Now here is a very well written column, written just before the suicide bombing in the mess tent at Mosul, but totally relevant to it. All of the news stations totay are reporting that only 38% of Americans support the war in Iraq. Who is going to go fight there next? Almost no one is my guess, unless we institute a draft, and of course that would never happen because President Bush has promised us personally that it will not.
When the war fails, correct the marketing plan
Tuesday, December 21, 2004
Their caskets return in the dead of night, far beyond the reach of the television cameras. The official letters of condolence to their families are signed by a machine. Their armored vehicles often aren't. When their tour of duty in Iraq is up, the Army can use its stop-loss power to keep them locked in the combat zone.
And the cannon fodder has finally figured that out. Army National Guard recruiters have conceded they are missing their enlistment targets by 30 percent. As Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum told the New York Times last week, "We are correcting, frankly, some of our recruiting themes and slogans to reflect a reality of today. We're not talking about one weekend a month and two weeks a year and college tuition. We're talking about service to the nation."
That talk of service only goes so far. I'm reminded of the classic Cheech and Chong comedy routine in which the World War II commander of a Japanese kamikaze squadron briefly reviews the day's battle plan for his troops.
"Today," he exhorts, "you will take your kamikaze airplane high into the sky, over the Yankee aircraft carrier, then take the kamikaze plane down, crashing on the deck, killing yourself and all aboard. Before we have the ceremonial sake toast, are there any questions?"
A hand rises tentatively in the back of the crowd: Honorable general-san: Are you out of your flipping mind?
The "reality of today" hasn't discouraged all of the 148,000 troops in Iraq. Evan Wright was the Rolling Stone magazine reporter embedded with the First Marines Reconnaissance Battalion that spearheaded the attack on Iraq in 2003. As Wright notes in his book, "Generation Kill," many in the platoon "see the invasion of Iraq as simply another campaign in a war without end, which is pretty much what their commanders and their president have already told them."
And those young Marines were energized, not paralyzed, by that campaign. As Cpl. Harold James Trombley, 19, blurts out after shooting up an Iraqi town in Wright's prologue, "I was just thinking one thing when we drove into that ambush. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. I felt like I was living it when I seen the flames coming out of windows, the blown-up car in the street, guys crawling around shooting at us."
But if, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld contends, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had, there aren't enough video-game enthusiasts in line. Lt. Gen. James Helmly, chief of the Army Reserve, says recruiting is a "precipitous decline," a daunting development in a war without end and for a country without a draft.
And it's not simply the raw recruits who are balking at spending a year in Iraq. Individual Ready Reserves are soldiers who were honorably discharged but can be called back to active duty at any time. The Associated Press noted Monday that of the 2,288 IRRs ordered to report at Fort Benning, Ga., by Oct. 17, 628 -- or more than one in four -- are still unaccounted for.
When Republican senators like Chuck Hagel of Nebraska are flogging the Pentagon for failing this country and its troops -- "They underestimated, they understated, they undervalued the complications and the difficulties and the dangers," Hagel said Sunday -- small wonder guys on the front lines have reached the same conclusion.
The body count, daunting as it is, no longer frames the disaster. Our troops are refereeing a Shiite-Sunni civil war. Nine hundred soldiers have been evacuated for psychiatric reasons. Iraqi civilian deaths may exceed 17,000. Six Guardsmen face military courts-martial for stripping metal plates and parts from abandoned trucks so they could outfit the vehicles they took to war.
The timeline and training for a Guard unit in New Mexico preparing for duty in Iraq is so intense that the soldiers received only three days off in four months. And on Jan. 30, there will be 9,000 polling stations to protect.
Those recruiters better work on their pitch. It's one thing to sell snow to an Eskimo and quite another to sell a kamikaze mission to a volunteer.
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