What's needed well in advance of any military campaign is military conscription. If the politicians want to make war, they need to at least have the human resources on hand to do so; and if they make war in the absence of a draft they're both criminal and incompetent. If politicians fear instituting a draft, then they should be constrained from making war.
You can't have one without the other: war — conscription = disaster. Of course, having a draft is by itself no guarantee that war will result in success; but it's impossible to achieve even the most modest wartime success without a draft in place to provide the necessary numbers of military personnel.
Twenty-thousand more warm bodies in Iraq will mean nothing, nothing, in either the short run or the long run. One-hundred thousand additional combat-arms military personnel on the ground in Iraq would begin to make a difference; but for that to happen a draft would have to be instituted, training facilities and supplies would have to be dramatically increased at great cost and several months' lead time would be necessary prior to any actual deployment.
Bush, Cheney and Rove haven't the intellect between them (let alone the wisdom) to grasp these realities; nor have they the nation's backing for such an escalation. Just as Israel had greatly underestimated Hizbollah when it decided to invade Lebanon, so too the U.S. failed to properly prepare for war in Iraq — or anywhere else for that matter, e.g., Somalia several years ago.
I'm amazed that impeachment by the House of Representatives and conviction by a trial in the Senate was considered, by some, to be just punishment for a president's having acted the part of an egotistical schoolboy; but the current president has sent thousands of U.S. citizens to their deaths, deaths which could and should have been prevented, a crime surely more serious than any scenario involving oral sex.
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timeasmymeasure
The man's unqualified for office.
Date: 2007-01-13 09:04 am (UTC)You can't have one without the other: war — conscription = disaster. Of course, having a draft is by itself no guarantee that war will result in success; but it's impossible to achieve even the most modest wartime success without a draft in place to provide the necessary numbers of military personnel.
Twenty-thousand more warm bodies in Iraq will mean nothing, nothing, in either the short run or the long run. One-hundred thousand additional combat-arms military personnel on the ground in Iraq would begin to make a difference; but for that to happen a draft would have to be instituted, training facilities and supplies would have to be dramatically increased at great cost and several months' lead time would be necessary prior to any actual deployment.
Bush, Cheney and Rove haven't the intellect between them (let alone the wisdom) to grasp these realities; nor have they the nation's backing for such an escalation. Just as Israel had greatly underestimated Hizbollah when it decided to invade Lebanon, so too the U.S. failed to properly prepare for war in Iraq — or anywhere else for that matter, e.g., Somalia several years ago.
I'm amazed that impeachment by the House of Representatives and conviction by a trial in the Senate was considered, by some, to be just punishment for a president's having acted the part of an egotistical schoolboy; but the current president has sent thousands of U.S. citizens to their deaths, deaths which could and should have been prevented, a crime surely more serious than any scenario involving oral sex.
=^..^=