From: Michael Wiik (mwiik@messagenet.com)
Date: Thu Aug 29 2002 - 10:01:17 MDT
Brian D Williams wrote:
> It is of course both painfull and infuriating to those of us who
> have paid a heavy price for our citizenship to see this country run
> down by people who have paid nothing for theirs.
>
> We have a saying for it: "For those who have fought to defend it,
> life has a flavor the protected shall never know."
*sniff*
Seems to me the greatest plus side of military service is that it can be
a psychological prop you can always use later in life to make argument
points. Or to make yourself feel better when the chips are down.
I haven't been in this country's or any country's military service but I
still pay a dear price every April 15th, lemme tell ya.
How galling it must be for you and maybe Mike Lorrey and perhaps other
vets to witness a succession of commanders-in-chief who went to great
lengths to avoid any real military service.
Perhaps your service has given you some insight into why, for example,
Colin Powell seems to be lacking Bush's gung-ho spirit when it comes to
sending other people to attack Iraq.
Check this out. It's about the president's current reading (Aug 28).
<<In an interview with an Associated Press reporter, Bush said that on
his vacation he had been reading a recently published book by Eliot A.
Cohen, The Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in
Wartime. Cohen is a well- known neocon warhawk and all-around armchair
warrior who professes "strategic studies" at the Johns Hopkins
University School of Advanced International Studies and, in his spare
time, ponders mega-deaths (his own not included) with other lusty
members of the Defense Policy Board. The quintessential civilian
go-getter, he never met a war he didn't want to send somebody else to
fight and die in.
The Supreme Command consists of case studies of how four "statesmen" –
Abraham Lincoln, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, and David Ben-
Gurion – successfully managed to make their generals act more vigorously
than those officers really wanted to act. By spurring their too-timid
generals, these four micro-managing commanders in chief supposedly got
superior results from their war-making efforts. The common soldiers who
were fed into the consuming maw of war under these worthies might have
given us a different opinion, but dead men don't make good critics.>>
---- http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/higgs7.html
The irony is, that if such patriotic ex-servicemen such as yourself led
a coup or something and pledged to uphold the constitution (you know,
that document both you and Bush swore an oath to defend), I'd probably
feel a whole lot safer. At least you're not actively trying to tear the
document into shreds.
> This is not a new problem and one I consider often, ever since it
> was presented to me by Heinlein in "Starship Troopers."
Ya know, when I saw the movie version of ST my first thought was 'here's
a society that has waaay too many young people' (the book was of course
much different and much much better).
-Mike
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