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Lt. Gen. Douglas Luter must have missed his White House orientation. How else do you explain President Bush’s military czar for Iraq and Afghanistan and his earnest remarks on NPR’s ‘All Things Considered’? How else do you explain his agreement with what I and many have been saying for years? That our current military, albeit the best trained in the world, is being so overstretched that we may have to consider bringing back a draft just to ensure that we continue to have enough well-rested personnel to fill our ranks.
Honesty has never been this administration’s strongest suit.
Of course, you don’t have to look at the polls anytime to know that this is as close to a political impossibility as you can get in Washington. The White House knows that if the majority of American families were forced to send their children in harm’s way, our military men and women would be on the first flight home. The outcry for their return would ring louder than ever in every corner of this country, from the soccer fields to college campuses to the Wall Street boardrooms.
Yet the cruel irony is that this so called ‘all-volunteer’ fighting force is already being fueled by a daft. It’s an economic one that lures minorities, women and poor whites in rural and urban areas with lucrative signing bonuses of up to in some cases $40,000. Just ask the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. Agreeing with earlier, non-governmental and Defense Department studies of representation in the military by various economic groups, the CBO released a report this past July that concluded that "areas in the low-to-middle range of household incomes were overrepresented" in the military compared to their representation in the general population.
Unfortunately, no amount of money has been able to make up for the fact that even with the military constantly changing their yearly goals, recruitment numbers for the last two years are still down, especially in the Army. The reality is that the only Americans making a sacrifice in this war are the troops and their loved ones. They are the ones that have to make additional arrangements to pay the bills and have food on the table. They are the ones that have to find a way to explain to children why mommy or daddy or both are not home and why they may never come back.
Instead of dealing with solid facts, our President wants us to blindly have faith in him. To ignore the daily reports or the plethora of retired four star generals and believe that his surge – the one powered by extending the Army tour of duty from 12-15 months, the one that are redeploying National Guard and other military units four or five times – is working.
But blind faith is not going to bring back young heroes like Juan Alcántara, a 22 year old resident of my Congressional district who was killed last week in Iraq. He would have been home, seeing the first steps of his one month old daughter Jayleni Marie if his tour had not been extended from to October. He would have had the chance to fulfill his dreams of becoming a citizen, getting involved in law enforcement and taking the necessary steps to make a better life for his family. His family and his country will now never know the great heights that would have achieved. Not know if he, like another fellow member of the 2nd Infantry out of Ft. Lewis, Washington, could have risen from the neighborhood to become Chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.
Those dreams are now dashed because of a war that we should have never gotten involved in the first place. A war that we must find a way to end before our own reckless policies push these fine men and women beyond their breaking point. Doing that would not only be dangerous to our country and to the security of the world. It would also be morally wrong to that small group of patriotic Americans that are on the frontlines, making sure that the liberty we hold today means something tomorrow.
This piece was originally published in the Amsterdam News. An edited Spanish-language version was also published in El Diario/la Prensa.
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