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Doug Bandow: Recruiting Problems Should Create Cause for Reflection
Share / Recommend - Comment - Print - Sunday, Jul 31 2005, 12:47AM
As most everyone knows, the Army and Marine Corps and Army National Guard and Reserves have been running into recruiting problems. The cause isn't difficult to understand. Indeed, you'd have to worry about someone who was enthusiastic about joining the armed services in order to fight in a war that: was based on completely false claims; has been badly bungled by officials who foresaw no opposition and didn't bother to acquire the necessary equipment (such as body armor and armored vehicles); has spawned a "democratic" process in Iraq that risks becoming distinctly illiberal, and has created an active recruiting and training ground for terrorists.
But war supporters remain adept at finding scapegoats. Some leftish activists have been attempting to organize a counter-recruitment movement. I don't know how successful it has been in practice, but Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy is not pleased:
Those who oppose our armed forces recruiters' visits to schools and universities or otherwise interfere with their activities will not prevent us from waging the war we have no choice but to fight. They may, however, require us to do so with forces that are obliged to serve rather than those who do so freely.However, if anything is evident in the aftermath of the administration's WMD intelligence fiasco, it is that the war was not necessary, but a matter of choice pursued for reasons having little to do with any direct threats to America. The fact that those most at risk in fighting -- as opposed to arm-chair warriors sitting around Washington planning -- such a conflict are increasingly saying no should create cause for reflection. There is nothing inevitable about how long America stays, or in what form it remains engaged.
If war enthusiasts (especially those enthusiastic young conservatives about whom I read who are now active on college campuses) can't seem to make it down to the armed services recruiting offices, the administration has yet another reason to accelerate plans to get out. It's one thing to contemplate conscription to preserve the nation from a hegemonic totalitarian menace. It's quite another thing for those who failed to serve yesterday to draft those who don't want to join today to spread "democracy" -- especially if the ultimate result is an authoritarian Iraq leaning toward Axis of Evil member Iran.
-- Doug Bandow
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A friend of mine has a son who was on his way to a posting in Hawaii. Friday, he was issued new orders: recruitment duty in Atlanta, GA...
I hope he doesn't go, but...
If there one thing this Admin is utterly incapable of doing it is refelecting on any of their actions. However bad those actions may turn out. Their answer is to spin, spin, spin, figerpoint, fingerpoint, and if that does not work attack on a personal/professional/legal front.
I would respectfully submit you are wasting your time asking for anything like reflection from them. I stand a better chance of getting my dog to write a review of Camus' The Fall than asking them to ponder their mistakes.
Never fear, Rome had a plan, Rove has one too...
USA Today newspaper, in a recent report, said that citizenship applications from service members more than doubled in one year to almost 10,000 after Bush's executive order in 2002. In the first three quarters of the current fiscal year, the immigration service has received more than 11,000 naturalization petitions from soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen.
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/GG30Df03.html
Mercs and furinners will fight for the chickenhawks.
Who was it who said, "What if they throw a war and no one shows up to fight"?
Jeffrey Toobin has an interesting article on John Roberts in the latest New Yorker, and on a case dealing with "race and gender provisions of recruiting policies," which the Court faces in October. Do universities and other institutions have a right to keep military recruiters away?
There should be a draft, but there should be
an easy way to get out of it. All you have to
do is to state that you do not support the war
and that this stand will be made public forever.
Then we'll see the ranks for those young chicken
hawks thin as they are forced to either stand up
and serve in the war they love so much or publicly
state that they do not support the war.
Of course such ideas are just fantasy. Akin to the
delicious idea of Karl Rove being "perp-walked" in
handcuffs for betraying his oath and legal
obligation to keep classified information
confidential.
RE: "Doug Bandow: Recruiting Problems Should Create Cause for Reflection
As most everyone knows, the Army and Marine Corps and Army National Guard and Reserves have been running into recruiting problems. The cause isn't difficult to understand."
Causes for reflections indeed. I have just returned from an encounter with a returning Iraq veteran. Strange since he is just twenty. But truth is he is all messed up. He recounted on how his unit fired upon a five ton truck whose occupants had not stopped at a road stop despite all of the strobe lights which were flashing upon the vehicle. With the result that the driver, his wife and children, the five of them, had been killed or wounded. He also recounted of how one soldier took away to America - as souvenir - a part of the brain of his first kill.
My Iraq veteran is of dual American-Canadian citizenship - he was all gung-ho that he would go to Iraq and kick butt - now he is now being thanked for by the Bush Administration: that if he does not volunteer to go back to Iraq they will remove his access to reenter the U.S. I.E. Revoke his dual citizenship.
Now, that is gratefulness for you when you put body and soul on the line in the infamous Iraq War.
Infamous President and Administration indeed - all brains aside!
Here's my solution to the recruiting conundrum: fewer stupid and wasteful wars! The problem is not one of inadequate supply of soldiers, but of inflated demand.
When Americans are attacked by some enemey, and feel that the security of their country and safety of their fellow-ciizens are vitally threatened, they will indeed sign up for military service and go fight that enemy until it is defeated.
But when they come to understand that some war is a con job, a lie-driven adventure cooked up to serve the strategic or ideological fantasies of duplicitous elites; that it is being waged against a target country that neither attacked, nor even *threatened* us; and that the war is only distantly related to the struggle against the people who actually *did* attack us - then they do not sign up.
I don't find the alleged shortage of recruits a cause for concern at all. In fact it for me a reassuring sign of the basic good sense of the majority of the American people. Most Americans seem still to hold on to the republican notion that a self-governing people is sparing in its expenditure of young lives, and engages the expense reluctantly, and only for causes vital to the defense of the nation. I am heartened to see that so many American parents are determined to keep their children away from the dismal factory works of the war machine, and out of the the cluthches of the fanatic predators who feed those works.
Indeed, there is only a "shortage" of recruits if one takes the Iraq war to be a legitimate and necessary use of our armed forces. It is not; and I suspect we have more than adequate forces to handle the legitimate and necessary defense needs.
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