A reminder of duplicity in Iraq war
Times Union | May 31, 2005
By SHERYL McCARTHY
Charlie Rangel's at it again.
The New York congressman two years ago assailed the hypocrisy of the war in Iraq by demanding that, if the Bush administration and Congress believed in the war so much, they should reinstate the draft. Now he is urging the President to appeal to Americans to enlist in the military.
"At the very least, the President should spend some of his political capital and publicly appeal to Americans to volunteer for service in Iraq," Rangel has been saying lately. "He should go on television and explain why this war is important enough for parents to put their sons and daughters in harm's way."
Rangel's remarks are partly tongue-in-cheek, coming from a man who has opposed the war since before it started and hasn't cast a single vote in support of it. But they also are a dare. They come after the Army reported lowering its minimum required active duty from 24 to 15 months, the lowest in history, in an attempt to lure hard-to-get recruits.
The prospect of dying in Iraq has made recruitment so difficult that the Army expects to have only 10 percent of the 80,000 troops it will need to replace those in Iraq and Afghanistan next year in place by this fall.
The Army's desperation to meet its quotas has driven recruiters to sign up people who are mentally ill, who have police records, who use drugs and who can't pass the military aptitude exams without cheating, according to The New York Times.
Despite Iraq's much ballyhooed election and the installation of an interim government, more than 600 people, including at least 58 U.S. military personnel, have been killed since Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari announced his new government last month. If Bush still thinks all this carnage is justified, then why not personally call on young people to enlist as their patriotic duty, instead of counting on the desperation of their being out of work and doing it for the cash bonuses, steady paychecks and college educations?
A lot of Americans have bitten the bullet and accepted our involvement in Iraq, which Rangel compares to driving a car into the rental return space and having the spikes pop up, so you can't get out. But revelations about how we got there continue to insult our intelligence.
A British memo written in summer 2002 about a meeting of Tony Blair's top foreign-policy advisers reports that Bush was looking for a way to remove Saddam Hussein by military action months before Congress voted to authorize it and while assuring the public that he was seeking an alternative to war.
At a time when we feel stuck in Iraq, Rangel's challenge to the President shakes us out of our doldrums, reminding us that this war is no less hypocritical just because Iraq has a somewhat better government. "If the President cannot convince the American people to make the financial and human sacrifice ... then he should refer this policy back to the U.N., where it belonged in the first place," Rangel told me.
He says the United States has done as much as it can in Iraq with guns and tanks, and that it should go to the United Nations and try to involve international diplomats who want to see a peaceful Iraq. Once the terrorists see that the international community, not just the United States, is guiding things, order might be restored, Rangel says.
I'm not nearly so hopeful as Rangel that the United Nations can close the Pandora's box we have opened over there. But he's right to remind us of the duplicity behind the mess we've made. Sheryl McCarthy writes for Newsday.
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