By Brigitte L. Nacos
When it comes to Americans, the question of who is carrying the heaviest
burden for the Iraq war is justified. And that’s exactly what U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer did during
a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing last week. “Who is going to pay
the price?” she asked. "I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too
old and my grandchild is too young." She then told Dr. Rice, "You're
not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate
family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families. And I
just want to bring us back to that fact." While these statements were
true, Washington
Post columnist Fred Hiatt writes today, that Senator Boxer was “repackaging
the familiar chicken-hawk attack. At its most elemental, this is the charge
that President Bush and his associates were too cowardly to fight in Vietnam and now, while their own children choose not to serve, are cavalier in risking
the lives of others.”
Hiatt may well be right that both sides in the Iraq debate exploit the troops for their political purposes. He writes, “When Bush tearfully presents the Medal of Honor to the family of a slain war hero the morning after announcing his latest strategy for Iraq, then flies off to Fort Benning, he is using the troops as props. Democrats didn't make the absence of body armor a key campaign issue until they had done a lot of poll-testing.” But Hiatt is wrong, when he assigns the same blame in this respect to supporters and opponents of the Iraq war and its planned escalation.
American military men and women in Iraq are now the pawns of those who continue to dream that the result of a still achievable victory will be an Iraqi democracy and an ally in the so-called war on terrorism. Unfortunately, the imagined victory will depend on the members of a “unity government” and a Prime Minister who are part of and/or depend on America’s most formidable enemies in Baghdad and elsewhere. The longer the deployment of troops in Iraq lasts and the higher the numbers of killed and wounded servicemen and -women climb, the more important becomes the question of burden-sharing—and a possible debate on whether to bring back the draft. Frankly, I do not believe that a draft is an option for the high tech military of our time, but debating a military draft would nevertheless drive home the point that we do not have a war-time burden sharing today.
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