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Fourth Amendment rights national politics & policies The Draft

Rich Kids for Ransom

Elliot Ackerman wants peace so badly that he is willing to conscript our sons and daughters into the military in hopes of achieving it. 

“From Somalia to Syria, American forces are engaged in combat,” the author and decorated Marine veteran writes in Time. “With recent military posturing against Iran, against North Korea, it is also easy to imagine our country sleepwalking into another major theater war.”

Mr. Ackerman is not arguing the draft would help in current or future combat operations, or appreciably improve the military. In answer to the obvious question, “Why would you degrade the finest fighting machine the world has ever known?” he replies, “[W]e must move the issues of war and peace from the periphery of our national discourse to its center.”

How? 

Ackerman proposes a “reverse-​engineered draft.” 

His idea is to call up 65,000 young men and women by lottery for two-​year terms of servitude. This would represent roughly 5 percent of the armed forces. “And no one could skip this draft,” he claims … though obviously not everyone sent a “Greetings” letter will be physically able to serve. 

Lastly, he insists that “the only ones eligible” would be “those whose families fall into the top income tax bracket.”

In short, conscript the rich kids!

Of which Ackerman was one.*

Maybe his stance of theatrical class self-​sacrifice distracted him from his proposal’s blatant violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. 

All this to stir up more angst from allegedly influential high-​income earners by turning their children into political hostages.

Doesn’t make Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


* In the 1990s, I served with Peter Ackerman, Elliot’s father, on the board of directors of U.S. Term Limits.

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Elliot Ackerman, conscription, war, slavery, soldiers,

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international affairs

Superpower Blues

I don’t want the Turkish military to wipe out the Kurds.

I also don’t want the Taliban to return to power in Afghanistan.

Nor do I want the Chinese totalitarians to violate the rights of Hongkongers.

Or for the Spanish government to slap long prison terms on peaceful Catalonian separatists.

Or tyrants in Nicaragua and Venezuela to torture and kill the people of those countries.

At the same time, I don’t want U.S. Marines landing on the beaches of Venezuela or Nicaragua or parachuting into Madrid or Kowloon … or for our military to endlessly occupy turf in Afghanistan and Syria.

There are limits even to superpower status. We cannot re-​make the world in our image. By force. Everywhere at all times.

Except to some degree, by example. And regime change wars have not set a very good example.

The Iraq War destabilized the Middle East and handed Iran a major strategic victory. Leading from behind to help NATO overthrow the government of Libya has produced more chaos for northern Africa and Europe. Efforts at regime change in Syria have only worsened the suffering of millions of people.

U.S. troops remain in Iraq. After 17 years, we still have soldiers dying in Afghanistan. We can never leave. At least, not without any “gains” evaporating in a hurry. 

And the president who finally ends military involvement in these “endless war” will get endless grief for abandoning allies* and ceding ground to Russia or some other bad actor. That’s what happened after 28 soldiers were pulled out of Syria.

Being a superpower isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. 

Beacon of freedom seems a better gig.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


* This is not an argument for being a bad ally ourselves. For starters, I think we ought to welcome Kurdish refugees who wish to immigrate to the U.S.

soldiers, world police, war, peace, Syria, Kurds,

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folly ideological culture

War Lust Flags

A new poll shows that a narrow majority of Americans would support the President were he to pull troops out of Afghanistan. Less than a quarter of those polled said they would oppose it. 

“The survey also indicates Americans remain unconvinced that the United States has a clear purpose in Afghanistan,” explains the January 10 press release of the Charles Koch Institute, which commissioned the poll. “Almost half of respondents, 45 percent, said the United States has no strategic objective, while only 21 percent said it does. About one-​third (34 percent) said they did not know.”

However you slice the public opinion data, the wars in the Mid-​East are not gaining in popularity. A plurality of Americans polled want out of Syria, too — no matter “whether the conflict was framed around the Syrian civil war or to counter-ISIS.”

Lucy Steigerwald, writing at Reason, highlights the incoherence in the White House and Pentagon: “no one seems to know what the hell is going on.” Which just shows how far we have come, after all these years. “The long life of the Afghan war makes it hard to remember how popular it was when it began.”

But back then it all seemed so clear: get Osama bin Laden, destroy his training camps, and punish the Taliban for harboring him.

All that was accomplished long ago. Now our leaders fear pulling out because … we haven’t established a western democracy there?

That was never going to happen.

It is foolish — even immoral — to keep a war going with impossible and incoherent goals.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Categories
ideological culture moral hazard national politics & policies U.S. Constitution

The Great Diversion

Though the breakdown of civil debate seems new, the subjects are old. We are actually talking about Nazis, again. Nazi death counts. And the Confederacy. The former defeated by my father’s generation, the latter defeated several generations earlier.

Why?

Because talking about the future would require actual thought. It’s easier to fight over the past, over symbols of the past.

That is why there was a Charlottesville debacle. It is about a statue, a monument to dead soldiers featuring the Confederacy’s General Robert E. Lee. And what it means. The “Unite the Right” rally was set in Charlottesville because of the city council’s decision to remove it. 

It is interesting, though, that the event did not unite “the Right.” Conservative and even many alleged “alt-​right” groups refused to participate. 

But “the Left” seems more united than before. If you focus on past racism and the persistence of Nazi and Confederate symbology, it’s pretty easy to agree. I agree. 

And yet, I take a step back, and remember that those monuments do not have the univocal racist meaning attributed to them. They were intended to heal wounds.*

Now they open up old ones.

And yet this is all a diversion. We are facing a major set of crises that could lead to war, depression, chaos, and (possibly) worse. But we are not now handling them because we are fighting over symbols of the past.

This may be a very human thing to do.

But it is not smart.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* At least 350,000 young American men died wearing Confederate uniforms in the Civil War, and half a million Union soldiers are believed to have died directly from their war wounds. Today’s population is ten times greater, so adjusted for today it would be eight million deaths. That is a lot of searing wounds.


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Categories
Accountability folly moral hazard national politics & policies

Hotel Afghanistan

“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

Is Afghanistan becoming the Hotel California?

Back in 2014, Obama declared victory — well, he called it “over.” We even informed our enemies ahead of time that we were leaving, to show good manners. 

But as wars are known to do, it keeps not stopping. That is, bullets whiz by and bombs explode … and our American military hasn’t left. 

Obama feared that if we pulled out completely from the longest war in our history, the Afghan government would soon collapse and the Taliban would rush back to power. Last year the Taliban controlled more of the country than at anytime since 2001, when we first … “won.”

Now President Trump, the purported isolationist, stares at a report from military commanders on what to do. Their answer, according to the Washington Post, is to send “at least 3,000” more soldiers to Afghanistan, in addition to the 8,500 currently stationed there. And to allow US troops to engage in greater combat. 

“The plan would also increase spending on Afghanistan’s troubled government,” the Post reported. But more money won’t un-​corrupt the system.

Afghanistan expert Andrew Wilder with the U.S. Institute of Peace predicts that, “the U.S. is going to send more troops, but it’s not to achieve a forever military victory. Rather, it’s to try to bring about a negotiated end to this conflict.”

Will American soldiers be laying down their lives merely to better the odds for negotiating an improbable “good deal” with the Taliban?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Categories
Accountability media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies responsibility

War on Page A‑10

War was once big news. Now? Not so much.

Which may be a function of the never-​ending War on Terror, no end in sight in Afghanistan and an Iraq War that is officially over … except for the fighting.

Last October, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein busied fact-​checkers by claiming the U.S. was “bombing seven countries.” True, declared PolitiFact: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.

Yemen is better known after January’s raid that killed Navy SEAL Ryan Owens, wounded three other SEALs, and killed 14 to 25 Yemeni civilians, including children. Last week, during President Trump’s speech to Congress, Owens’s widow, Carryn, received a thunderous ovation.

But, as I argued at Townhall, “Ryan Owens and his widow and her three now fatherless children deserve more than applause.“ How about thoughtful policies and a Congress that holds the executive branch accountable?

Invading Iraq was a mistake. So was President Obama’s swerve over to destabilize Libya.

“We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves,” President Lyndon Johnson once said … right before he sent more American soldiers to Vietnam.

Consider that U.S. Special Forces were deployed to 70 percent of the world’s nations in 2016. And, in recent weeks, President Trump asked for a $54 billion increase in military spending, and we have learned of Pentagon plans to seek a “significant increase in U.S. participation” against ISIS.

We owe it to those in uniform to ask tough questions, including: Is what we’re doing really worth a single American life?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

Further reading:

Reason: Is the Military Really “Depleted” After Years of Record-​High Spending?

The Atlantic: Fighting Terrorism With a Credit Card

The National Interest: America Is Never (Ever, Ever) Ending the War on Terror


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