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The Military Recruiter's Lament
By Scott Ritter
01/18/06 "AlterNet"
-- -- It should come as no surprise to any
observer of modern America that U.S. military recruiters are
having a difficult time meeting their quotas. Last year, the
U.S. Army fell 6,600 recruits short of its goal to enlist 80,000
new soldiers. An increase in recruitment incentives, including
signing bonuses and increases in college scholarships, combined
with the raising of the minimum enlistment age (to 39) and
allowing high school dropouts to be recruited, have not helped
reverse the tide. Even the vaunted U.S. Marines, the pinnacle of
the all-volunteer U.S. military, which has prided itself on its
ability to attract recruits with slogans like "If everyone could
be a Marine, there wouldn't be Marines" versus money and other
recruiting gimmickry, have failed to make their enlistment
quota.
As recruiters struggle to overcome the national aversion to
military service that has gripped the country, their superiors
wrestle to pin down the underlying reasons behind this failure
of the American people to heed the call of the trumpet. Some,
like Gen. Richard Cody, the U.S. Army's Vice Chief of Staff,
have turned the issue into one of fundamental patriotism.
"This recruiting problem is not just an Army problem, this is
America's problem," Cody is quoted as saying. "And what we have
to really do is talk about service to this nation -- and a sense
of duty to this nation."
Fair enough. I'd like to take Gen. Cody up on the challenge and
talk about this so-called inability or unwillingness on the part
of America to live up to any sense of duty to the nation by
turning its collective back on joining the U.S. military. Some
observers of the recruitment crisis, including the recruiters
themselves, have noted that a main reason for the drop off in
numbers of new enlistees is the war in Iraq and the growing
casualty figures attributed to the fighting in Iraq. This line
of argument seems to draw a direct correlation between the costs
associated with being a soldier and the decision to enlist.
I frankly couldn't think of a greater insult to the American
people than to put forward an argument along those lines. When
one examines the employment picture in America today,
firefighting is listed as one of the most dangerous vocations.
And yet America's youth are lining up to compete for
firefighting jobs, despite the dangers. The reason for this is
that danger aside, firefighting is seen as an honorable
profession, one worthy of the sacrifice entailed.
Americans aren't afraid to put their lives on the line for a
worthy cause. It is not military service that is being rejected,
but rather military service in support of a cause not deemed
worthy of the sacrifice expected. The military today has
degenerated into an entity that is viewed by many in the
American public as no longer serving the larger interests of the
American people, but rather the play toy of a political elite
who use the U.S. military as a tool to impose their ideology on
others around the world, as opposed to "upholding and defending
the Constitution of the United States," the mission assumed when
one is sworn into military service.
It is not just the fighting and dying in Iraq that creates an
image problem. The military today is involved in a variety of
activities that not only insult American sensibilities abroad
(such as the illegal invasion of sovereign states, and the
illegitimate occupation and oppression of sovereign peoples),
but also assault at home the very Constitution they are sworn to
uphold and defend. Americans should not overlook the fact that
the agency at the heart of the illegal warrant-less wiretaps
that have been ordered by President Bush is the National
Security Agency, or NSA, run out of the Department of Defense.
Likewise, a lesser known but equally disturbing attack on the
individual civil liberties enjoyed by American citizens -- the
ongoing collection of "domestic intelligence information" by a
Department of Defense agency known as the Counterintelligence
Field Activity, or CIFA. CIFA has, for several years, been
operating a new reporting mechanism known as TALON (for Threat
and Local Observation Notice). TALONs report on "non-validated
domestic threat information" derived from a variety of means,
including a process known as 'data mining' -- a similar process
used by the NSA to spy on American citizens as part of the
president's illegal warrantless eavesdropping campaign. "Data
mining" allows the agency involved to access as much data as it
can from any and all available sources -- emails, internet
chatter, phone calls, newspapers, etc. -- in an effort to
collate and correlate information on suspected potential
threats.
To date, the data mining efforts of CIFA have targeted such
high-priority targets as university students and concerned
Americans expressing their constitutional freedom of speech
through participation in anti-war discussions and
demonstrations. It should come as no surprise to Gen. Cody and
others in the U.S. military that American citizens might very
well balk at joining an organization that ostensibly is supposed
to protect the constitutional freedoms of Americans but in
reality serves to violate those freedoms.
The Pentagon's recruitment problems have spilled over into the
political realm as well. Rep. John Murtha, D-Penn., who was
thrust into the center of the Iraq war debate when he declared
last fall that the Iraq war (of which he was once a fervent
supporter) was no longer winnable, and that America needed to
leave Iraq immediately, added fuel to the fire when he recently
noted that if he were a young man today, he would not join the
U.S. military.
The Pentagon immediately attacked Rep. Murtha's remarks. Gen.
Pete Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took the
lead. Murtha's remark, Gen. Pace said, was "damaging to
recruiting. It's damaging to morale of the troops who are
deployed, and it's damaging to the morale of their families who
believe in what they're doing to serve this country."
"We have almost 300 million Americans who are being protected by
2.4 [million] volunteer active, Guard and reserve members," the
general went on to say. "We must recruit to that force. When a
respected leader like Mr. Murtha, who has spent 37 extremely
honorable years as a Marine, fought in two wars, has served the
country extremely well in the Congress of the United States,
when a respected individual like that says what he said, and 18-
and 19-year-olds look to their leadership to determine how they
are expected to act, they can get the wrong message." Gen. Pace
said young people should be encouraged to join, not shun, the
military, "especially when we're in a war where our enemy has
stated intention of destroying our way of life."
It is very curious that Gen. Pace likened the war in Iraq to a
struggle against a foe who has stated its intention to destroy
the American way of life. The only "way of life" being destroyed
today in Iraq is the Iraqi way of life, and the force
responsible for this devastation is the U.S. military. The
insurgency being waged in Iraq today is not anti-American, but
rather anti-occupation. The more Americans reflect on the nature
of the occupation ongoing in Iraq, the more they wrestle with
the notion of how they would respond if a foreign power put its
troops on the ground here at home. The answer, of course, is
obvious. It is hard to recruit Americans who know that if they
were in the shoes of the Iraqis, they would be doing the exact
same thing as the insurgents -- fighting with every tool
available to drive out the foreign occupier.
Gen. Pace and others miss the point completely when they appeal
to American patriotism in trying to draw recruits to a U.S.
military that is engaged in activities in Iraq that can only be
seen as inherently un-American.
The very fact that the War in Iraq does NOT threaten the
American way of life is the main reason why Americans, by and
large, are refusing to walk away from the comforts afforded by
the American way of life to join a military system comparatively
Spartan in nature. While economic incentives have always played
a role in rounding out the numbers in the all-volunteer force of
the post-Vietnam War era, the fact is that military service was
for many (including myself) a calling, a reflection of a desire
to serve a higher cause than simple economic self-interest. In
many ways, military service was (and is) inherently un-American,
since it embraces core values that place the collective over the
individual. These inconsistencies were accepted, however, since
those serving in the military understood that the team they were
joining represented that which guaranteed to all others the
wherewithal to enjoy the freedoms associated with being an
American. We knew when we joined the military that we had a
social contract with our fellow Americans. We who served would
forego the comforts and freedoms of civilian life so that we
could guarantee that those very same civilians could live as
Americans. We also knew that, when the time came, America would
support us by not only providing us with the wherewithal to wage
war, but also ensure that before asking us to make the ultimate
sacrifice in defense of a cause, that it was a cause worthy of
that sacrifice.
Today, that contract lays broken and violated. America went to
war in Iraq on the basis of false premises. Our troops fight and
die for a cause most Americans cannot identify with. And the
U.S. military is engaged in domestic spying operations against
the very citizens it is sworn to defend.
The generals who criticize Congressman Murtha would do well to
study recent history, especially some of the historical lessons
drawn from books that they themselves encourage mid- to
senior-level officers to read. Since its publication in 1998,
U.S. Army Col. H. R. McMasters' "Dereliction of Duty," an
indictment of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the escalation of
the Vietnam War, has been required reading for a generation of
U.S. military leaders. Drawing upon recently declassified
documents, McMasters outlines the betrayal of the American
military during the Vietnam War by its own leaders, the general
officers of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who put their own career
ambitions ahead of the welfare and well-being of their troops,
allowing the politicization of the Vietnam War to occur to the
point that a war all knew to be unwinnable (and unjust) was
sustained for many years by those afraid to speak out lest they
threaten their career and reputation.
Gen. Pace and his fellow Joint Chiefs of Staff are the current
manifestation of the same cowardice and dereliction of duty
McMasters chronicled in his book, a trend that leads one to
question whether there are any generals today who possess enough
honor to speak out against a war, and its underlying policies,
that not only destroys the men and institutions they represent
as leaders, but threatens the very nation they are sworn to
defend.
One only needs to look to Col. McMasters himself to find an
answer to this question. McMasters, a major at the time of the
publication of his book, is an officer of great courage and
conviction, not to mention considerable military talent. He
commanded an armored unit during the 1991 Gulf War, which
engaged the Iraqi Republican Guard in a ferocious battle known
as "73 Easting." During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, McMasters
commanded an armored battalion with distinction. More recently,
McMasters commanded the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq,
where he participated in combat operations in northern Iraq,
including a decisive battle in September 2005 for the city of
Tall Afar, a city of some 200,000 people about 260 miles
northwest of Baghdad and only 40 miles from Syria. This battle,
Operation Restore Rights, was one of several waged by the U.S.
military and its erstwhile Iraqi government allies against Iraqi
insurgents in an effort to demonstrate that the Iraqi military
was taking a lead in security and stability operations inside
Iraq. In a briefing to journalists shortly after the fighting in
Tall Afar wound down, McMasters referred to the insurgents as
"terrorists" who were drawn to Tall Afar because of its location
along routes between the Iraqi city of Mosul and Syria.
According to McMasters, the "terrorists" considered it a good
place to incite sectarian and ethnic violence and chaos that
would preclude Iraqi governmental control.
When the terrorists took over Tall Afar, McMasters said, they
replaced all the imams from the mosques with Islamic extremists,
replaced all teachers from the schools with people who "preached
hatred and intolerance," and kidnapped and murdered large
numbers of people. "The enemy here did just the most horrible
things you can imagine," McMasters said, "in one case murdering
a child, placing a booby trap within the child's body, and
waiting for the parent to come recover the body of their child
and exploding it to kill the parents."
In the end, McMasters said, the "terrorists" who once ran the
western Iraq city of Tall Afar were routed by American and Iraqi
security forces.
The operation began in early May of 2005, McMasters noted, but
fighting reached a climax in September. About 5,000 Iraqi
security forces and around 3,500 U.S. troops participated in
Tall Afar operation, according to McMasters, who noted that a
"pall of fear" has been lifted from Tall Afar.
McMasters, in extolling the victory in Tall Afar, noted that the
United States is employing "the right strategy" to defeat
insurgents in Iraq by building up capable Iraqi security forces,
including police, to eventually take over from coalition troops.
The colonel said the American people should be very proud of
U.S. service members in Iraq, noting that they and their
coalition and Iraqi partners have "the enemy on the run." The
Iraqi people should know that America is "going to stand by
them" until the insurgents have been defeated, McMasters said.
If one were ignorant of Col. McMasters' curriculum vitae, one
might be excused for thinking that Gen. Pace or one of his
clones had given the briefing, so in lock-step was the briefing
with the political message being issued from the White House.
According to McMasters' simplistic briefing, one would believe
that the "terrorists" had imposed themselves on the people of
Tall Afar, and not the U.S. military. Tell that to the Hassan
children, orphaned by the U.S. Army in January 2005, when their
car was shot up at a U.S. military roadblock inside Tall Afar.
"If it were up to me, I'd kill the Americans and drink their
blood", 14-year-old Jilian Hassan, who survived the shooting, is
quoted as saying afterwards. The Hassans were Turkmen, natives
of Tall Afar. I'd like to ask Col. McMasters what his sentiments
would be if foreign troops shot up his car while he drove home
in his own hometown, killing members of his family. I'm certain
they would echo that of young Jilian.
But McMasters will be the first to tell you that there are
unforeseen consequences to war, first and foremost being the
tragic reality of what the military euphemistically refers to as
"collateral damage" among the civilian population. But I will
tell you that another casualty of war is the truth, and
McMasters, the man who took the Joint Chiefs of Staff to task
for their lack of honor when it came to selling the Vietnam War,
seems to have taken a page directly from his own book.
McMasters failed to mention that his operation was an eerie
repeat of a similar operation fought in Tall Afar almost exactly
one year prior by members of the U.S. Army's Stryker Brigade in
September 2004. As with that effort, Operation Restore Rights
found virtually no foreign fighters in Tall Afar, only Iraqi
Turkmen native to the city. Almost all of those killed or
captured during the battle for Tall Afar were native Turkmen.
McMasters also glosses over the reality of the Iraqi military,
which fought alongside the U.S. soldiers in Tall Afar. Drawn
primarily from the ranks of the Kurdish Peshmergh, who were (and
are) waging their own pogrom of ethnic cleansing against Turkmen
in the area of Kirkuk, the Iraqi military was engaged in nothing
less than the wholesale terrorizing of an innocent civilian
population which the U.S. military, including McMasters, allowed
to be categorized as "criminal." Iraqi Defense Minister Sadoun
al-Dulaimi, a former lieutenant colonel in Saddam Hussein's army
who fled Iraq in 1986, commenting on the "battle" of Tall Afar,
said that it would be used as a model as his forces attacked
other insurgent-held cities in quick succession. "We are warning
those who have given shelter to terrorists that they must stop,
kick them out, or else we will cut off their hands, heads and
tongues as we did in Tall Afar," al-Dulaimi said.
Within a month of McMasters' press conference, U.S. forces in
Tall Afar were trying to win over the deeply traumatized Turkmen
population. Meetings were held with local school officials on
how to reopen schools closed since the fighting in September.
Most of the schools had been destroyed or damaged in the
fighting, and those that remained intact served as barracks for
the occupying U.S. military forces that remained behind in Tall
Afar. School officials asked when the Americans might leave, so
that they could return to a sense of normalcy. The U.S. military
made it clear that the security situation in the city will
dictate when the soldiers will leave the schools. "We hope we
can leave those schools as soon as possible, but we do not want
to do so too early and allow the criminals to come back," a U.S.
military officer said.
Left unsaid was the reality that the "criminals" the officer
referred to are in fact the very citizens he claims to be
protecting. As McMasters and others know, the vast majority of
the "terrorists" killed and detained during the fight for Tall
Afar were natives of that town simply fighting to defend their
homes. Like young Jilian, however, there can be little doubt
about what will motivate them for the foreseeable future -- a
burning desire to drive out an occupying force, that destroyed
their homes and slaughtered their fellow townspeople. In an
effort to win back the "hearts and minds" of the citizens of
Tall Afar, Col. McMasters' 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment
participated in a program in mid-November 2005 to distribute
blankets to help ward off the cold of the coming winter. This
action was reported by the Department of Defense's new "Defend
America" website, part of a propaganda effort to feed to the
American people the "good news" coming from Iraq. Tell that to
the citizens of Tall Afar, who know that a few blankets and
repaired schools can't undo the damage done by a brutal
occupation run by officers like Col. McMasters who have lost all
sense of history or responsibility when it comes to waging war
in Iraq.
When Col. McMasters was a major, he authored a book that made me
proud to say I was an officer in the service of the armed forces
of the United States of America. Today, I cannot in all good
faith say I share these sentiments. Col. McMasters seems to have
forgotten the lessons Maj. McMasters penned in his book
"Dereliction of Duty." After reviewing Col. McMasters' words and
deeds regarding Tall Afar, I wonder if he could write such a
book today, or instead has he become so enamored with his rank
and position, and with his seemingly upward mobility in the
ranks of the U.S. Army, that he has forgotten the important
lessons he drew from the failure of leadership exhibited by the
Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Vietnam War. One could easily
confuse Col. McMasters' briefing regarding operations in Tall
Afar with similar briefings offered years ago by colonels
concerning operations in the Au Shau Valley, or outside Danang,
or anywhere else in Vietnam, just as one would have no problem
drawing a direct comparison with the politicized posturing of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Vietnam with the similar
behavior of Gen. Pace and his colleagues today regarding Iraq.
All of this only serves to solidify my endorsement of
Congressman Murtha's statement encouraging America's youth to
avoid service in the military today. America's youth would do
well to enlist in an armed forces led by men not afraid to put
their careers on the line when it comes to telling the truth
about a war in which these same youth are called upon to give
their lives in increasing numbers. As Congressman Murtha knows,
it is not the number of casualties that presents the problem.
Marines lost thousands on Iwo Jima and other islands in the
Pacific during the war to defeat Imperial Japan. Hundreds of
thousands of Americans gave their lives to defeat the forces of
fascism and empire. These were losses justified by the cause. In
Iraq, it is not the numbers, but the cause. If the Iraq war were
just, then America should (and I believe, would) be prepared to
lose as many as it takes to get the job done. But since the Iraq
war is not a just war, one soldier, sailor, airman or Marine is
too great a price, let alone more than 2,270.
As the recent decision to authorize unwarranted wiretaps
illustrates, the Bush administration has exploited the
abrogation of constitutional responsibility by the U.S. Congress
to position the executive branch of government as an Imperial
Presidency. As long as this is the case, and those who wield the
reigns of power view the American armed forces as their personal
legions useful in the spreading of American imperial power, then
I could not in good faith encourage anyone to enlist in the
ranks of such a legion. Once the American people have reigned in
the excesses of power that have propelled the United States into
an unjust war in Iraq, and the increasing possibility of a
similar war of aggression against Iran, I could think of no
greater waste of patriotic expression than to serve in a
military so abused.
I am hopeful that the current course undertaken by America can
be reversed, and that someday (soon) Americans can enlist with
pride in a military not only sworn to defend the Constitution,
but also actively engaged in legitimate activities designed to
do just that. Then, perhaps, a new generation of American
military officers will sit down and pen the successor volume to
H.R. McMasters' masterpiece, telling the story of the leadership
failures exhibited by senior U.S. military officers during the
course of the Iraq war. I can only hope that Col. McMasters will
be the one either writing such a volume, or assisting in its
preparation, as opposed to being the subject of the narrative.
Scott
Ritter served as a chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991
until his resignation in 1998. He is the author of, most recently, "Iraq
Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to
Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein"
(Nation Books, 2005).
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