insomnomaniac

A Modest Proposal from a Democratic Hawk

On Monday, I wrote about my frustration with the Grand Ol' Party in my post entitled The Day After Tomorrow:

It's great that they "get" the threat, relatively speaking, but it's not so great that they refuse to risk their own political hides doing what's really necessary to make this nation stronger.

My loyal reader, Jason Galbraith, correctly inferred from that comment that I wish they were more hawkish, not less, and that I would likely support whichever candidate for President would step up to the plate and deliver the harsh news to the American people that giving peace a chance means sending in MORE GUNS!

To my shock and flattered amazement, Jason then submitted for my review his "Modest Proposal from a Democratic Hawk". It is his list of suggestions, the list he said a hawkish GOP candidate should use during their campaign. He suggests that perhaps--if I agree with them--I could "repackage" them in such a way as to make them more acceptable to the candidate and his (or her) supporters.

So I read his proposal for us, and set about determining whether I agree with each of his points. This is from my gut you understand, mind-numbing exhaustion from being sick and chasing a sick-but-energetic three year-old around all day while trying to care for myself and my also sick 10 month old prevents me from doing the detailed research a thorough evaluation would require...

I'll address each in order, and will bold statements I find particularly intriguing:

1. Reinstate the draft. It is doubtful that the Allies could have won either of the World Wars without introducing conscription. I have long believed that the 20th century politician to whom President Bush most deserves to be compared is not LBJ or Nixon (much less Reagan) but British Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, who stepped down two years into World War I, having resisted conscription all the way. As Congressman Mark Udall said at a press event to promote the United States Army Relief Act in July of last year,"Our troop levels should reflect the fact that we are at war.” Yes, he’s a Democrat, but why should this be a partisan issue? In World War II the United States Army was built up to 88 divisions, most of which were needed to prevent the outbreaks of insurgencies in Germany and Japan after those countries were defeated. Nobody stood up then and said, “How are we going to pay all those guys?” (See paragraph 3 for my answer to that question.) We might not have to go that high--only 8% of military age males were drafted during Vietnam, for example (but that war was fought in a relatively less populous region than the Greater Middle East). We have 10 active divisions in the Army today. According to slides viewed by following this link, the Army’s budget for FY 2007 is $111,800,000,000 and the Marines’ budget is $16,800,000,000. This briefing also specifies that this budget is designed to increase the number of active Army brigades by 9, the equivalent of two divisions, so current projections are for the Army to have 12 active divisions--still far from enough. Even the Marine Corps should probably be expanded beyond its current 3 divisions although traditionalists in that force would resist it (I know during World War II there were at least 5 Marine divisions). More about this in paragraph 4. A famous Rand Corporation study of insurgencies from Malaya through Northern Ireland posited that 20 occupiers to every 1,000 population are necessary to frustrate insurgencies. That means if we’re going to invade Iran, which option should probably not be off the table, we need to dedicate 1,400,000 soldiers and Marines to the occupation.

Jason, I fear, is correct. If we are to leave invasion of hostile territory like Iran on the table, there is no question we need more troops, and there is also no question that the only way to get them would be a draft. Everything he says is correct here, as hard as it is for me to admit it. I'm a hawk, but I'm human, and it's a tough thing to realize that my brother or my children (if the Democrats manage to pass the ERA in the next couple of years, and girls could be drafted) could be called up involuntarily, and perhaps get killed fighting for their country. But then again, how dare I advocate the peril of other mothers' children or other sisters' brothers if I'm not willing to have my own in the same position?

I would take it a step further though and suggest that a new draft focus not soley on numbers, but skills as well. The enemy we face today is technically sophisticated. Even Taliban fighters and Osama Bin Laden's lackies sit around on laptops coming up with new and different ways of waging their asymmetrical war with us. For us to simply draft young men and women of a certain minimum and maximum age to increase our "troop strength" in terms of numbers alone would be a mistake, I think. I think it would be entirely reasonable to also include people already proficient in computer technology, telecommunications, energy production and management, and probably some fields I'm forgetting that would be equally helpful in a war of this sort.

See, I just don't see us advancing on the ground in long green lines against tanks and infantry. Sure, it could happen, and as long as that's the case, we have to be prepared for it I just don't think it will happen that way. I think it will play out more like this:

1. Iran gets the bomb (or more accurately, several, maybe even a dozen or more)
   
2. Iran banks on the U.S. pressuring Israel not to pre-emptively launch on Teheran and tests the bomb, complete with fanfare, parades and even more strident threats to the West and Israel


3. Israel agrees, knowing that Iran will surely launch its missiles in return, in which case the scenario they'd be trying to prevent would come to pass anyway, so why be perceived as the aggressor, especially when you'll need sympathetic (and guilt-ridden) nations willing to take in refugees who will survive the Holocaust Part Deux in the bunkers they have intelligently built for themselves for precisely this purpose


4. Iran--drunk on their own power--will get greedy and stupid. They will start blackmailing the rest of the world, just to see what they can get in the run-up to their "final solution." They'll reason, "Hey, Hitler did it successfully at first, we'll just do him one better because we'll have the bomb he missed out on because he didn't keep the Jews around long enough to get them to develop it for him!" (Irony being completely lost on them of course). I can easily foresee them threatening to blockade the Straits of Hormuz, thus crippling all of Europe, not to mention their non-Iranian Arab trading partners. Oil flow will trickle to a halt, and the terms? Every man woman and child who is not Muslim in Israel must immediatel vacate the premises, or risk immediately incineration. Full stop.


5. The usual suspects at the UN will wring their hands until their skin peels off, and the Europeans will probably send a delegation to propose a resolution dissolving the state of Israel and advocating the immediate forcible relocation of her people "for their own protection of course," and it will pass, but it won't matter because before the ink is dry, the Israeli sub capatains off the coast of Israel will be calculating their solutions and entering their launch codes.


6. Israel will publicly refuse. Iran will launch its weapons, as will Israel, and the two countries--for all intents and purposes--will cease to exist. WWIV (not III, that was the Cold War, which was always "hot" for someone, somewhere) will be over in a matter of hours, leaving more dead than any war in human history.

But that's just Iran, not the Sunni terrorist nutters like Al Qaeda, or the "heavily armed" North Korean crime-syndicate. So the question then becomes, would a larger military be needed against them? No to the first, possibly to the second. I just don't think we would ever "invade" North Korea because, frankly, our interests are not served by doing so. Islamic fascists are gunning for us. North Korea? That loon just wants to stay in power any way he can. I say we wait until he dies and look for a way to stage a coup or take advantage of the power vacuum he'll leave behind. If we were smart, we'd work with China on a way to assasinate him to jump start the process before his generals and other military honchos could come up with their own plan to do the same.

Now why did I say no to a larger military to fight Al Qaeda-like terrorists? Well, it's kinda obvious, no? They have no army, they aren't using "might" or "numbers" to attack us, they are using stealth, infiltration, propaganda, psy-ops and, well, duhr, they are using TERROR! We have misused the word for so long, treating it as if it is the enemy istead of a tactic used by the enemy, that we've forgotten that "more" soldiers won't help against an enemy looking for bigger slower targets to hit!

This has been my gripe about the naysayers on the left who used the "not enough troops" mantra to simultaneously lend credibility to their claim that they "support the troops," and to build their case for getting out of Iraq immediately. "More" might have quelled an insurgency of native-born Iraqis early on, but no longer. The insurgents are fighting like terrorists now, using the same tactics, hiding in the shadows, using death squads and suicide bombs to create strife and ignite a civil war. Our troops are sitting ducks right in the middle of it all. A larger footprint would only get more of them killed (in my humble opinion).

The same is true with terrorists in any nation we would call enemy. Does anyone remember the bombing of the marine barracks? Soldiers have to sleep somewhere, and when there are hundreds of thousands of them, they're easier to spot. The Romans never figured this out, and look what happened to them. They sent conscripts to fight wars far from home against terroristic barbarian enemies, and they were defeated. Just because a mountain lion is larger and stronger than a scorpion doesn't mean the scorpion can't defeat him. The same is true here. Just like the scorpion, this enemy will crawl in the dark warmth of our shoes (or our civil-rights-obsessed country) and wait to sting us, and if we're not careful, we too will be defeated.

Which brings me to my final point on the draft/military enlargement solution. While I agree that in order to leave all options on the table, a draft is a must, I wouldn't advocate that a GOP candidate do the hard sell on it just yet. I would, however, suggest that he work overtime to convince Americans that we are, in fact, AT WAR, a precondition for support of the draft anyway, and the chief reason (in my opinion) that we aren't winning. I can assure you, there wasn't a man woman or child alive during World War II who thought we were facing essentially a "law-enforcement problem." I'm pretty sure captured German prisoners were not allowed attorneys, nor were there Americans arguing that they should be. And I'm reasonably sure political leaders weren't bending over backwards to refer to the non-Nazi Germans, or the "Japanese non-combattant people" as "peaceful," never mind "innocent." We were more than content to lock them up, bomb the bejeezus out of them and intern them, draft or no draft, and THAT my dear Jason is the missing link here. Before we can get the American people to vote for anyone, from either side of the aisle, who supports a draft, we have to convince them that they are, in fact, in danger, and I don't mean in danger of being bombed, I mean in danger of extinction. That's a tough nut to crack, especially with a people so woefully ignorant of world history and so obsessed with multi-cultural romanticism that they often willfully refuse to see reality even as it splatters its guts all over them.

Which brings me at long long long last to Jason's next suggestion:

2. Announce a policy of nuclear retaliation for 9/11 type attacks. I could hear the wheels turning in your head as I wrote the last sentence of paragraph 1. They ground out something along the lines of, “By this calculus, if we were to simply incinerate 20,000,000 Iranians we would need 400,000 fewer troops.” The Iranians, however, have not provided us with a pretext. Contributing to anti-Western proxies in Lebanon and other places is not enough. If it were the Russians would have launched a first strike while Brezhnev was still premier in response to American support for anti-Soviet insurgents, and we can’t play by more debased rules than they did. Sadly, I believe the window for using nuclear weapons in response to 9/11 itself is past. President Bush’s decision to leave STRATCOM on 9/11 without ordering nuclear release enabled the problem to migrate from southern Afghanistan to northwest Pakistan, itself a nuclear power. Also, to use nuclear weapons in either country now would be an admission that five years of fighting the Taliban toe-to-toe had been a mistake or wasted. Certainly, had the United States been a nuclear power on December 7, 1941, we would have deployed nuclear weapons against Japan before January 1, 1942, and we will have that opportunity again on the very day of the next major attack. But will there be another major attack? Nobody really expects that the next attack to result in loss of life on U. S. soil will be as big as 9/11; it may be a pinprick. It’s the attacks in between 9/11 and a pinprick that present a dilemma. My personal belief is that an attack as big as the 7/7 attack in London (52 innocents dead) justifies the incineration of a country, preferably the one the majority of the attackers came from. (If they’re homegrown, of course, as the 7/7 plotters were, self-immolation is no solution.)

The sentences in bold are spot-on correct, and support my argument above that the problem is we are not in a 1941 mindset! And even then, the main reason we instituted a draft was that we had no real military to speak of at the time! What we had to do to ramp up to fight a conventional war back then was nothing short of perform miracles. If the religious right wanted to make a convincing argument that God was on our side in that conflict, it would need look no further than our successful creation of a military superpower on the heels of a Depression, virtually overnight.

I also agree that we must publicly announce our zero-tolerance of terrorist attack policy forthwith. Now. Today. Not tomorrow, not the next day, TODAY. And we have to be crystal clear that there is no such thing as a real "home-grown" terrorist. Whoever came up with that term should be SHOT. No one who would do that on their native soil has a right to call it his "home," first of all, second of all, no two-bit store clerk or engineering student has the funding or the access to training or weaponry himself to pull off an attack the likes of the 7/7 bombings. All that came from places no Englishman (or American) would happily call "home," so let's stop calling them that. Let's call them what they are: TRAITORS, SPIES, PARTISANS, DEAD MEN WALKING. Pick your favorite, or use them all, I don't care, but when they are discovered before they can carry out their dasterdly deeds, they should be subject to trial, but when found guilty, summarily shot, in the public square. If for no other reason than to let the people see the smug self-satisfied face of their enemy as he takes his last pathetic breath on this earth, and then maybe they'll have a sense of the death-worship they are up against.

And once people do "get" this, it should be easier for them to support the unapologetic announcement that any such attack successfully carried out will be met with immediate retaliation against the nation "presumed" to be the source of the funding and material support for the mission. The President "said" those who support terrorists are just as bad as the terrorists themselves, but what he failed to do was live up to that statement. Instead, he has taken an equivacation (purposely misspelled). That's a term I just coined to refer to where your brain goes when you've decided that war has to be faught only with the individual "bad guys" and not with the cultures and populations that produced them. As I said, during WWII we didn't do this. We didn't care if the people of Hiroshima were loyal to Tojo or not, we incinerated them all regardless. It may sound cruel, but THAT--not the lack of a draft--is the real difference between our ability to win then and our inability to do so today.

3. Raise taxes, or at least sell war bonds. We are financing our present war effort by borrowing from China and a few other Asian countries that run trade surpli with us. This is not acceptable. In World War II the top marginal tax rate was 90%; by the time of Vietnam it had only fallen to 70%. Gas taxes should certainly be raised to levels comparable to tobacco taxes to encourage the use of more fuel-efficient, even zero-emission, cars, thereby reducing the amount of money going to Iran and Saudi Arabia. Personally, I think income taxes should be raised only on those making the President’s salary ($400,000) each year, or more. This will not raise the required amount of money by itself – see paragraph 4 – which is why every Federal civil servant should be made to understand that their promotion depends on selling war bonds to their neighbors who can afford them. In this way we would be borrowing money primarily from ourselves, as we did in World War II.
4. Be realistic about the amount that must be spent. Let’s take the number $250,000,000,000, a quarter trillion dollars, and start out by doubling what the Marines have to $33,600,000,000 (which should enable them to have 6 rather than 3 divisions). That leaves $233,200,000,000 to plow into the Army, which should enable them to triple the number of active divisions over what’s currently projected, to 36. To fill those divisions, refer to paragraph 1. We’re also going to need to spend a lot more on reconstruction of the countries we invade – I should think another $80,000,000,000 a year would be the equivalent in current dollars of the Marshall Plan. In Iraq, up to two-thirds of reconstruction funds have been expended on security, but hopefully having enough troops from the get-go would mean that the insurgency would never reach the levels currently seen in Iraq. If not, add another $160,000,000,000 to make sure $80,000,000,000 is actually spent on the projects.

Agree with everything you say, honestly, it just has as much chance of selling--especially to a GOP audience--as a pulled-pork sandwich to pilgrims in Mecca during Ramadan. And you know the bleeding-heart wing of the Democratic party would bleat out "We should be spending that on our own people, for free healthcare and birth-to-death entitlements, not on killing babies in far away culturally interesting places!"

But in principle, I agree, if a draft could be sold to the people, both raising taxes and selling war bonds would be the best ways to pay for it.

Look, I don't want you to think I'm totally against the draft at all costs, I'm not. I do see some value to reinstating the draft if only for psychological impact. It can have the effect of uniting the country against a common enemy, of investing each and every citizen in the war's outcome, certainly moreso than we are now, when we treat it as yet another depressing reality show we'd like to see cancelled. I just think we need to first attend to the preconditions, to the "repackaging" of the war itself, before we touch the draft never mind the huge taxes that will be needed to pay for it.

As for the gas tax increase, this worries me. I agree that we need to do something about our energy dependence, but taxing people seems a bit counter-productive. Nothing turns a country more sour on its leadership--whoever they may be--faster than paying huge prices at the pump. And we Americans are spoiled by cheap gas pure and simple. If we had to pay what Europeans pay, we'd rush to the polls to vote anyone and everyone out of office, you can bet your life savings on that one!

No, I think we need to push hard for energy independence, in particular for alternative fuels, and not only because of the middle east. Our environment is at a tipping point. I hate to go all Al Gore on everyone, but it is, global warming or not. Our consumption of fossil fuels is having an impact on more than just the air around us, it's affecting the soil beneath us and the water around us (and the fish in the water too). Whatever we're doing to the climate, we ARE upsetting the balance of the natural world that sustains us, and if we're not careful, nuclear fallout may be the least of our worries. This is where a rational Democrat needs to step up to the plate if you don't mind my saying so, perhaps someone with actual scientific credentials (not one who pretends to have them in a movie of his own production). And if we can stop raping the Earth, I believe that she (and God, don't laugh, I'm serious) will repay us tenfold by giving us a weaker enemy to fight! Our refusal to do what is right on this front is only strengthening the "devil" that wages war against us, and it's high time all of us--GOP especially--realized it. I think Bush "gets" this too, but he lacks the ability to communicate the seriousness of the issue and is hamstrung by his own party's unwillingness to "own" any of the problem. Make no mistake about it, nothing would hurt Iran and the rest of the wackos more than ditching oil in favor of fryer grease, nuclear power, even cleaner-burning coal technology. And if we don't do this? Mark my words, within the next ten years, we will have serious shortages of power, fuel, even some kinds of food (particularly seafood) and no one to blame but ourselves. And then the problem will be magnified by those who--in a desperate attempt to remedy the problem on their own--take to chopping down trees by the tens of thousands to burn them for HEAT!

As for your last two points, that we should appeal to the GOP base by promising to match Bush's record of countries liberated by invading the two most "anti-American" countries in the first two years of our candidate's term, and that we should implement Fareed Zakaria's ideas on Iraq, I can only say NO, and YES.

No to the first because I still don't think pre-emptive invasion works. I just don't. But then again what we did in Iraq, I believe, was NOT pre-emptive. We were in a 12 year stalemate situation with a man who'd never lived up to his end of a cease-fire agreement AND was bragging around that he had stockpiles of WMD, ready to distribute to the highest bidder (perhaps). I didn't feel then, and I don't feel now, that there was any responsible alternative but to go in and finish the job we should have finished long ago with Saddam. What I didn't sign up for, and apparently neither did the rest of the country, was some adventure in nation-building! Don't get me wrong, I thought it was a noble goal, and if it could have worked, it would have improved our situation in the war against Islamic extremists, but it was not what we all signed up for, and it sure as hell wasn't what we were prepared for--economically, emotionally or tactically!

Which brings me to Fareed's suggestions. I think they are well worth a try. We are there, we have to try something, and what he puts forth is as good a place to start as any. I would also remind people (and you) that it is a myth that the Marshall Plan was a model for "nation building" as it should be done. First of all, no nations were "built" they were "rebuilt." They had some history of "nationhood" in the first place, Iraq? Not so much. It is and always has been an artificial creation, a line-drawing on a map, created by and for people living very far away from the day-to-day struggles of the people they called "Iraqis."

Add to that the fact that Europe--Germany in particular--was Christian, and not Muslim. Now before anyone starts screaming at me that I'm a racist or something, hear me out. I think we need to accept the possibility (for me it's a probability bordering on certainty) that Islam and democracy as we know it are inherently incompatible. This is especially true of the "version" of Islam currently mobilized against us, in words as well as deeds. To think we could invade Syria and the Sudan--the former being a place so utterly dependent on the largesse of Islamic nations, despite having a relatively secular culture themselves, and the latter being so radicalized they think it's perfectly acceptable to rape young girls before lopping off their heads, just because they are black, or just because they are not the "right" kind of Muslim--and "liberate" anyone is just folly. I might as well try to teach my dog to speak English or vote, it's not going to happen, period.

I realize that sounds pessimistic, but I think it's time for a little lesson in our own history, the part that came before WWI or WWII. We did not become what we are overnight, nor did we become what we are by force or through any outside influence. No artificial construct of any kind gave birth to us, we "evolved" in the truest sense of the term, and the process was no less ugly than what it might look like if you got to live long enough to watch the fish "walk" up on the land (and vice versa, in the case of dolphins, but I digress...). Fits and starts and violence and civil war and ethnic strife and economic hardship, these are what you'd see. But ask people today and you get a romanticized vision of us as this "United we Stand, Divided We Fall" group of people who have always been thus! It just isn't so! And we were a largely Christian nation, not Muslim, which means that we began with the premise (in words if not in deeds always) that all men are created equal, and that forgiveness is divine, not to mention the stuff about separation of church and state and all! Islam IS the state for the truly faithful. For someone to say he or she is Muslim and American is akin to someone telling you she is a faithful Catholic who's twice divorced with children from each marriage. You can be one or the other, but not both, except in your own mind.

Not that I'm devaluing the loyal Muslim Americans amongst us, they are out there, plenty of them, they just bear no more resemblance to the Muslims fighting us and their supporters--who I believe are the vast majority of those loyal to the faith in the rest of the world--than I do. It's vital that we get that clear, I think. As long as we refer to it as "the religion of Peace," we will never "get" it as a nation. It would be like the Romans referring to the Goths as a "culture of peace" simply because the peasants in their villages weren't taking up arms against Rome's authority. It's ludicrous, seriously!

I have no idea if this is at all what you wanted or hoped for in a response, but it's what I came up with, unedited, unfiltered and unapologetic. It does no one any good for me to pretend I feel otherwise about these issues, right? Just as I think it would do no candidate I'd support any good either.

But as I said, before he, or I, or anyone can convince the American people to vote for a real hawk of either persuasion in '08, the American people have to grow some talons, wings and beaks themselves!

You know, raptors, birds of prey, hunt their food by sight. Most people don't know this and are surprised by it because the birds fly so high off the ground when they hunt, but it's true. Their eyesight is excellent. Without it, it wouldn't matter how sharp their talons or beaks were, and it wouldn't matter how fast they could move in for the kill. So must it be with us. We must first see the enemy, and not as a cute innocent or desperate little mouse, but as the thing we must destroy in order to survive.

Posted by insomnomaniac at November 8, 2006 9:41 PM | TrackBack