Synaptic Silence

“Oh, Saddam only killed 5,000 of his own people? I take it all back then, we shouldn’t have bothered Saddam until he’d killed a significant number of people… and the number of shells found with Sarin and mustard gas don’t count until HUGE stockpiles are found. Being able to wipe out small cities, and 30,000 people in a whack just isn’t enough. By the way, in our country, you can face the death penalty for killing one person.” — One of my relatives trying to justify to me why the invastion of Iraq was necessary.  The following was my response to him.  And his name is not Jack.  No sense making him even more mad at me.

Dear Jack,

I share your outrage at the mass graves filled with innocent victims of Saddam’s regime.  But the number of Iraqis killed under Saddam isn’t the issue.  Nor is the fact that we believed, falsely it now seems, that he had weapons of mass destruction.  The real issue is that we were attacked by Al Qaeda, not Iraq. 

Al Qaeda doesn’t have a country, although Afghanistan was the hiding place of choice for them for a while.  Taking Afghanistan and the Taliban down was a righteous action because we knew that destroying the infrastructure and training programs and the terrorist money sources there would hurt the people we knew attacked us…Al Qaeda.  Most of the Arab world supported our action.

But that all disappeared when we pulled the resources out of Afghanistan that were needed to consolidate the gains there to conduct a full-scale land war, regime change, and post-war restructuring in Iraq. 

And pulled our guns off target.  Now the Taliban is reforming.  Even worse, our ineptitude in Iraq has already created a brand new group of young disenfranchised Arabs who are just what Al Qaeda is looking for.  It isn’t bad enough that the Saudis are fostering jihadist fanatics in their Wahabi religious schools.   Now, due to our own lack of a post-war plan, Iraq is home to a host of first-round Al Qaeda draft picks.

And what about our own military?  Sadly, the true victim of this poor planning will be the Volunteer Force as I knew and loved it.  Benign terms like Stop Loss and Reservist Recall hide the fact that people who serve their country for honorable reasons are being dishonorably treated as expendable resources.   Not by their commanders and peers, but by their President and the American people, almost none of whom under the age of 55 have served in the military or ever given military service a second thought.

Most of the American people do not have a clue about the kind of sacrifices that these young men and women are making.  We’re up to over 1100 dead now and seem to be getting inured to high numbers.  I predict we’ll hit 2000 much more quickly than we let ourselves believe.  Which shouldn’t be unexpected.  Our President said, “Bring ‘em on!” and that’s exactly what they’re doing.   Soon, our own military recruitment will head for the basement as a result of the rash and ill-informed actions of this administration, but I guarantee you that Al Qaeda won’t lack new recruits.

Exactly what will happen?    I’m no psychic, but unless something changes incredibly fast, I predict the military will be looking at your children and my children to fill the gaps in the lines.  Ignore the administration’s denials that the draft won’t happen.  If I learned one thing as a Chief Master Sergeant in the Air Force, it’s that the Volunteer Force is nowhere nearly as resilient as the administration or senior military leadership believes it to be.

As the military sacrifices mount and they perceive that the rest of us don’t share in them, those people who can leave the military will, if they can ever find a way to do so.  The ones who go will be the cream of the force, the educated ones with transferable skills, the highly trained technical personnel, the intelligence professionals, the quality NCOs, and the innovative officers.  In short, the people with imagination, the very attribute that the 9-11 Commission says is vital to our success in the war against terror.

My friends still in leadership positions in the military intelligence community tell me this is already happening.  Their brightest people, the ones who they’ve trained for 10-15 years, are leaving because a contractor will pay them $85,000.00 a year or more just because they already have a security clearance.  It will take another 10-15 years to replace them, even though we need them and twice as many of them right now.

When they leave they will take with them the service members who have voiced their disagreement with the current strategy, because they have already seen what happens to people, even senior military commanders, who raise their voices to expound on the unpopular.

What about the commitment they made to serve their country?  What about their patriotism, you ask?   I don’t question it a bit.  But twenty one years in the Air Force taught me that commitment to a cause is a living, breathing thing that is sustainable only if people see that their sacrifices are truly appreciated and that others are willing to step in to take their place if they go down.

But we’re not sharing their sacrifices here at home yet and, believe me, they know it.  They’re away from their families, eating MREs in the desert, and picking up their friends’ body parts off of the road.  The lower ranking members with families likely qualify for food stamps with no real hope for immediate relief.  But we ask them to put their lives on the line to help a country, whose citizens spilled and are still spilling American blood, figure out how to spend what will soon be $200 billion our government was somehow able to find for them that it couldn’t find for us.

And the rest of us who aren’t on active duty, in the reserves, or in the National Guard?  We’re driving our cars, going to the movies, watching TV, sending our own kids off to college, and whispering in their ears as they drive off not to get any wild ideas about enlisting in the military right now.

I doubt we’ll have a choice. In the end, the beast that is the Volunteer Force will need to be fed with fresh troops and energy, only neither of them will be available.  Recruiting isn’t done by recruiters…it’s done by men and women coming home and saying being in the military is a great way of life and their friends should join up, too.  I sincerely doubt that’s happening right now.

And the days the Guard could recruit with slogans like “Only one weekend a month and two weeks a year” are gone for a long, long while.  If the current situation in Iraq continues more than another year or if the military is tasked in some other unforeseen way, a draft will be the only ethical solution to the problem.  I think we’ll really see how serious America is about this war or any other conflict when one of our children gets a draft notice in the mailbox.

That’s because this isn’t a Democrat/Republican, Kerry/Bush, or Liberal/Conservative issue.  It belongs to all of us and it will take all of us to solve it.  It will take our collective imagination as a culture and a country to confront and defeat this deadly hydra that has raised its many heads against us and, like its namesake, sprouts many new ones for each one we lop off.

But what we’re doing now, staying the course we set in Iraq on a road paved with false intelligence and questionable motives and the unnecessary deaths of young Americans, isn’t the answer.  In fact, I can’t help but remember something one of my commanders once told me when people were resisting a radical but desperately needed change in operational procedures. 

My commander said we should always remember that resistance to a change in direction, in the face of overwhelming evidence that such a change is necessary, is probably the state of mind cows are in at the slaughterhouse just before the guy with the killing gun puts it to their heads.  In that light, there simply isn’t such a thing as being too far along to turn a bad decision around.

Jeff