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December 08, 2005
Bob Herbert: Sharing the Sacrifice or Ending It.
Bob Herbert today calls for the draft to be reinstated. A truly foul and horrible idea. Seriously disgusting.
For the life of the citizen belongs to that citizen, not to the State or the politicians who control it.
As Don Boudreaux points out:
The state, at its best, provides protection against violence. It is a service. It is a valuable service, perhaps even an especially valuable service. But it is a service. The supplier of this service is entitled to no greater claim on the rights or property or lives of its customers than are suppliers of other services. If General Motors or Starbucks or The Wall Street Journal cannot supply their services without conscripting workers, they should go out of business. If the state cannot supply its service without violating the very rights that allegedly justify its existence, it should step aside and let some other provider supply this service.
Tag bob herbert
If it is true, as President Bush and many others have argued, that
horrific consequences will result if American forces are pulled from
Iraq in the near future, then how is it that we are even considering a
significant drawdown of troops in advance of next fall's Congressional
elections?
Opponents of a swift withdrawal speak of potential consequences that
are dire in the extreme: the eruption of a wider civil war with ever
more horrendous Iraqi casualties; the transformation of Iraq into a
safe haven and even more of a training ground for anti-American
terrorists; the involvement of neighboring countries like Iran, Syria
and Turkey in a spreading conflict that could destabilize the entire
Middle East.
Vice President Dick Cheney told troops at Fort Drum, N.Y., on Tuesday
that in the event of a swift withdrawal of American troops, Iraq
''would return to the rule of tyrants, become a massive source of
instability in the Middle East and be a staging area for ever greater
attacks against America and other civilized nations.''
Senator John McCain, who defines ''complete victory'' in Iraq as the
establishment of a ''flawed but functioning democracy,'' told Tim
Russert of NBC that achieving even that modest goal would be ''long and
hard and tough.''
If the hawks are right, if all of this is so -- and if this war is,
indeed, still winnable -- then the Bush administration has an
obligation to level with the American people, explaining clearly what
will be required in terms of casualties, financial costs and other
sacrifices, and telling the truth about the shabby, amateurish state of
the Iraqi security forces.
As it stands now, the United States is incapable of defeating the
insurgency with the forces it has in Iraq. So it is beyond preposterous
to think that Iraq can be pacified in a year or 18 months or two years
by a fledgling, underequipped Iraqi Army and a hapless police force
riddled with brutal, partisan militias.
What's more, the U.S. military itself is in danger of cracking under
the strain of this endless Iraq ordeal. Troops are being sent into the
war zone for their third and fourth tours, which is hideously unfair.
The more times you roll the dice, the more likely snake eyes will pop
up.
Even with lowered standards, the Army can't meet its recruitment goals.
And the National Guard and Reserves have been all but exhausted by the
war effort.
The combination of troop shortages, declining public support for the
war and the Republicans' anxiety over next year's elections all but
ensures some substantial reduction in U.S. forces in Iraq over the next
eight to 12 months.
And yet the hawks say we must continue the fight. Well, wars fought
with one eye on the polls and one eye on the political calendar get
lots of people killed for nothing.
If this war is worth fighting, it's worth fighting right. And that
means mobilizing not just the handful of troops who have borne the
burden of this wretched conflict, but the entire nation. Taxes would
have to be raised, the military expanded, the forces in Iraq bolstered
and a counterinsurgency strategy developed that would have some chance
of actually defeating the enemy.
To do that would require implementing a draft. It's easy to make the
case for war when the fighting will be done by other people's children.
If this war is as important as the hawks insist it is, the burden
should be shared by all of us. The youngsters sacrificed on the altar
of Iraq should be drawn from the widest possible swath of the general
population.
If most Americans are unwilling to send their children to fight in
Iraq, it must mean that most Americans do not feel that winning the war
is absolutely essential.
The truth is that no one knows for sure what will happen if we pull our
troops out of Iraq. Many of those who insist that the sky will fall
were insisting three years ago that Iraq had weapons of mass
destruction and that invading U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators.
The public initially supported this war because the administration was
very effective at promoting the canard that Iraq was somehow linked to
Al Qaeda and involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Now the hawks must once again bear the burden of persuasion. They must
persuade the public that the U.S. should continue indefinitely fighting
this war, which has embedded us in such a hellish predicament and taken
such a horrendous toll.
If it's not worth fighting, then we should be preparing an orderly exit now.
December 8, 2005 in Military | Permalink
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Comments
I think you're misinterpreting Herbert. Surely he's saying that /if/ one though Iraq was worth fighting, /then/ it would be worth having a draft for, and since nobody does think that, it's not worth fighting and we should come home? Not sure I agree with this, but that seems to be the argument.
Posted by: dsquared | Dec 8, 2005 4:13:17 PM
Ask any soldier and he'll tell you that conscripts are more trouble than they are worth, especially in the sort of low intesnity warfare that is going on in Iraq. By definition all your troops and most of your junior leaders will be unwilling participants in the sort of conflict that requires small groups of men to operate independently (a corporal's war).
Methinks this idea comes, perversely, from the left side of the spectrum, more in a hope that they can open another flank against the evil Republicans. As with Vietnam disgruntled conscripts would make a very effective anti-war group. Unfortunately, from the leftie perspective, the professional troops seem to show a distressing, determination to do the job before going home.
RM
Posted by: The Remittance Man | Dec 9, 2005 7:00:10 AM