Hell no we won't go.

Are you hoping so?

They won't put you in barracks with the boys, you know, CG.

Kicking the Can With Iran



President Bush offered a big economic carrot to Iran Thursday - entry to the World Trade Organization - to sway it from making bomb-grade uranium. This US shift, from threatening the Islamic republic to wooing it, hasn't been in Mr. Bush's antiterrorism playbook up to now.
The move could be downright Clintonian.

Before, Bush hadn't wanted to repeat a mistake made by President Clinton, who offered economic benefits to another nuclear-bent nation, North Korea, in exchange for halting a bombmaking program, only to see it cheat. Iran, too, was caught cheating on its nuclear agreements in 2002.

Bush has chosen wisely, however, because the US really can't make good on any military or economic threats against Iran. And Iran, too, is in need of trade benefits to create jobs for its massive numbers of unemployed youth.

Both sides can kick this nuclear can down the road. By most accounts, Iran is at least three years away from making a nuclear device, if that's what it is actually doing.

Still, the ultimate solution will be difficult. Iran also wants up to 10 nuclear reactors. That would require even more international inspectors crawling over suspect facilities to keep Iran from cheating again.

In talks with its European interlocutors this week, Iran agreed to halt its uranium enrichment for two months to see what the West has to offer. With the US clearing the way for Iran's entry into the WTO, a deal that would prevent a nuclear arms race in the Middle East is possible - at least for now.

Actually, there is no Royal Army, per se, there are however, the Royal Marines and the Royal Air Force, as well as the Royal Artillery . . . you should probably go with the latter, i hear they've very big guns . . .

May 28, 2005 7:35 am US/Eastern
(1010 WINS) (WASHINGTON) Rep. Charles Rangel is once again pushing a bill to re-instate the military draft, a year after the effort caused a flurry of campaign-season conflict over the war in Iraq.

Rangel, an antiwar Democrat from Harlem, offered the same measure last year, only to vote against it when Republicans brought the bill to the House.

At the time, GOP leaders were upset over a growing buzz on the Internet that the Bush administration might begin drafting American citizens if Bush won re-election. They blamed Democrats for fueling the speculation in a cynical attempt to win voters to their candidate, John Kerry.

Rangel said he is again calling for a draft because military recruitment is falling short.

"Everyone knows that we went into this war with an insufficient number of troops, but the problem now is filling the ranks of those units that are already on the ground," said Rangel.

The veteran lawmaker has railed against the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq war, called for the removal of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and argued that the burdens of the war disproportionately have fallen on the poor and minorities.

Merry Andrew
Do you think that having a conscripted army would make any difference to Bush. He marches to his own drummer and couldn't care less what the people want. No. to him more troops would only be more cannon fodder for his Crusade.

Sentanta
A discussion with Brandon is equivalent to one with an empty barrel. Have long since learned to tune him out. He travels from thread to thread spewing the same tired rhetoric like a broken faucet in dire need of repair.

Too Few, Yet Too Many

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: May 30, 2005
One of the more bizarre aspects of the Iraq war has been President Bush's repeated insistence that his generals tell him they have enough troops. Even more bizarrely, it may be true - I mean, that his generals tell him that they have enough troops, not that they actually have enough. An article in yesterday's Baltimore Sun explains why.

The article tells the tale of John Riggs, a former Army commander, who "publicly contradicted Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld by arguing that the Army was overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan" - then abruptly found himself forced into retirement at a reduced rank, which normally only happens as a result of a major scandal.

The truth, of course, is that there aren't nearly enough troops. "Basically, we've got all the toys, but not enough boys," a Marine major in Anbar Province told The Los Angeles Times.

Yet it's also true, in a different sense, that we have too many troops in Iraq.

Back in September 2003 a report by the Congressional Budget Office concluded that the size of the U.S. force in Iraq would have to start shrinking rapidly in the spring of 2004 if the Army wanted to "maintain training and readiness levels, limit family separation and involuntary mobilization, and retain high-quality personnel."

Let me put that in plainer English: our all-volunteer military is based on an implicit promise that those who serve their country in times of danger will also be able to get on with their lives. Full-time soldiers expect to spend enough time at home base to keep their marriages alive and see their children growing up. Reservists expect to be called up infrequently enough, and for short enough tours of duty, that they can hold on to their civilian jobs.

To keep that promise, the Army has learned that it needs to follow certain rules, such as not deploying more than a third of the full-time forces overseas except during emergencies. The budget office analysis was based on those rules.

But the Bush administration, which was ready neither to look for a way out of Iraq nor to admit that staying there would require a much bigger army, simply threw out the rulebook. Regular soldiers are spending a lot more than a third of their time overseas, and many reservists are finding their civilian lives destroyed by repeated, long-term call-ups.

Two things make the burden of repeated deployments even harder to bear. One is the intensity of the conflict. In Slate, Phillip Carter and Owen West, who adjusted casualty figures to take account of force size and improvements in battlefield medicine (which allow more of the severely wounded to survive), concluded that "infantry duty in Iraq circa 2004 comes out just as intense as infantry duty in Vietnam circa 1966."

The other is the way in which the administration cuts corners when it comes to supporting the troops. From their foot-dragging on armoring Humvees to their apparent policy of denying long-term disability payments to as many of the wounded as possible, officials seem almost pathologically determined to nickel-and-dime those who put their lives on the line for their country.

Now, predictably, the supply of volunteers is drying up.

Most reporting has focused on the problems of recruiting, which has fallen far short of goals over the past few months. Serious as it is, however, the recruiting shortfall could be only a temporary problem. If and when we get out of Iraq - I know, a big if and a big when - it shouldn't be too hard to find enough volunteers to maintain the Army's manpower.

Much more serious, because it would be irreversible, would be a mass exodus of mid-career military professionals. "That's essentially how we broke the professional Army we took into Vietnam," one officer told the National Journal. "At some point, people decided they could no longer weather the back-to-back deployments."

And we're already seeing stories about how young officers, facing the prospect of repeated harrowing tours of duty in a war whose end is hard to imagine, are reconsidering whether they really want to stay in the military.

For a generation Americans have depended on a superb volunteer Army to keep us safe - both from our enemies, and from the prospect of a draft. What will we do once that Army is broken?

DAMIEN CAVE
Published: June 3, 2005
Rachel Rogers, a single mother of four in upstate New York, did not worry about the presence of National Guard recruiters at her son's high school until she learned that they taught students how to throw hand grenades, using baseballs as stand-ins. For the last month she has been insisting that administrators limit recruiters' access to children.

Orlando Terrazas, a former truck driver in Southern California, said he was struck when his son told him that recruiters were promising students jobs as musicians. Mr. Terrazas has been trying since September to hang posters at his son's public school to counter the military's message.

Meanwhile, Amy Hagopian, co-chairwoman of the Parent-Teacher-Student Association at Garfield High School in Seattle, has been fighting against a four-year-old federal law that requires public schools to give military recruiters the same access to students as college recruiters get, or lose federal funding. She also recently took a few hours off work to stand beside recruiters at Garfield High and display pictures of injured American soldiers from Iraq.

"We want to show the military that they are not welcome by the P.T.S.A. in this building," she said. "We hope other P.T.S.A.'s will follow."

Two years into the war in Iraq, as the Army and Marines struggle to refill their ranks, parents have become boulders of opposition that recruiters cannot move.

Mothers and fathers around the country said they were terrified that their children would have to be killed - or kill - in a war that many see as unnecessary and without end.

Around the dinner table, many parents said, they are discouraging their children from serving.

At schools, they are insisting that recruiters be kept away, incensed at the access that they have to adolescents easily dazzled by incentive packages and flashy equipment.

A Department of Defense survey last November, the latest, shows that only 25 percent of parents would recommend military service to their children, down from 42 percent in August 2003.

"Parents," said one recruiter in Ohio who insisted on anonymity because the Army ordered all recruiters not to talk to reporters, "are the biggest hurdle we face."

Legally, there is little a parent can do to prevent a child over 18 from enlisting. But in interviews, recruiters said that it was very hard to sign up a young man or woman over the strong objections of a parent.

The Pentagon - faced with using only volunteers during a sustained conflict, an effort rarely tried in American history - is especially vexed by a generation of more activist parents who have no qualms about projecting their own views onto their children.

Lawrence S. Wittner, a military historian at the State University of New York, Albany, said today's parents also had more power.

"With the draft, there were limited opportunities for avoiding the military, and parents were trapped, reduced to draft counseling or taking their children to Canada," he said. "But with the volunteer armed force, what one gets is more vigorous recruitment and more opportunities to resist."

Some of that opportunity was provoked by the very law that was supposed to make it easier for recruiters to reach students more directly. No Child Left Behind, which was passed by Congress in 2001, requires schools to turn over students' home phone numbers and addresses unless parents opt out. That is often the spark that ignites parental resistance.

Recruiters, in interviews over the past six months, said that opposition can be fierce. Three years ago, perhaps 1 or 2 of 10 parents would hang up immediately on a cold call to a potential recruit's home, said a recruiter in New York who, like most others interviewed, insisted on anonymity to protect his career. "Now," he said, "in the past year or two, people hang up all the time. "

Several recruiters said they had even been threatened with violence.

"I had one father say if he saw me on his doorstep I better have some protection on me," said a recruiter in Ohio. "We see a lot of hostility."

continued
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/nyregion/03recruit.html?th&emc=th

I do not trust an all-volunteer army. The people serving today are mercenaries; to them, being in the military is just a job. A citizen army, on the other hand, is a historical tradition in most democracies. An army of mercenaries is loyal to its leaders and commanders; a citizen army tends to be loyal to the ideals of the republic. It is much harder to imagine an Abu Ghraib type of scandal with people off the street as the perpetrators. Most would have bridled at the idea and opposed it.

Merry Andrew wrote:

I do not trust an all-volunteer army. The people serving today are mercenaries; to them, being in the military is just a job. A citizen army, on the other hand, is a historical tradition in most democracies. An army of mercenaries is loyal to its leaders and commanders; a citizen army tends to be loyal to the ideals of the republic. It is much harder to imagine an Abu Ghraib type of scandal with people off the street as the perpetrators. Most would have bridled at the idea and opposed it.

That sounds great ... but then you have Vietnam as historical precedent. Back then it was "people off the street", a citizen army, who fought ... yet no lack of gruesomenesses on the part of those same citizens. So on that count, I'm sceptical.