08 June 2007
Volunteer Gladiators
A sad deduction from the Iraq invasion is that the creation of an All-Volunteer Army has had the unintended consequence of encouraging the U.S. Government to engage in military adventurism. Ironically, it is a supposedly conservative Republican administration that has adopted this strategy, evidently in pursuit of control of an important oil producer.
The unproved link between Saddam Hussein and the danger of international terror was a red herring that was used duplicitously to obfuscate the real motivation for the invasion of Iraq. Normally, it is conservatives who discount the danger of limited natural resources to economic growth. The pessimistic view that consumerism cannot survive without expansionism is usually considered a fault of liberals. But the temptation to use a tool like the All-Volunteer Army apparently was irresistible to the rightists who controlled the U.S. government during President Bush’s first six years in office. It had to be used for destroying Saddam, regardless of the fact that its purpose could be justified only by submitting to the business objectives of Republicans’ main corporate supporters, heavily tied to the oil industry. This paralleled the Republicans’ abandonment of their traditional fiscal conservatism by ballooning the federal deficit.
The families who enlisted in the military way of life have been disappointed, not to say betrayed by the political leaders to whom they pledged their allegiance. Their lack of trust in the ideals they thought they were serving promises the disappearance of this wellspring of suspended distaste for fighting wars for a living. If not for reasons of fairness, the disappearance of belief that they are serving the goal of preserving the community will make it necessary to re-impose compulsory military service on our modern society.
A sad deduction from the Iraq invasion is that the creation of an All-Volunteer Army has had the unintended consequence of encouraging the U.S. Government to engage in military adventurism. Ironically, it is a supposedly conservative Republican administration that has adopted this strategy, evidently in pursuit of control of an important oil producer.
The unproved link between Saddam Hussein and the danger of international terror was a red herring that was used duplicitously to obfuscate the real motivation for the invasion of Iraq. Normally, it is conservatives who discount the danger of limited natural resources to economic growth. The pessimistic view that consumerism cannot survive without expansionism is usually considered a fault of liberals. But the temptation to use a tool like the All-Volunteer Army apparently was irresistible to the rightists who controlled the U.S. government during President Bush’s first six years in office. It had to be used for destroying Saddam, regardless of the fact that its purpose could be justified only by submitting to the business objectives of Republicans’ main corporate supporters, heavily tied to the oil industry. This paralleled the Republicans’ abandonment of their traditional fiscal conservatism by ballooning the federal deficit.
The families who enlisted in the military way of life have been disappointed, not to say betrayed by the political leaders to whom they pledged their allegiance. Their lack of trust in the ideals they thought they were serving promises the disappearance of this wellspring of suspended distaste for fighting wars for a living. If not for reasons of fairness, the disappearance of belief that they are serving the goal of preserving the community will make it necessary to re-impose compulsory military service on our modern society.
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