Lando 
Posted on 06/28/2005 2:11:51 PM PDT by Lando Lincoln
Supporters of the Iraq war like to claim that Iraq is merely the current front line in a battle for national survival against a vast and shadowy enemy. They call this opponent "Islamofascism" or "global terrorism" or "the enemies of freedom." (How Saddam Hussein's brutal but ruthlessly nonideological regime ended up on this enemies' list remains unclear).
For example, Commentary's Norman Podhoretz assures us we are fighting the first battles of World War IV, which he estimates could last 50 years, while The Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer conjures up visions of atomic bombs going off simultaneously in 10 American cities if we should fail to maintain our nerve in places like Iraq.
Meanwhile, David Brooks of The New York Times complains that Americans were willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of troops to defeat Adolf Hitler, but are grumbling about losing a much smaller number of soldiers (so far) in the battle against Islamofascism.
Naturally the Bush administration encourages such claims while it tries to stem the public's rapid loss of enthusiasm for a war that our increasingly overstretched troops are being forced to fight without any clear goal or exit strategy.
Here's the most striking aspect of this supposed battle for national survival: for the past several months, the armed forces have failed to meet their recruiting quotas, often by large percentages (the Army missed by 42 percent in April). In response, the military has had to resort to such measures as keeping soldiers in Iraq for months after they were scheduled to be brought home, while calling up members of the reserves who hadn't seen active duty for years, and assumed they never would again (in some cases, grandfathers and grandmothers are being pulled out of civilian life to help fight Podhoretz's world war).
Now if anything ought to qualify as a true national crisis, one would think this would. Here we are fighting for our very survival as a nation, and we don't even have enough soldiers to fight what we are told is only a preliminary battle in a vast war. Even many of the Iraq campaign's most enthusiastic supporters now admit that the main flaw in the operation was the failure to put enough "boots on the ground" to keep the country from degenerating into precisely the kind of guerrilla war our troops are now fighting.
The obvious solution to this crisis is to reinstitute the draft. Yet this is so politically impossible that members of the Bush administration are more likely to come out in support of drowning newborn babies than to have the word "draft" pass their lips.
But a far more modest step than bringing back the draft is available, and the complete unwillingness of supporters of the war to take it says a great deal.
Where are the calls for voluntary enlistment? Try to find a single speech in which any member of the Bush administration, or any other prominent politician who supports the war, calls on America's young people (or its middle-aged - there's no reason to be picky when you're fighting for national survival) to come to the aid of our badly undermanned armed forces.
You won't find one - and the reasons aren't hard to guess. First, asking others to make sacrifices that you yourself refuse to make, and that you aren't willing for your own children to make, requires a level of hypocrisy that even most politicians can't quite stomach.
Second, the politicians who started it probably don't believe the war in Iraq is crucial to America's survival. Or if they do, the way they're fighting it qualifies as something close to treason.
Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. He can be reached at paul.campos@colorado.edu
Lando
According to the Rocky Mountain News, it is "ruthlessly non-ideological" to offer $25,000 cash to the family of every suicide bomber sent to kill Jews?
MSM anti-Semitism gets more blatant every day. How long will it be before they are seriously considering the oven as a potential Final Solution to the Jewish Problem? (Or the Christian Problem, for that matter.)
I think it's a good point. The President is not rallying the country to be at war. Shared sacrifice is part of what won WW2 for us. An alienated minority fighting alone is part of what lost Vietnam for us.
They keep overlooking the fact that America shamefully betrayed those that did serve when a steaming load decided it’d be a good idea to pardon the last batch of draft dodgers.
Now they find themselves in a pickle. Funny how that works out.
He's dealing a fatal blow to his own ability to rally the country around this war, with his immigration policy. If he can't even establish control over our own borders, why should anyone take seriously his effort to control Iraq's?
What a lot of people fail to consider was that when Nixon got rid of the draft, the counterculture died with it. The war on terror does not need people who need to be drafted to fight it. It needs moral clarity, a clear definition of what constitutes evil and how it endangers the nation, and most importantly we need a media that does not offer itself to terrorists by manipulating public opinion to advance a questionable rationale against the war. The fourth estate at times, like a fifth column leverages e the terrorists position by elevating through an abstract, morally relativistic arguement that somehow the insurgency in Iraq, the remnants of the Taliban in Afghanistan or countless groups around the world with an axe to grind against the west are like the minutement of the twenty first century.
Clarity and resolve is what beats the Insurgency. Nothing more. Sadly two qualities missing in the MSM today!
AAAAGGGGGHHHH!!!!!!
Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado, and is dumber than a small pile of rocks.
The President is not rallying the country to be at war
And what would you have him do?
This guy is so full of himself. I enlisted before I had even registered for the draft because I believed so strongly that communism was our biggest threat. Turns out I was wrong. Its guys like this and the Rats that were then and continue now to be the biggest threat to the US. Idiots, the whole basket of them.
What minority would that be?
"According to the Rocky Mountain News, it is "ruthlessly non-ideological" to offer $25,000 cash to the family of every suicide bomber sent to kill Jews?"
No, according to Paul Campos, a columnist for the Rocky Mountain News. Don't rattle the anti-Semite sabre too loudly before you check out the source. Especially since the RMN is normally a better MSM outlet than the rest of the bunch. They're not Human Events, or the Union-Leader, but they're a far sight better than USA Today.
And Campos is a liberal, but he's not the average liberal. Unlike the rest of academia, he at least strongly condemned Ward Churchill: "anyone who reads widely in the collected works of Professor Churchill, and especially anyone who listens to his speeches, will, if they are not blinded by certain ideological commitments, recognize the essentially fascist tendency of his work. If a white American were to speak of any foreign people or nation in anything like the way Churchill discusses America and Americans, the fascist character of his work would be obvious to everyone."
And in this case, he's got a point.
Sorry, what exactly is this point that he has. Do you agree with his assertion that Saddam was "non-ideological"? If so, how do you explain Saddam's substantial role in funding Islamic terrorism and his also-substantial role in black-market nuclear trafficking?
That assertion was true. Saddam was your garden variety thug dictator.
If so, how do you explain Saddam's substantial role in funding Islamic terrorism and his also-substantial role in black-market nuclear trafficking?
And you have identified what Campos missed. Our garden variety thug dictator was a threat because -- for his own security -- he was willing to ally himself with the highly ideological Islamofascists.
Campos is not a dummy. But he is a liberal, unable to comprehend or assimilate facts which might challenge his faith.
Which is what is really revealing here. The author betrays by calling Saddam "non-ideological" that the author actually shares that fascist ideology. And who is to be surprised by finding fascism among the US left? The only surprise is to see such an admission, however indirect.
As an ideology, fascism tends to attract those who aspire to power for power's sake. I'd contend that thug dictators are interested in ideology only insofar as it serves their purpose.
I.e., more "thug" than "ideologue". But that's just me. And your point is well taken...
But I think the overarching point of his article was essentially that the administration has done a poor job of making the war on terror America's war. I don't think anyone can argue that had Dubya made in 2001 a statement of the broad aims of the war and how we would judge its resolution, the sacrifices that Americans should expect to make in forwarding the war effort, and the duties of Americans in prosecuting that effort, more Americans would be behind it. I think that is the weakness in the American way of war as of the last half century: we state amorphous aims, call generally--not specifically--for sacrifice on behalf of those aims, and do not enlist the country, leaving it out of the effort, saying "we're at war, you go about your business." The "Powell doctrine," for all that it was eponymously self-promoting and intended as CYA for Colin himself, wasn't actually a bad lesson to learn from American 20th century war experiences, but it sure doesn't seem to have sunk in with anyone but Colin.
Yes, I know a war on terror is different. And I'm not saying we need to have the American people saving their used toothpaste tubes or going on meatless Mondays. But to a degree, where money saved on 'meatless Mondays' would go to war bonds and promote an end to terrorism either through direct military intervention or indirect aid to friendly, democratic institutions, that would be a good idea. And that's where I agree with the author's point. We should enlist every American in the effort when America is at war. If we don't, we're leaving idle hands to do the devil's work.
When they took the fifth amendment,
I was quiet because I didn't own real estate.
When they took the fourth amendment,
I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs.
When they took the sixth amendment,
I was quiet because I was innocent.
When they took the second amendment,
I was quiet because I didn't own a gun.
Now they've taken the first amendment,
and I can say nothing about it.
I disagree with this President on a LOT - but I don't think he can be blamed for the open treason of the opposing party, other than that in not seeing it prosecuted he's invited more of it.
Come to think of it, that's perhaps the place to start, if he wants the country aboard. Demonstrate seriousness by prosecuting treason.
Whoa, whoa, whoa--I'm not blaming Bush for the treason of the Rats or their MSM stalking horses. But I do think that it woulda been hellaharder for them to backstab the country if the country was brought onto the team. The traitors would have been their with the knives, but that the rest of the country doesn't really seem to have an opinion is what emboldens them. There, I think the President fell short. The folks in the middle, the ones who are unsure about the war, they could have been better sold if only by making them feel like part of it. They would not be fodder for the MSM and Rat traitors were their involvement more personal.
That's all I'm sayin'.
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