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Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Nation losing the stomach, heart for war
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
One of the great marvels of the vast political divide into which this country has fallen is how differently the left and the right view the military.
The incoming chairman of the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), announced his intention to reintroduce legislation to bring back the draft. The reason — and this reflects the left’s peculiar distrust of the military and those who would use it — is to burden policy-makers with a built-in protest movement.
“There’s no question in my mind that this president and this administration would never have invaded Iraq, especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to Congress, if indeed we had a draft and members of Congress and the administration thought that their kids from their communities would be placed in harm’s way,” Rangel said on Sunday’s “Meet the Press.”
This is one of the reasons national Democrats can never be trusted to occupy the White House and run government during times when the nation’s security is threatened. They look out at the country and see a frightening imperialist impulse that has to be checked by international treaty, by the United Nations, by U.S. law and by draft dodgers and flower children who would raze prospects of American aggression in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan.
The nation should have an honest debate about the obligation each of us has to public service — and to the highest form of public service, the country’s defense. Rangel might well have offered his legislation as a vehicle that opens critical national dialogue. A draft, as desirable as I believe one to be to inculcate into every generation the understanding that freedom isn’t free, is not needed to check America’s aggressive impulses.
But given Rangel’s premise and the mind-set that slipped from John Kerry’s lips during his revealing joke-gone-bad comments to California college students, the military and policy-makers who would use it for something other than road-building and humanitarian relief to Third World countries are dangerous predators, apt to scarf up the nation’s poor and march them off to build empires abroad. What’s more, the normal give-and-take of democratic debate and biennial elections is insufficent to restrain their aggressive desires to colonize the world’s raw-material producers. Such is the America the left sees.
That thinking will never succeed in constructing a foreign policy that amounts to more than missiles-to-mud-huts, bluff and finger-wagging. But of course the world will know that behind the bluff is nothing that seriously threatens sustained combat.
More than three decades after the draft ended, the country has changed in ways that prompt serious questions about our ability to engage a persistent enemy who doesn’t march in columns in May Day parades.
Reflect on the stories that have come out of the Iraqi phase of the war on terrorism. They are, by and large, devoid of heroes and of heroic actions. They are instead of things gone wrong, such as the friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman, the NFL defensive back who turned down a multimillion- dollar contract with the Arizona Cardinals to join the Army. Soldiers are seen as fragile creatures likely to break, driven to drugs, alcohol and post-traumatic stress disorder, without getting the treatment they need.
Those are legitimate stories, of course. But the predominant accounts Americans see and hear are of broken lives and failure.
No war, however just and necessary, can long be sustained when the cause is subsumed in the suffering. The argument can certainly be made that it’s up to the president, national leaders and the generals to remind us constantly of the stakes and the cause for which casualities are suffered. That is no doubt true. But the same explanations fall weak when the casualties are immediate and memories of the threat have cooled.
America may well have lost its capacity to fight a war that extends more than a few weeks, Rangel’s draft or not. Our attention span is too short, our recall too fragmented, our resolve too relative. We have become a timid nation, frightened by the threats, but unwilling to confront them in ways that put this generation at risk. In that sense, Rangel reads us right. A draft is a national security poison pill.
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