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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (120024)	6/15/2005 1:03:30 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 793905

Tim, you say, with regard to why those sending our young to face death in Iraq are not serving that; "They are [too] old to go, and they can't send their families. Their family members make their own decisions in life." That's true, Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice, Biden, Kerry, Hastert, and all the others are too old to go. As the army recruitment efforts reveal, however, the key to getting young people to serve is, at least in part, to convince their parents that it's the right thing to do. I guess we need a recruiter in the halls of power because their children and grandchildren aren't serving. And neither are the huge majority of the other children of the rich and powerful from universities such as Yale, Princeton and Harvard. Now why is that? Is it only "noble" for the powerless to serve and die for their country? In my view if you're going to send men to fight and face death then you should believe in the cause so strongly that you'd be willing to send your own kids or go yourself. But of course in Vietnam only a few like Kerry and Hagel served, and most like Cheney, had "better things to do." It looks like this "war" in Iraq will have the same kind of "service" from the families of the powerful. In my view, that's a travesty. I guess they don't like to chance their kids bleeding out in wars that are questionable and dirty. (By the way, in WW11 I understand that a disproportionate number of Harvard and Yale graduates were killed in action.) Re: I'm sure the story of that one unit was true, I'm also sure that there are other units like that one. But that doesn't mean they all are, or that the quality of Iraqi units isn't rising. They are becoming more effective and taking a larger role. Progress has been painfully slow but it has been real. How do you know? Reporters cannot travel anywhere in Iraq outside the green zone without full military support. Almost all of the news is filtered or generated through military sources and the military has acknowledged that they are "fighting the information war." Without any free access, how can we know. If the Iraqi units were truly effective in ANY significant number of instances, isn't it likely that we'd hear a lot about it from people like Myers and Rumsfeld, but we don't. The news that does trickle out usually involves wholesale desertions in the face of danger where the "trained" Iraqis drop their weapons and go home or, worse yet, go over to the other side. In the face of that we are repeatedly bombarded with official assertions that the Iraqis are getting better and doing better. For some reason I'm skeptical. Maybe it has something to do with "flowers and open arms," or "the war will cost about 2 billion because of the Iraqi oil revenues," or "after Fallujah the back of the terrorists will be broken," or "the elections were the turning point," or .... And then there are the echo of Vietnam statements about how the people are grateful and that we'll turn the corner. With respect to the question of accepting foreign rule, you write: "I'd rather have foreign soldiers, that acted like American and British soldiers, supporting the elected government of my country, than I would want to live under someone like Saddam or his sons." That's your preference? I'd prefer to handle my own problems without some massive foreign power from another culture that didn't speak my language using rockets, bombs, tanks, roadblocks and broken down doors in the middle of the night to "help" me. But if you'd like to subject your family to the approach to roadblocks where nervous, scared and angry foreign men with their fingers on triggers were twitching at every odd move, that's fine with me. If you'd like to risk the bombing and near total destruction of your city the size of Fallujah by the foreigners in their efforts to clear out insurgents, that's fine with me. If you'd like to spend months trying to find out where your son was taken in the middle of the night, or even if he was still alive, only to be frustrated by the inability or unwillingness of the foreigners to communicate that information, that's fine with me. Because remember, under my hypothesis the soldiers wouldn't be British or American, they'd be Chinese, or Egyptian or Vietnamese or from some other culture and religion. And they'd certainly support the elected government of your country, but of course the "elected government" would understand who had the guns and why. Dig a little deeper and examine how you'd really feel about that. Ed