Are the soldiers the war?

In the previous post, I talked again about the notion that critics of the Iraq War were somehow hostile to soldiers.  The war's fans have been trying very hard, and using quite a bit of imagination, to make that case against today's opponents of the war. 

The idea of soldiers and their sacrifices becoming a justification for further war and sacrifice is, of course, nothing new.  Abraham Lincoln's brief and immortal speech at Gettysburg on 11/19/1863, made good use of the idea, putting it in semi-religious terms:

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate - we cannot consecrate - we cannot hallow - this ground.  The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.  The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never foreget what they did here.  [There is certainly some measure of irony now in that comment, since Lincoln's speech has become iconic.]  It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It's worth noting here that, though most Americans probably think of this as a tribute to all the soldiers lost, North and South, he was making a tribute to the soldiers of the North.  The "unfinished work" of which he spoke was certainly not the unfinished work of Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy nor of the men who fought for it, the work of destroying the nation and making slavery and white supremacy permanent and inviolable institution.

In fact, I wonder how much the postwar, anti-Reconstruction, anti-democracy "Redemption" movement in the South, with its all-too-successful ideology of the Lost Cause, may have contributed to the particular forms this debate over "honoring the soldiers" takes in the United States.  Neo-Confederates today promote rightwing and racist politics under the pretence of "honoring their ancestors" who fought for slavery in the Confederate army during the American Civil War.

But the cold reality is that that some wars are not worth the lives expended in them.  And to send more and more people to die heroically for their country in such a war is not a good thing in any sane view.  Outside the persecution fantasies of our superpatriots, very few people blame ordinary soldiers for the policies of the government that decides on wars.  But responsible citizens in a democracy have to take a critical attitude about what policies are being followed in wars - whether we support the particular war or not.  To pretend that doing this is "dishonoring the soldiers" is simply an effort to stigmatize criticism as unpatriotic.

The First World War is worth remembering in this regard.  Though today, most Americans think of that war as at leaast somewhat of a positive thing (to the extent they think of it at all!), especially after the later conflict with Germany in the Second World War, that was not the general impression in the years following that bloody conflict.  Other wars have also note fared well in the public memory, though of course there will always be those who romanticize war.  John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in The Culture of Contentment (1992):

World War I, although it evoked the most powerful of patriotic responses at the time, has passed into history largely as a mindless and pointless slaughter.  The party victoriously in power at the time, the Democrats, was rewarded in 1920 with a stern defeat at the polls.  World War II, made inescapable by Japanese and German initiation or declaration of war, has survived with better reputation.  However, the Korean and Vietnam wars, both greatly celebrated in their early months, ended with eventual rejections of the wars themselves and of the administrations responsible.  In the longer run, it cannot be doubted, serious war deeply disturbs the political economy of contentment.

In his valuable book The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (1998), Jerry Lembcke talks about how Bush the Elder used the idea of soldiers as the meaning of the war in a particular way in the buildup to the Gulf War of 1991.  In August of 1990, as a buildup of American troops began in the Gulf in response to Iraq' invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein announced that foreigners in Iraq would be held there as hostages (although of course he did not use that term).  The senior Bush used the image of the hostages to suggest to the American public that our soldiers were being held hostage to Saddam in a similar way.  As Lembcke writes:

Headlines declaring that Saddam Hussein was taking hostages dominated the news of the war for the next several days.  The hostage stories were combined with stories about troops in the Gulf in ways that, at times, conveyed the impression that it was U.S. troops who were the hostages. Goerge [H.W.] Bush abetted the comingling of images by choosing the Veterans of Foreign War (VFW) convention on August 21 [1990] as the occasion on which to declare the beginning of the "hostage crisis."  Other than making the declaration and saying that he would hold the Iraqis responsible for the safety of Americans in Iraq, Bush was noncommittal with regard to the so-called hostages.  His speech ... moved seamlessly from hostages to troops, to whom he also pledged his support.  Then, in a manner that echoed the news media's profiling of civilian individuals and families in Iraq, Bush read family profiles of U.S. soldiers already in the Gulf.  This was very personal and moving, but was this supposed to be a speech about civilian hostages or military troops?

And then came the yellow-ribbon campaign:

The ultimate comingling of hostage and troo-support symbolism was int he use of yellow ribbons - the quintessential hostage/prisoner symbol [my emphasis] - for a support-the-troops symbo.  Still, it was not a given that Americans would transfer their emotional support for individuals to support for policy.  Someone would have to say that the two were linked - or that they were not linked.

It's well worth noting, given today's Republican posturing that only pro-Iraq War Republicans "support the troops" that the critical support in that regard came from the Democratic National Committee (DNC):

On September 16, the DNC expressed support for the American troops in the Persian Gulf while criticizing the Republican administration that put them there...  This support-the-troops-but-not-the-policy statement signaled to the public that there was a debatable issue while evading the important question of how one could oppose the policy without opposing the troops.  Therein was the rub.  On the surface, the statement legitimized opposition to the U.S. military role.  But it did so in the context of hysteria over hostages and troops-as-hostages that was several weeks in the making and already had a gripon the emotions of the American people.  Could opponents of the policy voice their opposition without appearing to be attacking the troops?  Not likely.  Nor was it likely that the yellow-ribbon campaigners would translate their support for the troops into oposition to the war and demand that the troops be brought home.  In reality, the DNC had constructed a one-sided discourse that mobilized the pro-war sentiments of the American people.

I don't mean to suggest any direct analogy to today.  In the case of the invasion of Kuwait, even Democrats who opposed immediate military action in early 1991 saw the invasion as an act of war and a legitimate cause of war to free Kuwait from Iraq.  As did virtually the entire world.

But part of the reason that "support the troops" so easily equates to "support the war" in the minds of many Americans is that one side-effect of the all-volunteer army of the last 30 years has been a sentimentalization of soldiers that makes many people too willing to give them chances to die heroically for their country.

Wesley Clark made this point very well in an interview with Duncan Murrell, published in "The Art of Politics," Oxford-American May/June 2003.  Murrell writes:

The irony, as [Clark] sees it, is that while the relationship between the military and the general public has improved since [the] Vietnam [War], the experience of actually serving in the military has become less common.  The result is a perception of soldiers as the embodiments of ideals - duty, honor, country - reinforced by a sentimentality unsullied by first-hand knowledge of soldiering.  Such admiration for the military is powerful, but not quite powerful enough to drive the sons and daughters of the middle and upper classes into recruiting offices.  "We've been the beneficiaries of that lack of familiarity," Clark says, which has allowed the leadership of the United States to use the military as a symbol, sending soldiers off to wars that don't affect most American families directly by putting their children in harm's way. [my emphasis] ...

[A]n ambivalence toward leaders, Clark says, is common in any organization, including the military.  But such healthy, educated skepticism is missing when Americans make soldiers into symbols, or when political parties make generals into saviors.  This naivete is symptomatic of something very dangerous, in Clark's view.  "The paradox is, or the danger is, that when everybody doesn't have an obligation to serve, the costs of service can become disconnected from the rhetoric of governments. [my emphasis]

And from the policies of governments, as well.

Finally, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who has studied, among many other things, the My Lai massacre, wrote in Made In Iraq: The New Antiwar Veteran Boston Globe 08/25/04 (link here is to CommonDreams.org reprint):

[I]t turns out that Iraq veterans have much in common with their older compatriots who fought in Vietnam. Both groups were involved in a confusing counterinsurgency war conducted in an alien, hostile environment against a nonwhite enemy as elusive as he was dangerous. The result in both cases was an atrocity-producing situation -- one structured militarily and psychologically so that ordinary soldiers with no special history of violence or antisocial behavior were suddenly capable of killing or torturing civilians who were loosely designated as "the enemy."

A significant number of Vietnam veterans found meaning in opposing their war while it was in progress. The hearings on American war crimes and the throwing away of medals were their way of rejecting the war and holding not just themselves but their country accountable.

Their impact on the nation was different from that of other antiwar protesters because they were able to bring the Vietnam death scene directly to the American public, as John Kerry did in his 1971 testimony before a US Senate subcommittee, when he asked, "How we can ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

What Kerry and other antiwar veterans were contesting was the wartime tradition that in order to make sure the fallen did not "die in vain," one must rally round the flag, assert the nobility of the cause, and prosecute the war ever more vigorously.Instead, they invoked the authority of the dead to oppose rather than perpetuate the war. [my emphasis]

This kind of alternative is byno means new -- it was powerfully expressed by writers surviving World War I and goes back as far as Homer.

Truth or Fiction or Folklore?

RepublicanJen at her AOL Journal is still concerned over those stories of anti-Vietnam War protesters spitting on veterans, whether it happened or not: No Spitting on Soldiers, They Say? 09/23/04.

Now, I need to give RJ credit.  She's at least aware that others have claimed the whole thing is an urban legend.  Unlike, say, Chuckie, who just keeps repeating it because it feels good.  Or feels bad, in a good way, by Chuckie's standards.

But she's picking up on a story making the usual rounds in the Republican echo chamber, Drudge Report to Freeperdom, and on from there.  It'll probably be showing up in one of Dick Cheney's speeches in a couple of weeks. 

The story is about a young soldier on leave from duty in Iraq, at home in Ohio.  According to the one news report I've read on it, the one to which RJ links, he was attacked from behind by someone after a Toby Keith concert, who knocked him down and broke his nose and was yelling at him about soldiers.  The news report leads us to believe the attacker singled him out as a soldier because he was wearing a shirt with an "Operation Iraqi Freedom" logo.

The story is from a local NBC affiliate:  Decorated Soldier Reportedly Attacked At Concert nbc4i.com 09/21/04.

Foster Barton, 19, of Grove City, received a Purple Heart for his military service in Iraq. He almost lost his leg last month after a Humvee he was riding in ran over a landmine.

Barton said he was injured again Friday night in a crowded parking lot as he was leaving the Toby Keith concert at Germain Amphitheatre. The solider was injured so badly that he can't go back to Iraq as scheduled.

"I don't remember getting hit at all, really," said Barton, a member of the 1st Calvary Division. "He hit me in the back of the head. I fell and hit the ground. I was knocked unconscious and he continued to punch and kick me on the ground."

Barton and his family said he was beat up because he was wearing anIraqi freedom T-shirt.

"It's not our fault," Barton said. "I'm just doing a job."

According to a Columbus police report, six witnesses who didn't know Barton said the person who beat him up was screaming profanities and making crude remarks about U.S. soldiers, Burton reported.

Now, I'm mentioning this in my own post in part because I'm curious about the story.  If anyone comes across another story on this, please send me a link, or leave it in the comments.

Before proceeding, let me say what's pretty obvious at the moment to most people except those who use Fox News and Oxycontin radio as their window on the world: Americans who are against the Iraq War are not hostile to soldiers.  I say that with a high level of confidence, because I was present at two large antiwar protests in San Francisco before the invasion, and I've been following the news about the war fairly closely, including criticisms of it. 

People know that this war was George W. Bush's project, not the choice of the soldiers.  Some of them supported it, some of them didn't, and soldiers' opinions of it vary greatly.  (See, for instance, A strident minority: anti-Bush US troops in Iraq Christian Science Monitor 09/21/04.)

So, if this incident was as the Freepers are taking it, an antiwar type attacking a soldier because he's a soldier, it's certainly an aberrant instance.  Certainly, we have seen some striking displays of disrespect for our soldiers lately.  The "Purple Heart band-aids" that were popular items at the Repubican convention to mock wounded soldiers was one example.  So was this one I posted about earlier: Rumsfeld to servicepeople and their families: Stop whining, you wimps!  09/11/04.  "And indeed, if you watch in any conflict in our history, there have always been people who said, 'Why?  Why should we do that? Another loss of life.  Another person wounded.  Another limb off'," the Defense Secretary sneered.  These people really should show more respect for the men and women serving our country in uniform.

I posted this in the comments at RJ's post:
***************************************
As far as the historical issue of the "spitting on soldiers" folklore from the Vietnam War era, you may want to check out the work of Jerry Lembcke (a Vietnam veteran himself) who did extensive research on this particular tale for his book, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam.

An article by him on the subject is available online at: http://www.rlg.org/annmtg/lembcke99.html

If you have to believe that antiwar protesters hate soldiers, you can just dismiss work like Lembcke's, of course.

The Freepers have been using this Foster Barton incident as an example of this kind of thing.  As you noted, it didn't involve spitting, although most people would take breaking his nose as a more serious type of assault.

And it may well be that this was some aberrant antiwar zealot who decided he was going to attack Barton because he was a soldier.  Since there were six witnesses, I would think there's a good chance the guy will be charged.  So it would be interesting to see if the guy's history actually justifies this interpretation.  Is the attacker an antiwar activist?  Did he have some personal grudge against the Barton? Was he a violent nut who hadn't been taking his meds?

It's also eye-catching that the incident occurred after a Toby Keith concert.  If you don't know, Keith has made a point of striking a jingoistic pose ever since 9/11.  It seems odd on the face of it that someone would be inspired by a Toby Keith concert to whack an off-duty soldier on the head.  But stranger things have happened.
**************************************

Now, I won't try to compete with the comma-dancing Freepers in analyzing this thing.  But the Lembcke book interested me for more than one reason.  It's a very good study of how a folklore tale moves from fantasy to conventional wisdom.

And it strikes me that this Foster Barton story could become an element is some later folklore concoction years from now.  Because it's gone out over the Freeper network,and has surely become part of a couple of million e-mail spam mailings already.  (But it's probably competing with the "Kerry and the Bible" one that I got two copies of yesterday.)  So even if the real story is something different, e.g., the attacker was in love with Barton's girlfriend or something, there are a lot of people who will remember "seeing it in the news" that a soldier on leave was brutally attacked by an antiwar protester.

Actually, my urban-folklore-detector involuntarily triggered when I saw the part about the Toby Keith concert.  The setting just seems an awfully unlikely place for someone who was passionately antiwar to show and assault someone because he thinks the target is a soldier.

So, if anyone hears more on this story, please pass the link along.

Oh, how does RepublicanJen link up the Foster Barton story to spitting on Vietnam veterans?

If the anti-war nuts are angry enough to beat this poor guy senseless, then the anti-war nuts of the 60s and 70s were capable of spitting on soldiers when they returned from Vietnam.

It must be kind of like the final result on Iraqi WMDs.  Saddam didn't have WMDs.  He had the intention to have programs to make WMDs.  So even if the protesters didn't spit on veterans, they must have thought about planning to spit on veterans.  It's pretty much the same thing, right?

And the moral of the story for RJ?

Just how vile can the anti-war/Bush/oil/capitalism crowd get?

Assuming the attacker was antiwar and anti-Bush, much less anti-oil and anti-capitalism, that is.  All it really says about the attacker in the article she linked is that he "was screaming profanities and making crude remarks about U.S. soldiers." But we can assume, I suppose, that he intented to consider becoming antiwar, anti-Bush, etc.

By the way, just what does "anti-oil" mean?  Oh, the mysteries, the mysteries...

California politics: Schwarzenegger the immigrant-friendly governor

Old Hickory's Weblog 09/01/04:

Schwarzenegger's main promise to immigrants in California during the recall coup in 2003 was to get a bill approved to allow undocumented immigrants to get drivers licenses.  As a reminder, the good Republican growers of California are essentially completely dependent on illegal immigrant labor, as are canneries and many home services to a large extent.  The system is corrupt to the bone, of course, but that's the way good California Republicans handle things.  And as long as we have hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants here, it would be helpful to have a car licensing program that encourages them to get at least basic instructions on state traffic laws.

A bill is expected to hit Schwarzenegger's desk soon.  We'll have to wait and see what our immigrant-friendly, smiley-face Republican governor will do.

Sacramento Bee 09/23/04: Governor vetoes driver's license bill by Aurelio Rojas

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Wednesday vetoed legislation that would have allowed illegal immigrants to apply for California driver's licenses with a terse statement saying the bill did not meet his security concerns.

The Republican governor dispensed with perhaps the most emotionally charged bill on his desk with a four-line veto message.

"One of the most important duties of the governor of a state is to protect its citizens," Schwarzenegger said. "This bill does not adequately address the security concerns that my Department of Homeland Security and I have, and I cannot support it." ...

Ann Marie Tallman, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, said her group was "profoundly disappointed" in the governor's decision.

"The governor's veto is even more regrettable given his public statements that immigrants should be allowed to obtain a driver's license," she said in a statement, adding that the measure "would have ensured that a significant, reliable and hard-working segment of our state's work force be able to safely drive to and from work."

"Immigrants are a critical component of and significant contributor to our state's economy," she said. "It is baffling that the governor would deny them the ability to fully participate in making our state's economy even stronger."

El gobernador de California veta las licencias para los indocumentados de Jorge Luis Macías La Opinion 09/23/04:

La decisión del mandatario provocó “desilusión” entre legisladores demócratas, elogios del comité republicano conservador Salvemos Nuestra Licencia (Save Our License), y críticas de partidarios del senador Gil Cedillo, autor de la ley, quienes hicieron un llamado a los hispanos del país para que voten contra el presidente George W. Bush en las elecciones de noviembre.

“Para rescatar un poco de nuestra dignidad, lo hecho por Arnold [Schwarzenegger] sólo se puede contrarrestar si actuamos en contra de Bush. Si él [Schwarzenegger] quiere hundir al Presidente, nosotros le ayudaremos el día de las elecciones”, dijo Miguel Araujo, presidente del Centro de Información Azteca de California. ...

“Los republicanos le han quitado la máscara al gobernador”, dijo Angélica Salas, directora de la Coalición de Los Angeles para los Derechos de los Inmigrantes (CHIRLA). “Schwarzenegger ha mostrado su verdadera cara y ha establecido que quiere mantener a la comunidad inmigrante sin derechos ni protección. Hemos peleado seis años por la justicia, pero no nos dejaremos vencer, aunque será una larga batalla”. ...

Schwarzenegger solicitó en diciembre ... la revocación del proyecto de ley que había firmado el gobernador Gray Davis poco antes de ser destituido en las urnas y al senador prometió que ambos trabajarían en una nueva iniciativa.

“Es una gran inmoralidad que se siga jugando con los sentimientos de nuestro pueblo. Arnold nos ha traicionado, y si el presidente [George W. Bush] había mostrado algunas señales de buena voluntad al pedir en el Congreso que se aprobara el uso de la matrícula consular, el gobernador de California también contradice a Jeb Bush —hermano del Presidente— quien dio licencias en Florida a los inmigrantes”, dijo Miguel Araujo. “Con Arnold estamos ante un hombre republicano de ultraderecha, cuyos lazos ligados a un pasado nazi lo hacen más peligroso”.

[My translation: The decision of the head of state proviked "disillusionment" among Democratic legislators, praises from the conservtive Republican committee Save Our License, and criticisms by supporters of senator Gil Cedillo, author of the law, who called for the country's Hispanics to vote against George W. Bush in the November elections.

["To recover a little of our dignity, what Arnold [Schwarzenegger] did can only be counteracted if we act against Bush.  If he [Schwarzenegger] wants to sink the president, we will support him [in doing so] on election day," said Miguel Araujo, president of the Centro de Información Azteca de California. ...

["The Republicans have removed the governor's mask," said Angélica Salas, director of the Coalición de Los Angeles para los Derechos de los Inmigrantes (CHIRLA).   "Schwarzenegger has shown his tue face and has etablished that he wants to keep the immigrant community without rights or protection.  We have fought six years for justice, but we're not going to give up on winning, if if there is a big battle." ...

[Schwarzenegger asked in December for the rvocation of the plan of the law that Governor Gray Davis had signed just before he was defeated at the polls and promised the senator [Cedillo] that they would both work on a new attempt.

["It is a very immoral thing for him to play witht he sentiments of our people.  Arnold has betrayed us, and if the president [George W. Bush] wanted to show some signs of good will by asking Congress to approve the use of consular enrollment, the governor of California also contradicts Jeb Bush - brother of the president - who gave licenses to immigrants in Florida," said Miguel Araujo.  "With Arnold, we're stuck with a Republican man of the ultraright, whose binding ties to a former Nazi have done him of a lot of harm."]

Presumably, the "former Nazi" to whom Araujo refers is Schwarzenegger's father, who was a Nazi Party member during the Third Reich.

CALIFORNIA: La política de las licencias de Jorge Delgado La Opinion 09/22/04:

Con él sonríe la extrema derecha del Estado y los movimientos antiinmigrantes liderados por los Wilson, los Costa, los Rohrabacher y algunos más que impulsan sus respectivas carreras políticas dándoles circo a quienes respaldan sus causas.

En la antigua Roma, los césares lanzaban a los cristianos a los leones para distraer la atención del pueblo. En la actualidad los políticos de extrema derecha promueven la intolerancia antiinmigrante con el mismo fin.

[My translation: With the approval of the state's extreme right and the anti-immigrant movements led by the Wilsons, the Costas, the Rohrbachers and some other who promote their respective political careers (with a) damaging circus for those who support their causes.

[In ancient Rome, the Caesars threw the Christians to the lions to distract the people's attention.  In the present, politicians of the extreme right promote anti-immigrant intolerance with the same goal.]

El veto a las licencias de conducir La Opinion editorial 09/23/04:

A nadie sorprende el veto del gobernador Arnold Schwarzenegger al proyecto de ley que autorizaba dar licencias de conducir a los indocumentados. Sin embargo, las razones que alega y el proceso seguido revelan su falta de sinceridad sobre el tema. Schwarzenegger tiene motivos políticos para rechazarlo, pero, desafortunadamente, optó por esgrimir un vergonzoso argumento de seguridad interna que no convence a nadie. Esta posición es contraria a las recomendaciones de los profesionales de la ley, para quienes mantener la situación actual conlleva mayores riesgos que otorgar el documento. ...

Por otra parte, ayer comenzó en Sacramento la junta de firmas para otra iniciativa electoral contra los indocumentados, usando como latiguillo el tema de las licencias de conducir. Sus autores, tristemente conocidos por la Proposición 187, no hablan de seguridad nacional ni seandan con medias tintas. Es lamentable que esta gente, en su odio y resentimiento a los indocumentados, sean más sinceros y transparentes que el gobernador.

[My translation: No one was surprised by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's veto of the plan of the law that authorized drivers licenses for the undocumented.  Nevertheless, the reasons he put forward reveal his lack of sincerity on this issue.  Schwarzenegger has political motives to reject it, but, unfortunately, he opted to use a disgraceful argument of intenal security that convinces no one.  This position is contrary to the recommendation of legal professionals, according to whom maintaining the current situation carries with it grater risks that granting the document [i.e., the drivers license]. ...

[ Besides that, the collection of signatures began yesterday in Sacramento for another electoral initiative [statewide plebescite] against the undocumented, using the theme of drivers licesnes as a clicheé.  Its authors, who sadly we know from [the anti-immigrant] Proposition 187 [in 1994], aren't talking about national security nor are they of moderate coloration.  It's regretable that these people, in their hatred and rsentment of the undcoumented, are more sincere and transparent than the governor.]

Schwarzenegger vetoes license bill for illegal immigrants San Francisco Chronicle online 09/22/04

The veto marked the newest turn in a sustained battle that reveals the state's rigid political divide over illegal immigration.

Supporters called the legislation a recognition of contributions by California's large illegal working class while opponents dismissed it as rewarding those who break the nation's immigration laws. Opponents also frequently suggested terrorists would use licenses to blend in.

Assembly Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield, applauded the veto.

"This veto makes it harder for terrorists to obtain the primary document used for renting cars, boarding planes, and making other travel arrangements," McCarthy said.

Similar fears in Florida caused lawmakers last April to abandon a similar licensing bill backed by Gov. Jeb Bush.

Schwarzenegger's veto countered many mainstream supporters of the bill, including Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton and Roman Catholic Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles as well as other police chiefs, religious organizations and newspaper editorial pages.

Iraq War: Steve Gilliard on the current situation

Steve Gilliard is using a video game comparison that I must admit I don't get, because I haven't played that game: Traveller 2000, the Iraqi edition 09/24/04.

But his read on the situation in Iraq is probably realistic:

There are three things one needs to understand to get how bad the situation in Iraq is:

One, even if we had a draft, and it's passage through Congress is unlikely, because the class of Duke 2006 isn't going to Samarra for George Bush, it would take up to five years for the draftees to become part of the Army. Why so long? Because they would have to be trained and infantry school is a year. The 82nd Airborne took over a year to get into combat in WWII, the 101st, two years. Only the divisions with a hard core of regulars, the Big Red One and the 25th ID, were able to get into combat quickly, and even then took serious losses from inexperience.

The draft is not a short term solution to our problems in Iraq. And we need a short term solution. Desperately. And that can only come from large armies like the Indians, Pakistanis and Egyptians. And they aren't coming. Not after Abu Gharib. More Muslims live in India than Pakistan. Egypt is on tenderhooks as is with their own fundamentalist problem.

Two, the resistance has waged a brilliant campaign of economic warfare. While everyone looks at the war for Al Anbar province, but it's been the dedicated, coordinated sabotage of the pipelines which has paralyzed Iraq. Then they made the highways too dangerous to traverse. Only heavily armored convoys can move to and from Baghdad.

This is what drives the kidnapping. It isn't so much the demands, but the fear which cripples people. ...

Three: Personal safety in Iraq comes from the barrel of a gun. Without bodyguards, you risk kidnapping at any time of the day or night. The kidnappings have become so brazen, so aggressive, they are a major threat. When armed gangs can crash into private homes and kidnap and murder people with no fear, there is NO security in Iraq. You have entered a land of anarchy and madness.

The Iraqi police are either infiltrated or openly hostile to American and Coalition troops. Of the 25,000 cops in Basra, not one lifted a finger to help the British. The Guardsmen are little better. They walk around with their faces hidden so they won't have their families threatened. Anyone who becomes a governor in Iraq either helps the resistance or faces humiliation or outright assassination.

Steve's chances to become a commentator on Fox News are small.

More on the antiwar movement during the Vietnam War

This article includes some worthwhile historical information on the antiwar movement against the Vietnam War, especially as it relates to veterans.  The Antiwar Movement We Are Supposed To Forget by H. Bruce Franklin Touchstone Nov/Dec 2000.  (The article was originally published in the Chronicle of Higher Education but it's behind subscription at that site.)

Thousands of veterans who had fought in Vietnam moved to the forefront of the antiwar movement after they returned to the United States, and they -- together with thousands of active-duty G.I.'s -- soon began to play a crucial role in the domestic movement. Dozens of teach-ins on college campuses were led by Vietnam veterans, who spoke at hundreds of rallies. More and more demonstrations were led by large contingents of veterans and active-duty servicepeople, who often participated under risk of grave punishment. The vanguard of that Washington demonstration by half a million people in the spring of 1971 was a contingent of a thousand Vietnam veterans, many in wheelchairs and on crutches, who then conducted "a limited incursion into the country of Congress," which they called Dewey Canyon III (Dewey Canyon I was a 1969 covert "incursion" into Laos; Dewey Canyon II was the disastrous February 1971 invasion of Laos). About 800 marched up to a barricade hastily erected to keep them away from the Capitol and hurled back their Purple Hearts, Bronze Stars, Silver Stars, and campaign ribbons at the government that had bestowed them.

John Kerry was a participant in the Dewey Canyon III protest.

Franklin also recalls the fact that active duty soldiers expressed their opposition to the war and/or war policies in a variety of ways:

In 1968, dozens of black soldiers, many of them Vietnam veterans, were arrested and court-martialed for refusing to mobilize against antiwar demonstrators outside the Chicago Amphitheatre during the Democratic National Convention. What made the convergence of the black and antiwar movements explosively dangerous for those trying to maintain order and sustain the war was the disintegrating and volatile situation within the armed forces, as pointed out by an alarming article published in the January 1970 Naval War College Review.

Very little awareness of resistance to the war inside the military survives today. But without this awareness, it is impossible to understand not just the antiwar movement but also the military history of the war from 1968 to 1973, not to mention the end of the draft and the creation of a permanent "volunteer" army to fight America's subsequent wars. To begin to get some sense of the relative scale and effects of civilian and active-duty war resistance, compare the widely publicized activity of draft avoidance with some little-known facts about desertion (a serious military crime, defined by being away without leave for more than 30 days and having the intention never to return). Although draft evasion and refusal certainly posed problems for the war effort, desertion was much more common and far more threatening.

The number of draft evaders and resisters was dwarfed by the number of deserters from the active-duty armed forces. During the 1971 fiscal year alone, 98,324 servicemen deserted, an astonishing rate of 142.2 for every 1,000 men on duty. Revealing statistics flashed to light briefly as President Ford was pondering the amnesty he declared in September 1974 (at the same time he also pardoned ex-President Nixon for all federal crimes he may have committed while in office). According to the Department of Defense, there were 503,926 "incidents of desertion" between July 1, 1966, and December 31, 1973. From 1963 through 1973 (a period almost half again as long), only 13,518 men were prosecuted for draft evasion or resistance. The admitted total of deserters still officially "at large" at the time was 28,661 -- six and a half times the 4,400 draft evaders or resisters still "at large." These numbers only begin to tell the story.

This article is a good reminder that the stereotypes of "the 1960s" and about the Vietnam War that today's Republicans promote are sometimes almost bizarre departures from the reality.  For instance:

Who opposed the war? Contrary to the impression promulgated by the media then, and overwhelmingly prevalent today, opposition to the war was not concentrated among affluent college students. In fact, opposition to the war was inversely proportional to both wealth and education. Blue-collar workers generally considered themselves "doves" and tended to favor withdrawal from Vietnam, while those who considered themselves "hawks" and supported participation in the war were concentrated among the college-educated, high-income strata.

In fact, that part is so much a departure from the conventional wisdom, it's worth quoting a second time with my emphasis added:

Who opposed the war? Contrary to the impression promulgated by the media then, and overwhelmingly prevalent today, opposition to the war was not concentrated among affluent college students. In fact, opposition to the war was inversely proportional to both wealth and education. Blue-collar workers generally considered themselves "doves" and tended to favor withdrawal from Vietnam, while those who considered themselves "hawks" and supported participation in the war were concentrated among the college-educated, high-income strata.

The article is adapted from Franklin's book Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (2000).

Iraq War: Deceiving ... the enemy?

Sam Gardiner takes a look at the methods the Bush administration has used to sell the Iraq War to the US public: The enemy is us by Sam Gardiner Salon.com 09/22/04.

One important point he makes, that well worth considering as we hear the administration and its supporters defend the disaster that is the Iraq War, is that they are relying on a formula that Gardiner characterizes as Iraq = terrorists = 9/11.

Neocon Kenneth Adelman, who famously predicted that the Iraq War would be a "cakewalk" for the US, employed this tack on his appearance on the PBS Newshour on 09/21/04:

I would say that there's no doubt that Saddam Hussein was fronting terrorism. There's no doubt about that. They were funding the Palestinians who blow up innocent Israeli children, where William Harrop served so wonderfully as ambassador. It's for sure that the people who tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993 went to Iraq afterwards and were given sanctuary. It's for sure that Abu Nidal, one of the worst terrorists in the world, lived for many years in Baghdad. It's for sure that Saddam Hussein tried to assassinate the ex-president of the United States, President George Herbert Walker Bush. So he was involved in terrorism. ...

But what you want to do [in Iraq] is to get everybody to help the situation. We have an enormous stake in making that succeed. The world has an enormous stake in making that succeed. And for these other countries to sit on their hands and to say, well, you know, that it's none of our business, it's just wrong. It's a fight from terrorism against civilization.

In Gardiner's article, he mentions a few items that were widely taken as fact that turn out to have been not so:

During the early part of the war, there was more deception than truth in the comments and press briefings of the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Among the fabricated stories was the early surrender of the commander and the entire 51st Iraqi mechanized division. We were told of an uprising in Basra -- it did not happen. We were told Iraqis had stolen U.S. uniforms to commit atrocities -- this was not true. We were told on White House and State Department Web sites that the Iraqi military had formed units of children to attack the coalition -- untrue. We were told of a whole range of agreements between the French and Iraq before the war over weapons -- false. We were told Saddam had marked a red line around Baghdad and that when we crossed it Iraq would use chemical weapons -- completely fabricated.

We were told of an elaborate scheme by Saddam's forces to ambush U.S. Marines on March 23 as they fought toward Baghdad. The president mentioned this incident many times. It turns out what really happened that day is that the Marines were repeatedly attacked by a U.S. Air Force A-10. It was a friendly-fire incident, not an Iraqi ruse. But building on the theme of Iraqi evil was more important than the truth.

Military intelligence officials' prewar assertion when no WMD were found that Iraq had moved its weapons to Syria is another example of information denial. But although the Iraq Survey Group report to be released at the end of this month will announce once and for all that Iraq did not have WMD, the WMD argument already served its purpose in garnering support for the invasion. The important message now remains: Iraq = terrorists = 9/11.

For a longer discussion of information manipulation in the Iraq War, see Gardiner's 10/08/03 paper Truth from These Podia (*pdf file).

Iraq War: "a free market of demons"

War fantasists, which pretty clear include our legitimate president, will just dismiss this like all the other troubling news.  But this is a pretty sobering picture of the situation in Iraq: Phillip Robertson Hell Salon.com 09/23/04.

Reconstruction, the most important step on the path to a sovereign and stable Iraq, has all but stalled because of targeted acts of violence that reach all the way south to Basra and north to Mosul. Successful countermoves by the Sunni insurgents have prevented the United States and new Iraqi government from gaining any real political support. In fact, billions of dollars originally allocated for reconstruction are now headed for security companies, which are quickly becoming private militias. Unfortunately for optimistic planners in the Bush administration, the coalition is up against not one single group but a constellation of allied militias. It's as if the United States had gone to war against the tribal system itself. There are so many new fighter cells that they are at a loss to distinguish themselves, and so use kidnapping and videotapes as branding strategies. In this market, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Tawhid wa al Jihad, with its monstrous beheading trademark, is the undisputed brand king. Some of the groups are crazier than others. It is a free market of demons.