-Caveat Lector- >From http://www.uexpress.com/georgieannegeyer/viewgg.cfm?uc_full_date=20021003 &uc_comic=gg&uc_daction=X
WAR HAWKS BECOME DEFENSIVE ABOUT AVOIDANCE OF SERVICE WASHINGTON -- Some readers may have gotten the impression that I am unequivocally against a war with Iraq. As a matter of fact, that is not true. But one reason that I am against an attack upon Baghdad is because I do not think our military leaders are the best ones to lead it. To the contrary, I think that our many superzealous civilian officials who are impassionedly leading the fight should be right up there in the front lines. Wars always need the most aggressive and "warlike" at the front. Instead, we find ourselves today in a virtually unheard-of situation where most of the men planning this abstruse war are hawkish and agenda-prone intellectuals who seem to think that war is the ultimate metaphysical experience -- for someone else, of course. Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel is a Vietnam war hero and a legislator gaining in merit. He recently sardonically suggested that if Richard Perle, leader of the never- bothered-to-serve super-hawks in the Pentagon, is so set upon reconfiguring the Middle East through an attack on Baghdad, why then, he should lead it. When I asked Sen. Hagel last week at a luncheon of the Eisenhower Institute whether he could suggest which others of this pugnacious group might lead the charges into Basra, Karbala, Najaf and Mosul, he grinned and said, to the delight of the audience of Eisenhower admirers, "I shouldn't have said that about Perle -- but the response has been overwhelmingly positive." It used to be that we had civilian control to stop our supposed wildly aggressive military men from invading some country or another. Now we clearly need military control of the civilians to stop them from invading the world. I have to admit that I have never quite been able to rise above my South-Side-of-Chicago self, and so I have taken it as one of my chores to ask of the war hawks why they did not serve. One, the man who first said going into Baghdad would be a "cakewalk," got red in the face, shouted something inexplicable and marched away. Another huffed, almost with disdain: "All this talk about 'our young troops' going into Baghdad -- hey, these guys are in their 30s." When I suggested that he was treating our soldiers as "our Mamelukes," he looked at me with confusion -- he did not know that the Mamelukes were the Muslim mercenaries from Baghdad in the ninth century who later took over large parts of the Middle East. Richard Perle revealed his own deep concern for American soldiers when he was asked on a recent "Wide Angle" TV show about the threat of chemical and biological weapons to troops landing in Iraq. All he could do was announce, without any emotion, "These are not effective weapons in terms of the outcome of the engagement." The nonserving hawks get quite angry when anyone questions their patriotism. They say things like, "You think nobody should make policy who has not been in a war?" No, I do not. But I do think it presents a strange and even sinister picture to us as a nation when virtually everybody who is breathlessly plotting, planning and pushing for this war, particularly in the Pentagon and the White House, is a highly ideological civilian who has deliberately chosen (deferment, deferment, deferment!) never to be in the military and yet claims the right to send other Americans into hell. The idea of any moral commitment to actually DOING what you are SAYING seems never to cross their radar screens. One can see war in their terms only when one has not seen the horror, contradictions and confusion that characterize real warfare. Indeed, there is a strange and delusional sense about them that one used to find primarily on the far left: violence as abstraction, spilt blood as purifying nectar, duty as somebody else's principle. What's more, a democracy's tendency to engage in unjust or unnecessary warfare has always been contained by the fact that all citizens supposedly had to take equal risks. The coefficient of willingness to send one's people to war, with all that means in terms of loss of life and of derangement of the world, is one's willingness to sacrifice oneself. But this is not at all true today, when America has a volunteer army often removed from everyday Americans and where these nonserving hawks, none of whose children ever would serve either, actually look down on the uniformed soldiers. Some Americans seem to be seeing -- or at least, feeling -- what is going on. John P. Artusa of Chicago wrote to me recently: "May I suggest that the sons or grandsons of Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Don Rumsfeld and the editors of The Wall Street Journal promptly enlist for infantry officers training. Their war fervor should make them excellent field officers. Then the concept of 'noblesse oblige' will take on its original meaning and no longer will be reserved only for the working class." The members of this war party in the administration, so filled with fervor for their own purposes, virtually never speak of the American soldier himself or herself with any emotion. It is as if these soldiers were merely pawns on a grand map of personal agendas and remote schemas. The first President Bush, who served valiantly in a war in which we were attacked, spoke recently on television of suffering terrible pain the night before he led his men into attacks in the South Pacific. "It was not from fear," he said, tears welling in his eyes even after all this time, "but of my custodianship -- of being responsible for someone else." It makes you think. COPYRIGHT 2002 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE Originally Published on October-03-2002 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A<>E<>R + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Forwarded as information only; I don't believe everything I read or send (but that doesn't stop me from considering it; obviously SOMEBODY thinks it's important) + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + "Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. 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