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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam who wrote (124421)	2/6/2004 12:32:55 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 281500

<U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel, "We've failed to convince our allies to send troops, we've extended deployments so morale is sinking, and the president is saying we can't cut and run. So what's left? The draft is a very sensitive subject, but at some point, we're going to need more troops, and at that point the only way to get them will be a return to the draft."> Charles, when you want to hire a doctor, dentist, checkout operator or policeman, you get your money out and offer sufficient to hire the people you want. That might be more expensive than you want to pay, well, tough luck, that's how markets work. Getting people to risk coming home in a body bag requires higher pay rates than hiring them to patrol the Smithsonian Institute as a security guard. Kidnapping and press-ganging people for military service is far from freedom. <Rangel has provoked controversy in the past by insisting that a draft is the only way to fill the nation's military needs without exploiting young men and women from lower-income families.> Paying people the going rate isn't exploitation. If they don't want to take the job, they don't have to. <Most military officers understandably prefer an army of volunteers and career soldiers over an army of grudging conscripts; Rumsfeld, too, has long been a staunch advocate of an all-volunteer force.> Good for Rumsfeld. Conscription is the antithesis of human freedom. "We are forcing you to kill those other people and risk being killed because we are defending your freedom". Yeah, right! Mqurice

To: Sam who wrote (124421)	2/8/2004 3:08:15 PM
From: marcos	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Oh right, that's exactly what you need when stuck occupying a country on the other side of the planet - conscription ..... certainly gets the young folk involved in politics, lol .... looks like Lindorff has been reading Carl's posts, with that reference to police ratio in Northern Ireland This fellow Morris was just on CBC radio - ' ... Born in San Francisco in 1916, McNamara has been described by some as an American Zelig. After graduating from Berkeley in 1937, he went to Harvard Business School, where he became the youngest professor in its history. He spent the Second World War in the US Air Force, where served under General Curtis LeMay, the notorious hawk who commanded the air campaign against Japan. Under LeMay, McNamara was a member of the team that agreed a strategy of firebombing 67 Japanese cities, with the loss of 1.9 million civilian lives - before the atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In one of the film's most powerful moments, a tearful McNamara tells Morris that if his side had lost the war, he and LeMay might have been tried as war criminals. 'What makes something moral if you win and immoral if you lose?' he asks plaintively.' observer.guardian.co.uk ' The Observer's efforts to elicit an explanation from McNamara for his refusal to speak out against Vietnam were met with this response: 'Anyone who believes I should have spoken out doesn't understand war, doesn't understand the responsibilities of individuals. Can you imagine in the middle of the Second World War, when the Germans were beginning to lose, the impact on the German military and the lives of the German people of a major individual coming out and saying, "We have got to give up"?' ,,, 'There's this wonderful phrase, the "fog of war",' he tells Morris.... '