And with what shall we defend our great Republic?

tlaktan · July 28, 2005, 11:33pm

<a href=“http://www.cejla.netfirms.com/About%20CEJ.htm[/url]”>http://www.cejla.netfirms.com/About%20CEJ.htm</a>

Several anti-war organizations have proposed the complete dismantling of our armed forces, partially because of our participation in wars that are quite questionable, such as Iraq and Vietnam. I am not talking about withdrawal or a partial reduction of our already-small volunteer force, but a total dismantling.

Iraq is only the pretext in which some of these organizations operate. They go to schools, use teachers as agents to promote anarchy and dissidence among students who do not know all the facts and are brainwashed into believing that other opinions are incorrect.

Sad to say, the problem is growing. We see the crippling effect anti-war demonstrations had against the United States Army and other military recruiters, as recruiters struggle nowadays. Organizations such as the one mentioned above promote dissidence, taking students out of classes in order to promote the organization’s own agenda.

Under the pretext of education, the alleviation of societal problems, and a “better America” these organizations gather members, and then subtly add to the pile a “removal of our vicious armed forces.”

Divide and conquer, as the Romans once said. Create trouble and anarchy, confusion and vexation, especially during a time of war, and a government will be weakened.

I ask the organizations who ask for a dismantling of the military: with what, then, shall we defend our Republic?

TheDad · July 29, 2005, 1:09pm

It’s an obviously dumb idea. Prompted by an equally opposite dumb idea.

Mr.B · July 29, 2005, 1:31pm

The military would not meet with as much resistance if they were more wisely used. I think poor policy is the problem. We were winning the diplomatic war with Iraq, the military solution was unwise.

calmom · July 29, 2005, 10:46pm

Well, Tlaktan, this represents a new low for a post. There is absolutely nothing on the site you linked to about “dismantling” the military. The site you linked to is:

Are you suggesting that the advocating of education and expanded rights for working-class communities and minority communties will decimate our military because you hope that the poor continue to be the fodder that fills the front lines? Give them a better alternative and they might not be so eager to join? I hope that isn’t your view.

There is no anti-military sentiment expressed on the page you link to; they simply make clear the oppose the Iraq war, and way down on the bottom of the page list a rather unremarkable array of in anti-war activities:

The site is very clear that it is the Iraq war they oppose.

And anti-war demonstrations are not the cause of the military’s current recruitment efforts – the war itself is the cause. The fact that hundreds of vets are coming back with crippling injuries - except for the ones who don’t make it back; that there is no end in sight; that the tours of duty are extended far beyond the period of time that draftees were expected to serve in the Vietnam era; that there is a **30%<a href=“!”>/b</a> reported rate of mental illness such as post traumatic stress disorder among Iraq returnees – who in their right mind would volunteer for that? I am sure that the vast majority of young people returning from Iraq counsel their friends and family members to stay away from the military.

Don’t blame the messenger, Tlaktan.

tlaktan · July 30, 2005, 12:21am

I apologize, first of all. I must admit there’s nothing on the site but there are supplementary materials in print. I’d scan it, if you’d like. My scanner is broken but I’m sure I can scan it at Kinkos or something.

You don’t know the organization like I do, Calmom. This is not a new low for me. (I’ve sunk lower, I defended going into war with what I knew was lousy intelligence, but I’ve recanted and of course, like everyone else, know there must be a timetable to withdraw. Just not immediately of course, we don’t want to be responsible for the worst disaster in nation-building and one of the worst civil wars in the history of the world.)

What they put on the Net pales in comparison to the actual actions they take in schools.

The war itself may be the cause, but making informed decisions as to whether or not joining the military may be a wise thing is the correct thing to do. Brainwashing students into believing that we’re going to turn into a fascist state and military subsidized leadership programs will all have kids in boot camp … that is just ludicrous (if you’d like, I’ll scan the flyers for you that they’ve posted all throughout the HS campus).

They bring forth lies, they say that the military is completely fradulent in advertising (and I have proof of this too) and promote fear campaigns such as “You Can’t Join the Army If You’re Dead.” The sad part is, these are students (fueled by activist, radical teachers) who are brainwashed into doing all the “dirty work” and are being punished for it. (A few months ago, students from this particular organization were involved in a hostile disruption which required administrative intervention).

They accuse the military of brainwashing and chicanery in order to meet their recruiting numbers, but I say the deception involved in these extremist organizations are just as bad.

I’m not saying all opponents of the war are bad, and most people who oppose the war support the troops. That, I don’t have a problem with. Some retired military personnel who served as recruiters currently oppose the war, yet support the troops. Heck, I support the troops but dislike the war, but… leaving them without reinforcements is not support.

Those who take it to an extreme level, however, through harrassment of students who are for the military (they went up to a military desk during career day, went to students and said in their faces, “Are you sure you want to join the Military? How can you join the military if you’re dead?” etc.,) or whoever even has a remote interest in the military… shakes head It’s just wrong. I don’t know how these extremist organizations are even allowed on campus, but they are. Freedom of speech is one thing, but it does not guarantee the right to harrass others in order to “help better understand” what is being said.

I am supportive of withdrawal as the next person, but attempting to disorganize and collapse the military ranks is not the way to go. With no fresh rotation of troops into the United States armed forces, and a large amount of soldiers taking leave and bidding adieu to their military careers, we will soon be at a point where our volunteer army will no longer be able to sustain our various efforts.

Is that what we all want, a volunteer army no longer able to sustain itself? Then there’s that D word we all don’t want to hear. Funny, the consequences of attempting to tear down the military’s source of recruitment will lead us into the predicament we all fear. Hrmph.

Calmom,

Just to give you an idea of what these teachers do:

That is ALL a pretext to gain power. Most of the teachers from that organization are based in our high school, and they’ve managed to (somehow) obtain a tremendous amount of power. However, they’ve already abused the perquisites of power. Most of the teachers teach essential classes (e.g. the core curriculum) yet now have the power to invoke a second conference period (meaning two hours straight of no-class conference, and they do invoke their power) and thus force other classes to be packed to capacity and sometimes beyond. Is that your idea of advocating education?

Or that dozens of senior students couldn’t access a government class (and the government classes already open were filled to the brim) thanks to the now non-existent section being unavailable. shakes head

When you carry the power to do so, and yet you have failed to fulfill the promises made, what sort of advocacy is that? An advocacy for corruption?

calmom · July 30, 2005, 2:02am

Tlaktan,
You obviously have a personal agenda based on things that have happened at your high school that has nothing to do with what’s on the web site you linked to - so there’s not much point in debating a case based entirely on your impressions and conclusions [“Most of the teachers from that organization are based in our high school, and they’ve managed to (somehow) obtain a tremendous amount of power.”] How in the world would any of us know whether your claims have any validity? If anything, your perception sounds somewhat on the paranoid/conspiratorial end: i.e., the CEJ has infilitrated and taken over your high school. But there’s no point in debating it here - unless you can find some pro-CEJ people from your high school willing to participate, we’re getting a one-sided view.

Some of your examples that are upsetting to you don’t seem bad to me. You wrote:

That upsets you; from my point of view that is exactly what military recruiters should expect and is an understandable and acceptable response.

I’m not asking you to agree – but just understand that some of us do not share your outrage, and if you are going to post your opinions rather than facts we don’t have much of a conversation. There are many parents here, myself included, who are opposed to the idea of military recruiters on high school campuses at all – we would favor an outright ban – and would encourage and support our own kids to engage in protests, leafleting, etc. If any one of my daughter’s classmates expressed a desire to join the military, I would do my darndest to talk him or her out of it.

You make some very big leaps in your logic: from disagreeing to counter-recruitment tactics used by antiwar activitists, to a claim that they advocate the dismantling of the entire US military; from disagreeing with the decision of teachers at your school concerning class scheduling (to allow for some sort of antiwar teach-in or conference?? - not so clear from your post) – to a semi-paranoid rant as to how such teachers somehow have grabbed all the “power” at the school.

Anyway, there’s no point in debating – since you are conducting an online rage against an organization and group of teachers who are not here to present their side of things. I would suggest you try to get control of your anger - focus on the facts of what has actually happened, and not your own personal spin - and then try engage in rational discourse with the teachers or students who you are upset with.

In any case, don’t waste your breath arguing with me any more. We can agree to disagree and leave it at that.

tlaktan · July 30, 2005, 2:31am

Rage is not quite the word. It’s not an interest that irks me terribly, but something of concern that’s been in the back burner. With a bit of extra time on my hands, I’m just bouncing off thoughts.

I’m curious, is the Iraqi engagement the only reason why parents would prefer recruiters off campus? The HS (I can’t refer to it as our school anymore) banned recruiters except on an invitation-only basis. I can understand (well, not totally, but I do acknowledge and agree with the idea…) that you wouldn’t want your children to go fight in some unjustified war that has a questionable purpose to serve the agenda of the current administration. But… if we backtrack, and say we didn’t invade Iraq, would it be a different situation? Would more parents be willing to let their children go into the armed forces if we were in a passive military situation?

Just some things that I’m curious about. I’ll step aside from the personal experience.

calmom · July 30, 2005, 3:13am

Back before Iraq and before 9/11 - in 1999, 2000 - my son was in high school and because of the diversity/economics of his school, there was a military recruiter who regularly visited and kind of hung out there. My son was always engaging the recruiter in debate and challenging – I’m not sure that the recruiter minded, as it was possible that my son was one of only a few kids even willing to talk to the recruiter. Not many kids signed up, and my son was quite proud of the fact that no kids from his high school class signed up – so yes, there was anti-military sentiment before the war, though my son didn’t get it from me. (I didn’t even know there was a recruiter at his school until he told me). I think my son’s view was more of a pro-education view than anti-military though – that is, I think that he thought his classmates should be headed toward college, and didn’t like the idea of them signing on for the army instead. But I don’t know for sure - I never really asked, it wasn’t a big deal at the time.

I don’t think that 17, 18 & 19 year olds are really ready for the life-altering decision that a military career can mean in a time of war. So yes, the Iraq war is part of it, because there was a very low risk that kids who enlisted in, say, 1996, would end up in harm’s way, and thus a decision to enlist really didn’t carry the risk it does now. I realize that the army really likes to have 19 year old recruits, but I think maybe because kids that age are more malleable precisely because they lack mental maturity. Bottom line: if our society says the kid isn’t old enough to make appropriate decisions about alcohol use… how can that same kid make a decision that very well may shatter his life and destroy his future because of physical or emotional injuries sustained on the battlefield? I’m not saying they should change the laws about the age of entry to military service-- but I don’t want recruiters at my kids’ school. It’s not a big issue for me - that is, I’m not going to write any protest letters to the editor of school board – but only because I am confident that the local schools also allow students with opposing views the freedom to express them. In other words, I’m figuring that if CEJ is at your school politely arguing the other side,then it is far less likely for a kid to make an ill-considered judgement: they’ve heard both sides and thought things through. (And if the CEJ people are not so polite, they are only going to alienate kids and so their tactics will backfire – so I’d hope they have as much savvy about getting their message across as the recruiters do).

I don’t think that recruiters come to my daughter’s school anyway, so its a non-issue locally. Most of my daughter’s closest friends wouldn’t be allowed to join the military even if they wanted to, because of their sexual orientation – maybe if the military really wants to increase its numbers, it should consider abandoning its policy of excluding gay people. I doubt that an overwhelming number of gays would join, but I’ll bet they could meet short-term recruiting goals.

TheDad · July 30, 2005, 3:59pm

Tlaktan, it wouldn’t even have to be a passive military experience, just not an ill-conceived, counter-productive one based on fraud & deception.

As a writer (part time), I find thought experiments highly useful, particularly when contemplating various unpleasant ideas. If my daughter were killed in Afghanistan after 9/11, I would be devastated but accept that it happened in the course of something that needed to done.

If my daughter were killed in Iraq, I would not only be devastated but enraged at the squandering of her life in pursuit of a policy rooted in deception and false premises and which has not and will not make the world safer. From my feelings about my own daughter, I extrapolate to the feelings of all the parents of all the sons and daughters going over there. Which is why I can’t bring myself even to say to someone, “If you believe in this !@#$%! war so much, why don’t YOU send YOUR son/daughter over there.” Because however much they believe in it, it’s because they don’t yet see (or may never see) that this is a pointless blind alley we’ve gone down and the death of their son or daughter will be just as much of a devastating loss and pointless waste as that of mine would have been.

I would also have the same reaction as Iraq to a death in Afghanistan NOW, where we have squandered the military superiority and been completely inept, negligent, arrogant, and foolish in working with the cultural, religious, ethnic, economic, and political dimensions of Afghanistan so that the area won’t be a breeding ground for more terrorists in the future. Conditions in Afghanistan are worse now than they were a year ago, as measured by virtually any metric you care to use.

I’ve spent most of my life being moderately hawkish. I worked for the US Navy as a college student at a time when doing so got one labeled a running dog imperialist lackey on campus. I believed absolutely that SH’s invasion of Kuwait could not be allowed to stand, no matter that SH was partly a creature–borne out of convenience, as with the Taliban–of our own making. My father fought in the Ardennes and got a Purple Heart and my stepfather fought on Iwo Jima. I am no stranger to military institutions and can sustain a marathon pace when discussing many aspects of military history, including the intersection of the military and the political.

The incompetence that led us into Iraq, the salesmanship logic that implicitly connected Iraq to 9/11 (fighting them there so that we don’t fight them here, etc.), and the blustering self-aggrandizing buffoonery of a President that can engage in machismo posturing like “Bring it on!” and ignorant inanities like “They hate us for our freedom” in the expectation that invading Iraq would be like Desert Storm with all the consequences of invading Grenada, all make me sick.

There is term in chess, “zugszwang,” to descibe a situation where any move you make weakens your position. We’re very close to that in Iraq. I am less sure about what to do than what ought not to have been done. But I am absolutely clear that those who initiated this mess, those who sustained this travesty, need to be held accountable and ejected from power. And if diminished military recruiting gives second thoughts about precipitous action against Iran or Syria and intensifies the need for the US to focus on getting itself out of Iraq, then well and good.

Some may say, we can’t leave before the job is done. There is no “done” there, no realisitic end state that is achievable, that will, when the reality is absorbed by the American people, make most people think the cost has been worth it. We will have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, but at the same time killed 3,000 of our own people (by the time we’re out, at least), maimed another 25,000, watched Iraq suffer at least 40,000 civilian deaths, opened up a front for Islamic jihadists that had not previously been in play, left in place an Iraqi government either not to our taste and/or in a civil war, AND NOT DONE ONE DAMNED THING TO MAKE THE WORLD SAFER FROM ISLAMIC JIHADISTS!!!

And in fact, we will have been their best recruiting tool by acting just like their propaganda says we do, participating in a war of the West vs. Islam, intent on humiliating Islamic people.

The argument about military recruiting is that shortfalls hurt the troops already there. But the flipside is that no shortfalls make it easier for the administration to pursue its wrongheaded policies unchecked. So far they’re getting by but the strains are showing, e.g., upping the maximum age for new recruits, extensive use of the Individual Ready Reserve to the point of calling up people in their mid-50’s, and the odious widespread use of Stop-Loss orders, not to mention some of the less publicized techiques to get currently serving members to re-enlist.
Zugszwang.

citygirlsmom · July 30, 2005, 6:49pm

In the past, recruiting for the military focused alot on minorities, for many it was the 'chance" to go to college. And, while minorities was a certain percentage of the population, it would almost a THIRD of the military recruits, three of four times the percentage. Today, minorites have more choices and enlist at the same rate as the rest of the population. That has changed enlistment #s quite a bit.

The “college” money earned, the “job skills” got didn’t quite live up, in many cases, to the sales pitch. So as soldiers came back, the promises made didn’t always happen, and that was shared.

I think there is a distrust right now, a distrust of what the commitment will be, a distrust of where you will be sent…soldiers haven’t been treated so well when they come back by our Government, and young people and their parents see that. So while many kids do sign up, many who might have don’t because of a number of reason.

And with what shall we defend our great Republic?

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