Parents Are Part Of The Reality-Based Community

by DemFromCT

I'm a parent. I've got teen-aged boys. Reading this "well, of course" article in the NY Times today reminds me there's other topics to get angry at the politicians in DC for (besides the Nuclear Option).

Two years into the war in Iraq, as the Army and Marines struggle to refill their ranks, parents have become boulders of opposition that recruiters cannot move.

Mothers and fathers around the country said they were terrified that their children would have to be killed - or kill - in a war that many see as unnecessary and without end.

Around the dinner table, many parents said, they are discouraging their children from serving.

At schools, they are insisting that recruiters be kept away, incensed at the access that they have to adolescents easily dazzled by incentive packages and flashy equipment.

A Department of Defense survey last November, the latest, shows that only 25 percent of parents would recommend military service to their children, down from 42 percent in August 2003.

"Parents," said one recruiter in Ohio who insisted on anonymity because the Army ordered all recruiters not to talk to reporters, "are the biggest hurdle we face."

I haven't seen the military bands invited to town for concerts lately (the Air Force used to come regularly to the high school... fabulous musicianship, ending with 9/11 slides followed by the recruiting booths in the lobby).

We know the recruiting numbers are terrible for the army. Each local soldier, sailor, airman or marine that dies gets a very poignant local send-off in the paper.

Legally, there is little a parent can do to prevent a child over 18 from enlisting. But in interviews, recruiters said that it was very hard to sign up a young man or woman over the strong objections of a parent.

The Pentagon - faced with using only volunteers during a sustained conflict, an effort rarely tried in American history - is especially vexed by a generation of more activist parents who have no qualms about projecting their own views onto their children.

Lawrence S. Wittner, a military historian at the State University of New York, Albany, said today's parents also had more power.

They mean 'no draft'. Well, this parent reaction is reality. No amount of 9/11 slides and WMD lies is going to change things back the way they were in 2003. The Republicans like to say that there are consequences for elections. There are consequences for lying to the American people about the reason to go to war as well.

Comments

[ng]

There are consequences for lying to the American people about the reason to go to war as well.

Well this is certainly a potential bottom line and what it is all about etc., etc.,! Time will tell us a story. I would clarify my view on this, however, with the following statement:

Does a political power pay a penalty for lying about the real reasons for taking a country into a NEEDED war, OR does a political power only pay a penalty for lying about the real reasons for taking a country into an unnecessary military conflict? BTW as an aside, what about telling the truth about the reasons for an unnecessary war or is unnecssary enough in itself????

How this Iraq issue plays out will affect American foreign policy for many years to come, but then again, I would have said the same thing about the Vietnam conflict. Vietnam did put an apparent zipper on large-scale American military actions for 25 years, so maybe the time span effect of bad military-foreign policy is only one generation.

Anyway, if the American public starts to feel the world is a safer place post 9/11 because of Bush's war in Iraq, then military recruitment will return to the "good" level, and God help any country that gets in America's way for a while. If the Iraq war does indeed turn Vietnamesque (new word--mine), it will be interesting to see the price that the Bush crown pays down the road, as well as how timid the US might then become militarily and for how long this time??

[RonK, Seattle]

ng -- No fast return from depressed position. The social contract between soldiers and the nation they serve has been visibly dishonored -- especially w.r.t. the reserves, but also with active duty. That'll factor into the subjective risk model everybody uses on all sides of the equation.

Near term, it gets worse. A dwindling able-bodied force will be asked to do more, under conditions of increasingly overt express doubt re the mission. Mischief-makers elsewhere on the globe will be marginally encouraged by our comparative disadvantage. Noncombat working conditions will deteriorate as they did in a demoralized, drug-addled, dead-ended post-Vietnam force.

And our adventure in Iraq conceivably climaxes in a full retreat under fire, abandoning conspicuous amounts of usable equipment and live personnel.

This was all in the cards when we went in, it's in the cards today, and it'll be a generation before we repeat the slow series of confidence-building walkovers (Grenada, Panama, Gulf War I) that brought US ground force back to can-do posture.

[Mimikatz]

WWII suggests that the penalty is only for lying to get us into unnecessary wars.

The effect of (Boomer) parents withholding consent for this war in the most dramatic way possible on our continued ability to conduct the war has to be critical. Also whether it affects voting patterns, because that is the key to ending this madness.

[DemFromCT]

I'm thinking parents vote.