Destroying the National Guard

For many Guardsmen, deployment to Iraq means economic ruin. They have mortgage payments, car payments, credit card debt, all calculated on their civilian salaries. Suddenly, for a year or more, their pay drops to that of a private. The families they leave behind face the loss of everything they have. What militia wouldn't desert in that situation? The real scope of the damage of Mr. Rumsfeld's decision to send the Guard to Iraq – 40% of the American troops in Iraq are now reservists or Guardsmen – will probably not be revealed until units return. One of the few already back saw 70% of its members leave the Guard immediately. What the Washington elite that wages cabinet wars does not understand, or care about, is the vital role the National Guard plays on the state and local levels. Once the Guard has been destroyed, who will provide the emergency services communities need when disaster strikes? One would think that in a so-called "war against terror," where the danger to the American homeland is readily acknowledged, someone in the nation's capital would care about the local first line of defense. The fact of the matter is that Versailles on the Potomac does not care about the rest of the country in any respect, so long as the tax dollars keep coming in.

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A Draft After the Elections?

Obviously, Iraq has not been a "cakewalk" as was widely trumpeted by its neocon promoters in the months leading up to the American invasion. And if, as Donald Rumsfeld once said, Iraq turns out to be "a long hard slog" (it has), who then will be called on to do the slogging? It is fair to ask how many wars our imperial nation can fight with its hard-pressed volunteer forces, many of whom are now forbidden to leave when their enlistments run out. Or, when they are finally released, how many will re-enlist. The National Guard, for example, failed to meet this year's quota of 58,000, recruiting 5,000 less people. A more pressing question is, how many Americans will be forced to fight, perhaps die for the crazed imperial dreams concocted by a small clique of extremely influential and well-funded neoconservatives, virtually none of whom ever bothered to serve in the military they so profess to love? And among Americans (the late Neil Postman once described them as "amusing themselves to death"), unless their immediate family members are in the military, how many Americans will care if a draft is reinstated and more GIs must die fighting Iraqis and Iranians who have never attacked us? And even more ominously: There is increasing chatter in Washington among neoconservatives and their pet columnists of ever more wars ahead. They call it spreading their version of democracy; I call it aggressive and unjustifiable wars. Israel, America's client state, is now hinting at an attack on Iran while neocons here are suggesting that America's next target should be Iran. Unanswered is what happens if Iran strikes back at Israel and U.S. forces in Iraq? In fact, the issue of Iran is now being discussed behind closed doors at the White House. How many dissenters do you think are present at these sessions?

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