Who's Sacrificing the Most for Bush's 'War on Terror?'
The so-called commander-in-chief never asks the people of this country to make sacrifices for his botched war. Instead, he gives them tax cuts and tells them to go shopping. How will we explain this to our grandchildren?
"It is like watching a different reality,” says Larry Wilkerson, a former colonel who was chief of staff to Colin Powell. “Nothing could better illustrate the alienation of America’s armed forces from the college-going Americans for whom the Iraq war has meant tax cuts, SUVs and nice holidays.”
During the week since the 3,000th American soldier was killed in Iraq – by a roadside bomb in Baghdad – Washington’s attention has turned to speculation over George W. Bush’s reported plans to order a “surge” of US troops to Iraq.
What is often missing from America’s increasingly recriminatory debate over Iraq is how isolated are the communities that bear most of the human cost. The Pentagon does not disclose the socio-economic background of the 25,000 US soldiers who have been killed or wounded in Iraq.
But a breakdown of their ethnicity and states of origins shows they are overwhelmingly white and from small towns in the interior states of mid-America and the South.
For example, the ratio of killed to the state’s population is 221 per cent for South Dakota, 178 per cent for Nebraska and 163 per cent for Louisiana. In contrast, the District of Columbia, which is home to Washington, the US capital, has a ratio of just 52 per cent, while Connecticut is 66 per cent and New Jersey is 60 per cent.
Charles Moskos, a military sociologist at Northwestern University, says the divorce between the social origins of most US army personnel and the character of the population as a whole is greater than ever. When he attended Princeton as a student in the late 1950s, 400 out of his class of 750 had served in uniform. Last year only nine of Princeton’s class of 1,100 had been in the armed services, he says.
posted by storiesinamerica @ 10:33 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Plato classified men as either Lovers of Wisdom, Lovers of Money, and Lovers of Honor. I agree with the sentiment that small-town America is the biggest bastion of Lovers of Honor.
-----
I understand that this site’s position is to withdraw US forces. The 2007 reality, in my opinion, is that the main reason Bush keeps our troop in Iraq is to prevent the Iraqi Sunnis from being slaughtered by the millions by the Iraqi Shia. There is a good chance than Sunni Saudis would engage the Shia Iranians over control of Iraq.
I’d like someone to reconcile the Progressive call to pull the military out of Iraq with the reality that the result of leaving would likely be Muslim-style genocide. The Shia consider the Sunni to be heretics and visa-versa:
From Qu'ran Section 5.33; The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His apostle and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter they shall have a grievous chastisement...
The Progressives that are wringing their hands because of the way UN Marines responded to a deadly ambush on their unit, are also calling for actions that will result in the deaths of millions, perhaps tens of millions. It doesn’t make sense to me.
"The Progressives that are wringing their hands because of the way UN Marines responded to a deadly ambush on their unit, are also calling for actions that will result in the deaths of millions, perhaps tens of millions. It doesn’t make sense to me."
No, it doesn't make sense to me either. And nice comment by the way....beautifully said.
Rose said:
"The so-called commander-in-chief...."
So-called? What...as opposed to not-so-called? Hate to break the news to you, but he's not just the "so-called" commander-in-chief...he's actually THE commander-in-chief.
Post a Comment
<< Home