I thought of this thread when I read two op-ed pieces from the New York Times today.
The first is by David Douglas Duncan, the famous Korean and Vietnam War combat photographer and ex-Marine.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/25/opinion/25duncan.html? He writes:
"Today, in Iraq, where nearly every dawn is lacerated by mounting carnage - local and foreign - American troops are hemorrhaging among the wounded and the dead, pawns in an unspeakable farce, for the United States of America is not at war.
Only 135,000 men and women in American uniform are fighting - volunteers, members of the National Guard, reservists. There is no draft. No threat of a uniform hangs over the citizens of a nation of nearly 300 million who, in polls, support the invasion of a remote country upon whom our government would pin guilt of 9/11 ... and then attack."
The second is by David Kennedy, a Stanford professor.
http://nytimes.com/2005/07/25/opinion/25kennedy.html He writes:
"we now have an active-duty military establishment that is, proportionate to population, about 4 percent of the size of the force that won World War II. And today's military budget is about 4 percent of gross domestic product, as opposed to nearly 40 percent during World War II.
The implications are deeply unsettling: history's most potent military force can now be put into the field by a society that scarcely breaks a sweat when it does so. We can now wage war while putting at risk very few of our sons and daughters, none of whom is obliged to serve. Modern warfare lays no significant burdens on the larger body of citizens in whose name war is being waged.
This is not a healthy situation. It is, among other things, a standing invitation to the kind of military adventurism that the founders correctly feared was the greatest danger of standing armies - a danger made manifest in their day by the career of Napoleon Bonaparte, whom Jefferson described as having 'transferred the destinies of the republic from the civil to the military arm.' "
You may not agree with everything in these editorials - I don't, certainly not in the second one - but they are thought-provoking.
Do you remember, during the first Gulf War, the stories about rich young Kuwaitis partying it up in London and Paris while waiting for ordinary American soldiers to fight their war? So today, do we have rich young Americans partying it up in Miami and New York while waiting for ordinary American soldiers to fight
their war?
Put another way - why aren't there more sons and daughters of politicians and lobbyists and lawyers and CEOs on the front lines in Iraq? Never mind, I know "why". Change the question to "shouldn't there be?" Would that mean that their influential parents would be less likely to support going to war in the first place? Or that their parents would be more likely to press for more troops, more reconstruction spending, more equipment, to shorten the war?