Wednesday, September 13, 2006

The German People is Unworthy of its Fuhrer

Before Germanicus gets all hot and bothered and mistakenly "invokes" Godwin's Law (what do you expect from a guy who gets all his information from "Britænnicæ Onlinæ"?), let me say that I'm not comparing Bush or the war cheerleaders to Hitler or Nazis. I'm simply wondering where the argument goes from here: the war continues to lose popularity, the armed forces continue to miss recruitment goals, Iraq has become the sectarian hellhole war opponents predicted it would be, no WMD are found, intervention has radicalized the Muslim world and strengthened the hand of the worst elements in the region and severely limited our options with respect to Iran.

Do the hawks just keep saying that Saddam was a monster and the world is better off without him? Well, yeah, but so what? China would likely be better off without the Communist Party, but we all understand that there are many, many practical reasons for us not to invade Beijing. If they were honest, the next stage of the rhetorical campaign would be to blame the American people for a lack of will, a la Colonel Kurtz and the Beltway Vietnam revisionists. However, since they can't do that, I guess they'll just blame Democrats for leading the volk astray. And how about this article, which is says the DOD has a serious case of the soft biggotry of low expectations (my favorite phrase in politics, by the way):

MORE TROOPS....The New Republic reports on the state of our military today:

After failing to meet its recruitment target for 2005, the Army raised the maximum age for enlistment from 35 to 40 in January — only to find it necessary to raise it to 42 in June. Basic training, which has, for decades, been an important tool for testing the mettle of recruits, has increasingly become a rubber-stamping ritual. Through the first six months of 2006, only 7.6 percent of new recruits failed basic training, down from 18.1 percent in May 2005.

Alarmingly, this drop in boot camp attrition coincides with a lowering of recruitment standards. The number of Army recruits who scored below average on its aptitude test doubled in 2005, and the Army has doubled the number of non-high school graduates it can enlist this year.

There's nothing all that new in this article, but it's worth reading it to get the big picture. Two-thirds of active Army units are unready for combat and the situation is even worse in the National Guard. The number and quality of recruits is down. Equipment is wearing out and not getting replaced. As the authors say, we simply don't have any more combat-ready troops than the ones that are already in the field.

This is why it's not merely rhetorical to ask guys like Rich Lowry and Bill Kristol to tell us where they're going to get the extra soldiers they keep telling us we need in Iraq. They've already tacitly admitted that we can't win the war without more troops, but they're too timid — or mendacious? — to ask the obvious next question: If we need more troops to win, but there aren't any more troops to be had, then what?

3 Comments:

Blogger Germanicu$ said...

If he was really earnest about this being a battle for civilization, Bush would have re-instituted the draft and pushed through a tax hike.

God, how I hate him. Hate him like Hitler.

2:08 PM  
Blogger Notobamasfool said...

A liberal friend made a very good point.

If we're really at war, shouldn't we be rationing and making everyone make the kind of sacrifices that were made during World War II? Shouldn't there be meatless Mondays to pay for the war machine?

I think by and large liberals are against this war because it's trendy--take away their soy lattes for a month and we'll be out of Iraq by next Wednesday.

3:36 PM  
Blogger George W. Bush said...

Trendy? What's the matter w/ you? Most liberals are against this war because 1) it was launched on lies, 2) young, mostly disadvantaged youth are dying with no end in sight, not because the New Yorker told us so.

Take away the Redstaters F-150's and the suburbanites 3rd flat screen...screw the latte.

10:01 AM  

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