without telling you what to think or what to feel. It was really one of the most harrowing films of the year.”
It’s not a light watch; my insides were twisted into knots watching the movie, even though the ending was far from a cliffhanger. And the no-name cast is impeccable.
Harrowing is about the right word. But it deserves every honor it can get
…and Frank Rich is no Walter Cronkite:
“As bad as things may seem now, they can yet become worse, and not just in Iraq.
“The longer we pretend that we have not lost there, the more we risk losing other wars we still may salvage, starting with Afghanistan.”
Wow. The President nominated the wrong Secretary of Defense!
I don’t write much about the difference between Islam and Christianity (or Islam and the West, for that matter); other people do it better.
But when I have, I’ve gotten the occasional comment claiming that, at least as far as this country is concerned, fundamentalist Christianity remains a bigger threat than fundie Islam.
The commenters (I’m not going to look them up now – they’re on the old site) never cite any concrete reasons, of course. And I wish they would.
Because I’m trying to find an example of any group of Christians doing something like this any time since the Middle Ages:
The gunmen came at night to drag Mohammed Halim away from his home, in front of his crying children and his wife begging for mercy.
The 46-year-old schoolteacher tried to reassure his family that he would return safely. But his life was over, he was part-disembowelled and then torn apart with his arms and legs tied to motorbikes, the remains put on display as a warning to others against defying Taliban orders to stop educating girls.
Anyone?
“The only way home is through Berlin”.
The line was Tom Skeritt’s, from Saving Private Ryan. It’s one I’ve repeated during countless intractable crises in my own personal life; it recognizes that the only way to be rid of the problem you face is to beat it, or at least outlast it. The unspoken corollary, of course, is that if you don’t go to Berlin, you won’t go home. And the key criterion in getting to Berlin is the will to do it or die trying.
Victor Davis Hanson on loss of will, and what it means. He describes our enemies not as terrorists, but as agents of a worldview incompatible with the one that spawned this great nation:
But our newest foes of Reason are not the enraged Athenian democrats who tried and executed Socrates. And they are not the Christian zealots of the medieval church who persecuted philosophers of heliocentricity. Nor are they Nazis who burned books and turned Western science against its own to murder millions en masse.
No, the culprits are now more often us. In the most affluent, and leisured age in the history of Western civilization–never more powerful in its military reach, never more prosperous in our material bounty–we have become complacent, and then scared of the most recent face of barbarism from the primordial extremists of the Middle East.
What would a beleaguered Socrates, a Galileo, a Descartes, or Locke believe, for example, of the moral paralysis in Europe? Was all their bold and courageous thinking–won at such a great personal cost–to allow their successors a cheap surrender to religious fanaticism and the megaphones of state-sponsored fascism?
Hansen ponders – has the West lost the will to persevere? The signs are ominous:
Just imagine in our present year, 2006: plan an opera in today’s Germany, and then shut it down. Again, this surrender was not done last month by the Nazis, the Communists, or kings, but by the producers themselves in simple fear of Islamic fanatics who objected to purported bad taste. Or write a novel deemed unflattering to the Prophet Mohammed. That is what did Salman Rushdie did, and for his daring, he faced years of solitude, ostracism, and death threats–and in the heart of Europe no less. Or compose a documentary film, as did the often obnoxious Theo Van Gogh, and you may well have your throat cut in “liberal” Holland. Or better yet, sketch a simple cartoon in postmodern Denmark of legendary easy tolerance, and then go into hiding to save yourself from the gruesome fate of a Van Gogh. Or quote an ancient treatise, as did Pope Benedict, and then learn that all of Christendom may come under assault, and even the magnificent stones of the Vatican may offer no refuge–although their costumed Swiss Guard would prove a better bulwark than the European police. Or write a book critical of Islam, and then go into hiding in fear of your life, as did French philosophy teacher Robert Redeker.
Read the whole, scary thing.
Tell you what we’ll do: the next time we get on a plane together, you refrain from acting like you’re probing the plane’s security measures for whatever purpose…
…and I’ll avoid acting like my Viking anscestors acted when they pummeled encountered your anscestors.
Deal?
The other day, I castigated the Strib’s editorial board for its dubious command of history.
What do you suppose the odds are that I’d have to do it again? This time the offender is Syl Jones, the man who combines Lori Sturdevant’s keen evenhandedness, Nick Coleman’s writing chops, and Aaron McGruder’s sharp-eyed rejection of racial cliches.
He’s just as good when it comes to history! This time, he’s comparing the President’s proposed “exit strategy” with our departure from Vietnam:
But there is something else afoot here. The folks who brought you “peace with honor” in Vietnam, officially proclaimed in January of 1973 by Republican President Richard Nixon, are also preparing to make a similar phony declaration in Iraq.
If you don’t remember that original declaration, all you need to understand is that our government’s goal during the war was to prevent the fall of Vietnam into Communist hands. Not only did we fail to do so but our 12-year presence there also inflamed a generation of Communists who subsequently slaughtered millions of their own people.
For starters, Syl, the Communists never needed to be “inflamed” to slaughter their own people. Or did you ever read about any of this?
While the United States may not be directly responsible for the atrocities committed after it departed, anyone except the most partisan observer would be forced to admit that the whole enterprise could be blamed on a form of faulty intelligence: the domino theory.
No, Syl. The fact that we got involved in a conventional land war in Asia could be blamed on the Domino Theory. The fact that we got into it with hundreds of thousands of conventional troops is blamed on John F. Kennedy’s need for an easy PR win after the debacle of the Bay of Pigs. But the Killing Fields? That happened because we left – and broke our promise to return if things got bad.
Speaking of “things getting bad”, how are Syl Jones’ thought processes working these days?
Developed primarily by President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, the domino theory was a racist canard that stemmed directly from Dulles’ days as chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation. In that capacity, he traveled the world with John D. Rockefeller in an effort to convince his boss that the nonwhite populations of the world were growing too rapidly and must be contained.
Just re-read that graf a few times and let it sink in. Syl Jones thinks that containing communism meant containing non-white people.
(No. That would have been Margaret Sanger‘s thing).
But unlike Vietnam, where the Communists had little desire to kill Americans outside their borders, the militant Islamic insurgency is determined to end American hegemony everywhere. Peace with honor will therefore prove to be impossible in Iraq. To end this war, the American people will unfortunately be forced to face dishonor in the extreme, with little hope of ever finding peace.
That, or seeing this thing through.
So, Syl – you join me in rejecting the Democrats’ call for a fast, PR-slathered withdrawal?
Background: At the end of the Cold War – nearly 20 years after the institution of the all-volunteer military – the US Army had a total of 18 divisions (plus ten more from the National Guard, for a total of 28 combat divisions). To this you could add enough sailors in the Navy to man nearly 600 ships, and about 30-40% more combat aircraft than today.
They were all volunteers. And that was with a population that was tens of millions smaller than it is today. This was down, of course, from the 110-odd divisions in World War II (largely draftees) or the two-dozen-odd divisions, about a third of them conscripts, with which the US Army went to war in 1964 in Vietnam.
Summary: With a much smaller population, this nation has sustained a much larger military – proportionally and in absolute numbers – than it does today (where the US Army has 10 regular and 8 National Guard divisions).
Fast-forward to today.
I’ve been reading “Death Ground”, by Colonel Daniel P. Bolger. It’s a book about the least-glamorous part of the US military, and the part that, as it happens, actually wins the wars – the Army and Marine infantry, the guys about whom B.H. Liddell-Hart wrote, “You can keep your atom bombs, your tanks and your airplanes: you’ll still have to have some little guy with a rifle and bayonet who winkles the other b*****d out of his foxhole and gets him to sign the Peace Treaty.”
Throughout history, the infantry have accomplished their mission in one of three ways:
As Bolger points out, the US Army followed #2, above, during World War II, on the philosophy that it was easier to bomb and shell the enemy into submission than to train draftees to fight as highly skilled professional infantry, something that takes not only years, but a huge culture change. As Bolger also points out, #3 is the only way to fight guerrillas among people you wish to make your friends.
Like, Iraq.
So why is Chuck Rangel trying to reinstate the draft?
Rangel, incoming chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, said he worried the military was being strained by its overseas commitments.
“If we’re going to challenge Iran and challenge North Korea and then, as some people have asked, to send more troops to Iraq, we can’t do that without a draft,” Rangel said.
Of course, draftee armies are the worst way to fight counterinsurgency wars. Taking a scared 18 year old kid who’d rather be skateboarding or in college or working at K-Mart and giving him a gun and tossing him into combat sometimes works – if your nation’s surivival is at stake, or if you back that scared kid up with enough firepower to devastate anyone who stands in his path. Remember – we tried that in Vietnam.
But the US Army and Marine infantry are, today, to a man a group of volunteers, people who’ve chosen to devote between three and 30 years of their lives to learning the fine, horrific art of moving close to the enemy and killing, wounding or capturing him – with the added wrinkle of doing it with enough “finesse” to avoid killing and destroying everything around the enemy, to boot. This is an important wrinkle; we learned the hard way in Vietnam how vital it was.
So why does Rangel want to mess this up?
He said having a draft would not necessarily mean everyone called to duty would have to serve. Instead, “young people (would) commit themselves to a couple of years in service to this great republic, whether it’s our seaports, our airports, in schools, in hospitals,” with a promise of educational benefits at the end of service.
Ah. It’s a social program, then.
Make no mistake about this; the draft would, at best, dilute the fighting edge of the US armed forces – the Infantry – into a force that’s vastly less capable of fighting the types of wars the US is most likely to face today.
Ah. And could that be Rangel’s motive…?
Note to legal bureaucrats; stupidity isn’t terrorism.
Not that what Rthese people did wasn’t gapingly, breathtakingly, invincibly stupid…:
According to their indictment, Carl Persing and Dawn Sewell were allegedly snuggling and kissing inappropriately, “making other passengers uncomfortable,” when a flight attendant asked them to stop.
“Persing was observed nuzzling or kissing Sewell on the neck, and … with his face pressed against Sewell’s vaginal area. During these actions, Sewell was observed smiling,” reads the indictment filed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
So far, so good; a couple is getting frisky on the plane. Note to world; take it to the rest room.
But laws are all about more-or-less arbitrary thresholds:
On a second warning from the flight attendant, Persing snapped back threatening the flight attendant with “serious consequences” if he did not leave them alone.
The comment was enough to have the couple, both in their early 40s, arrested when the plane reached its destination in Raleigh, North Carolina, and charged with obstructing a flight attendant and with criminal association…Persing’s lawyer William Peregoy said his client was not feeling well when he placed his head on his companion’s lap, and that he only threatened the flight attendant with reporting him to his superiors on landing.
Note to the lawyers involved; we have an entire political party trying to trivialize the War On Terror. Please don’t contribute to it.
…please take some time out to think about those whose days are not so routine at the moment.
Max Boot on the consequences of “cut and run” or “cut and jog”, or whatever it is the Democrats are proposing:
Bad as the situation is today, it could get a lot worse if we simply pull out. The probable result might be labeled “civil war,” but it would bear scant resemblance to our own Civil War. It wouldn’t be two sides fighting one another; it would be a war of all against all. Iraq would probably degenerate into the kind of anarchy seen in Somalia and Afghanistan in the 1990s. As in those countries, the resulting backlash could produce an Islamist dictatorship that would threaten American interests. We would also be hurt by the perception that we are a “weak horse” (to quote Osama bin Laden) that can be driven out of a country by a few suicide bombers — a perception sure to embolden terrorists.
Not a pleasant scenario. But we need to be honest with ourselves about what is involved in an unseemly dash for the exits. By all means, try to apply a political Band-Aid to Iraq’s gaping wounds. Just don’t be under any illusion that it will hold.
More on this later this week.
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