How Do We Define Stupid?
One of my readers got a bit upset about my argument for a general draft. I don't blame him. I don't support the War In Iraq at all. I never did. But we're in a tough spot right now and we're committed to staying there.
Both Donald Rumsfield and Dick Cheney have publically stated that the war will last at least twenty years. Projections of Iraq's oil capacity suggests that Iraqs oil fields will cease being profitable to pump by then.
George Bush has publically stated that he does not intend to win in Iraq. He says that we are winning now, and we'll continue to win until he can hand the war off ot the next president. He's a war steward and feels its his duty to make sure we don't win or lose before 2008.
Now TV Talking Heads go on at length about victory and plans for glory and how wonderful this war is. But they are just making crap up. If they acutally listened to the President and his staff, they'd understand that every thing they are saying is just Bullshit.
If the war goes on as planned and at last years pace, we will kill about 5.3 million Iraqis. We'll lose 46,000 US soldiers and over 400,000 Americans will be maimed. The war will cost over 2.3 trillion dollars.
But we're already seeing escalations in causulties. So my rough numbers are likely to fall far short of reality.
Now Bush and Cheney don't want the draft. They understand that a general draft will end the war. They don't need more troops, because they aren't trying to win. All they need to do is keep Halliburton safe and their plan so far has been to feed a steady stream of volunteers to the war. The newest plan after recruiting gang members and the mentally ill, is to recruit Mexicans and offer their families citizenship in exchange for service. I think this plan will work. They'll be able to afford the loos of thousands of soldiers a year if they aren't 'Real (Tm)' Americans.
And this plan won't upset the US public enough to put forth serious opposition to the war.
If the draft were enacted, you'd have plenty of of Suburban TV watching moms getting out and making a scene. Until then, Americans will be more concerned over who is going to win 'American Idol' than how many dead Mexicans and Iraqis per Gallon their SUV consumes.
An American Soldier right now is worth 857 barrels of oil. An Iraqi is worth 10 barrels of oil. When Bush toured in November, ahead of the elections, he told us that we're at war in Iraq to keep the price of gasoline down. It was a message that resonated with the American people.
As a nation, we aren't really troubled by trading our soldiers lives to help Halliburton pump all of Iraq's oil and keep all of the profits. We don't even mind paying all of Halliburton's expense and then extra, so that Halliburton's profits exceed theie revenue on Iraqi oil. We don't mind spending two billion dollars a month to simply replace munitions used in the war. Hardly anyone will even be aware that Bush just asked for another $127 billion in emergency funding to finance the war. This evidently is an emergency request that he makes every few months. By making it emergency funding, it doesn't get added into regular budget figures. So the cost of the war doesn't go into official government statistics.
If the public really cared about any of this, it would stop.
Don't worry, there won't be a draft. Our leaders want endless war, and a draft would have soccer moms throwing rocks at congressional limousines, as our leaders go pick up their war luchre on K street.
Don't worry, there won't be a draft. Millions more will die.
posted by Weaseldog @ 7:45 AM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Good post, Weas.
Well-stated.
The only thing a draft would accomplish is more dead kids. If you're going in the wrong direction, you get off the road. When you are in a hole, you stop digging. Two stupids don't make a smart. Etc.
Speaking of stupid, have you been watching too much Glenn Beck or something? There is more opposition to this war out there than is advertised, and just because little boy Bush wants endless war doesn't necessarily mean he will get it. You are writing pretty darkly there, my friend :)
Sure there is growing opposition, but our leaders don't care. We don't see much opposition here in Dallas, but I friends on the East Coast that send me regular reports of what goes on in communities that aren't as gung-ho for war as Dallas is.
We can't make them stop digging. They own us, they do what they want.
I was in grade school when Vietnam was chugging along at full bore. I grew up in the company of vietnam veterans. I watched the scream and run from mice and listened as they told stories about siccing their dogs on old woman and watching the dogs tear them apart.
The nation as a whole didn't care, until the draft was enacted. When boys that didn't volunteer started coming back in boxes, then the public became incensed enough to fight back. Then we had National Guardsmen shooting people and protestors throwing molotov cocktails at limos.
That's what ended the Vietnam War. The protests that we're seeing now aren't newsworthy and to the media and most of middle class America, are composed of the fringe groups that don't like to pay to have babies burned alive in foreign countries.
Rumsfield worked hard to keep our boys in Vietnam and he learned a lot in that war as he did day to day management to keep the war going. Dick Cheney and Karl Rove also took lessons to heart. They won't bring back a draft. They won't do anything that will get the public angry enough to throw rocks and National Guardsmen.
They will keep digging graves, and they are shooting for another 17 years in Iraq and thirty in Iran. If they do get Mexicans to fight for us, you can expect that public opposition will wane a bit and people will become accustomed to the war until things are so screwed up that it affects them in personal ways.
Our leadership has no problem with trading the lives of kids for cold hard cash.
And yeah, I've been travelling this dark road since 1998 when I learned that Peakoil would be here sooner than later.
I've tried to keep my tone light and upbeat for some time now, but its not really been an honest assessment of how I see things going down.
I honestly believe that we're going to be in a world war in a few short years, triggered by our screwups in the ME, our weakened military position and our lost chances at building on the fine art of diplomacy.
Honestly, I don't see a reason to softpeddle. We know we're going to kill millions of people. We know that we are going to sacrifice more soldiers. We need to start making this a matter of public discourse. Start asking if getting 4,000, 8,000, 20,000 more American soldiers killed will be enough to accomplish 'The Mission'. LEts start asking how many have to be maimed or killed to accomplish the unknown goal. Ask if the mission is finished if we kill two million Iraqis. Or do we we need to kill three million.
Go dark and force the opposition speak our language, not the made up words and catchphrases that they use to hijack the discourse with.
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