[lbo-talk] A Very Long Engagement

[Michael Dawson]

> Philip Carter and Owen West write that "[v]olunteers outnumbered
> conscripts by a 9-1 ratio in the units that saw combat during the
> [Vietnam] war's early days in 1966" ("Iraq 2004 Looks Like Vietnam
> 1966," Slate, December 27, 2004). Altogether during the Vietnam War,
> "1,728,344 men were drafted. Of the forces who actually served in
> Vietnam, 648,500 (25%) were draftees. Draftees (17,725) accounted for
> 30.4% of combat deaths in Vietnam" ("The Draft and Historical
> Amnesia," VFW Magazine, March, 2003). In short, conscripts were a
> minority during the Vietnam War.

Any idea what percentage of the "volunteers" volunteered to try to improve
their terms of entry?  And, as a leftist, you have to also see the reason
for quotation marks, right?


> In the Iraq War, "[in] recent months, at any given moment, the
> stop-loss policy has affected about 7,000 soldiers who had been
> planning to retire, leave the military or move to a different
> military job" (Monica Davey, "Eight Soldiers Plan to Sue Over Army's
> Stop-Loss Policy," New York Times, December 6, 2004), turning a
> significant minority of regular troops into conscripts in effect.
> Moreover, National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers, who cannot be
> expected to perform long and frequent overseas deployments without
> turning their civilian lives upside down, "now make up nearly 40
> percent of the 148,000 troops in Iraq" (Eric Schmitt, "Guard Reports
> Serious Drop in Enlistment," New York Times, December 18, 2004).

In other words, there's a quasi-draft happening inside the military already.

Has anybody noticed that the right's party line right now is "our success in
Iraq?"  Amazing, both as a piece of Orwellianism, and as a testament to the
pathetic state of the left.