prickvixen | (no subject)

(no subject)

I wonder if the whole thing with sending an inadequate number of troops to Iraq, despite the assessment of the top brass, was a scheme to get the public to pay for a larger armed forces. Because that's probably what will happen anyway; you know, 'the lessons learned in Iraq show us that our current military strength is inadequate to tackle the problems of the 21st century etc etc.' It's just a theory.

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The problem is that the bush administration is really too stupid to plan something like that. Seriously they are like a chess player who can only plot one more at a time going up against a Grand Master.

I don't know. There _has_ to be a serious, realpolitik reason for the invasion of Iraq beyond all this bumf about democracy and nukes: my best guess is it's part of an incredibly oblique struggle with the EU involving control of energy markets. It ain't the oil, it's the leverage over the oil, and how the oil gets paid for. Running up the deficit looks stupid, too, until you see that PNAC policy paper from the late 90s advocating that very thing as a means of crippling the federal government's ability to do anything more than fight wars abroad and keep the peace at home -- removing the few remaining counterbalances against ascendant corporate power. Bush isn't making the decisions; a guy who asks for the executive summary of an executive summary makes a great figurehead, you don't have to work hard to slant his daily briefings such that he takes the course of action you want him to, especially when he's not overburdened with morals to start out with.

But who's the machiavellian planner behind all this? All I see are a bunch of old men frightened by the prospect of losing their cushy jobs. They don't seem the sort of type to make any decision unless they've got the focus group's approval.

Oh, I forgot to answer your actual *post*. Durr. Anyway, I'm not sure about a larger military budget -- dear god, how high can it go?! but I think that we're going to see a military draft in this country pretty soon. It makes a lot of sense, really. The kinds of wars America will want or need to fight are going to require lots of bloody ground combat against low-tech, non-state enemies in places like Mogadishu and Fallujah. Predator drones are useful in such places, I suppose, but really you need tens of thousands of guys with rifles -- the more the better.
The US military, designed to fight other massive, high-tech states, currently has too many gadgets and not enough guys with rifles for these sorts of neocolonial scuffles, and recruitment numbers are dropping like a stone. Even post-dot-bomb, civvy life looks a lot better than dying for oil in Fallujah for $20K a year. But class stratification, of course, is accelerating evermore in the States, and pretty soon there will be enough desperately poor and permanently unemployed people that they won't so much mind being drafted; at least they'll be getting food and shelter, and the Army might actually be a more hospitable environment than the ghettoes and postindustrial towns these people will be born into. Plus, from the perspective of the government, it'll reduce spending on what minimal social services remain, and cut down on deprivation-fueled crime. Send that surplus flesh to Somalia!

That might be what they're going for, but I don't think they can pull it off. Unless they keep ALL the recruitment to the terminally poor, they'd probably be in for more trouble than they can deal with. It's not even the people being drafted, it's the relatives of people being drafted you have to worry about. As it is, things are so distant that they can spin the story however they want to the 'unwashed masses' and it'll stick. It's a lot more difficult to spin 'your son is dead'.

They can't do it right now, and the kids out there are volunteers. Their biggest mistake would be to make the brunt of the population -care- about what's going on.

You mean our government isn't being completely honest with good intentions on this endeavor to save the Iraqi people from themselves?

Gasp.

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